INFO
| Name | Allan Xia starts Chromacon |
| Year | 2013 |
| City | Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland |
ABOUT
In 2013, Allan Xia created Chromacon, an independent biennial festival that ran until 2019, held at the Aotea Centre in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland for illustrators, comics, and video game, VR and AR artists. Xia created the festival after observing the need for local creators to have an opportunity to connect with local audiences. Writing for The Big Idea in 2017, Christine Mackintosh described how the idea took off:
He floated the idea with a group of artists prior to Christmas in 2012, thinking he wouldn’t have any response over the holiday, but by the New Year, he had 50 artists ready to come on board. His humble idea of hosting the event in a small scale community hall quickly turned into something much bigger and before he knew it, he was booking the Aotea Centre in Auckland and had four months to prepare for the event.
The festival was last held in 2019 (prior to the pandemic). By then it had grown to become the country’s largest biennial festival of “homegrown illustrators, comic artists, toy designers, game developers and animators”. The 2019 festival featured almost 200 artists exhibiting, selling their work, doing demonstrations and taking part in talks, screenings and panel discussions.
In December 2019, the festival launched Chroma, a platform for distributing work by independent creatives.