Sochetha Meng

INFO

Name	Sochetha Meng (she/her)
Born	2000
Country of Birth	Aotearoa
Place of Residence	Pōneke Wellington
Ethnicities	Cambodian
Artform	Zines, Design
Decades Active	2020s

ABOUT

Sochetha Meng is a Cambodian-New Zealand graphic designer who uses design practices such as typography and illustration to highlight migrant experiences and Cambodian history. She has worked primarily with Migrant Zine Collective and produced multiple works that “[raise] awareness on issues that affect minority groups and people of colour”.

Meng was born in 1999 in Aotearoa. Her parents immigrated from Cambodia in the late '90s due to the unsettled political landscape that arose after the Khmer Rouge regime. The emotional impact of learning about her family’s experiences during the regime is a crucial drive in Meng’s work. She often comments about the responsibility she feels to tell her family’s story and increase awareness about the Khmer Rouge period of Cambodian history.

Meng’s zinemaking practice illuminates the distinct experiences of the Asian diaspora as well as exploring Meng’s own personal questions about identity and culture as a second-generation Cambodian New Zealander. For Meng, zinemaking is a way of normalising conversations about immigrant experiences and creating connections between Asian diasporic youth.

In 2021, Meng released her first zine, From Me To You — a three-part zine series that excavates the past, present, and imagined future of immigrating to Aotearoa. This zine notably used both Khmer and English script, Cambodian fabrics and cultural icons in order to tell Meng’s personal story. She hopes for this zine series “to help young Asian diasporas in New Zealand cope with their unique identity and at the same time raise awareness and normalise conversations about this issue. As well as provide a sense of community/belonging for Asian diasporas”. Shortly after this zine, Meng was commissioned to work on the design of Migrant Zine Collective’s Together Apart and collaborated with Helen Yeung to edit The Life of Inbetweeners in 2022.

Stylistically, Meng’s zines combine typography, collage, painting, and cartoon-style visuals. There are often stark aesthetic contrasts in her work, illuminating the intergenerational trauma and tension of growing up in diaspora; bright, playful colours are presented alongside darker, more ambiguous visual motifs. Her collages also lean towards a tone of hauntology, with childhood photographs cut up and displaced among liminal cultural symbols of Aotearoa and Cambodia. This style is evident in Meng’s commissioned work, too - her collages in The Life of Inbetweeners swinging between childlike, nostalgic, and bittersweet.

Beyond zinemaking, Meng works in design and typography, focusing on ways to bring her cultural background and stories into design practice.