Workshop
Lunar New Year at Auckland Art Gallery

Join us at Auckland Art Gallery this Lunar New Year and celebrate the Year of the Wood Snake with a day of creativity in Te Ātea. Make your own snake plushie with Hanna Shim, learn how to tie lucky Chinese knots 中国结 and uncover the symbolism behind each design with Wai Ching Chan and — for those looking for a quieter moment — take a seat and write a letter: either to someone who has shaped you in the past, or to your future self.

This day is inspired in part by yee sang — the colourful raw fish salad commonly served in Southeast Asia (particularly Singapore and Malaysia) as an appetiser during the Lunar New Year period. Each ingredient in yee sang symbolises different wishes for the year ahead, from abundance to luck to happiness, and is added one by one before everybody enthusiastically tosses the ingredients in the air with their chopsticks.

In a similar way, this day is an invitation to take part in the many offerings: to create something, to learn something new, to have a moment of contemplation and connection and to think about what your hopes might be for the year ahead. Join us to mark the many possibilities in this Year of the Snake!

Hanna Shim is an interdisciplinary artist born in Seoul and raised in Tāmaki Makaurau. Working across installations, paintings, soft sculptures, textiles, and video, she creates playful works that blend contradictory imagery and stories drawn from her diasporic background.

Shim's practice often centres on stuffed sculptures that transform gallery spaces into immersive, sensory environments. Through these installations, she challenges conventional boundaries between hard and soft, art and craft, adulthood and childhood, and dominance and marginality. Her work envisions spaces where these contrasts can peacefully coexist—a personal exploration of Utopia.

Wai Ching Chan is a Tāmaki-based contemporary artist. Her practice is often driven by collaborative relationships with other artists, and a desire to build and strengthen connections between people, including between tangata whenua and tauiwi.

Chan was born in Hong Kong and moved to Aotearoa in late 2012. She often works with the symbolic language of Chinese knots 中国结, forming them from a range of fibres, including harakeke and twine, to allude to bonds and connections between people and people and the land.

Knotting workshops are sometimes facilitated by Chan as part of her exhibitions, encouraging conversation among participants and guests, particularly with regard to tauiwi—tangata whenua relationships, while learning to knot.

Rosabel Tan is a writer, researcher and producer of Peranakan Chinese descent. She is the director of Satellites, an initiative that connects the past, present and future of Aotearoa Asian art — through an archive of Asian diaspora artists in Aotearoa, an online magazine, and a visiting artists programme. She is a founding editor of arts and culture journal The Pantograph Punch, was the inaugural curator: Asia for Auckland Writers Festival 2022 and co-programmer for Verb Festival 2023.