Beyond the monolith: In search of representation
Oct 2024 Issue #4
More highlights from our growing archive of Aotearoa Asian art, selected by some of the Satellites team.
16mm film tests for Bitter Sweet featuring Min Tran-Bers, 1997
Tim Wong — Writer, designer, filmmaker and Satellites archivist
When I bumped into Steven Chow at a mutual friend’s party earlier this year, our conversation led to a little-known short film of his called Bitter Sweet. Student films are generally excluded from official film history, so being able to give it some legitimacy through Satellites has made it one of my favourite archive discoveries. Selfishly, I also love its Cantopop aesthetic and romance for Wong Kar-wai, whose films were essential to my cinephile upbringing — and as a teenager, my identification as Chinese.
Micheal McCabe, Queer Pavilion model, 2020
Rosabel Tan — Satellites Director
One aspect of the archive I love is the way it offers a glimpse into different artists’ processes and their distinctive approaches to making — whether it’s as detailed as the annotated notes for Ruby White’s solo show Pieces of or as simple as the email that birthed The Beths. I have a particular soft spot for the ephemera we have from designer and long-time collaborator Micheal McCabe. I love seeing how the plans for Twin Cultivation — the project we developed with ceramicist Cindy Huang — evolved over the two years we worked on it together. And I adore his miniature models for Queer Pavilion: looking at them, you start to get a sense of how carefully he thinks through his design process, not only in terms of the aesthetic considerations of his work but in terms of how people will interact with and move through them, too.
Susu, Remember to Dive 回溯潛水, presented as part of the exhibition Between the Gift and its Reprisal, Artspace Aotearoa, 2022
Dilohana Lekamge — Artist, curator, writer and Satellites archivist
Recently I have started my journey into object-making, as someone who is entirely unfamiliar with creating three-dimensional forms. This led me into the studios at Samoa House Library and to Susu’s expansive visual-art practice. They’ve kindly spent several Monday afternoons teaching me how to make silicone moulds of objects to duplicate them as resin and plaster replicas. The patience they have shown while passing on their comprehensive knowledge has allowed me to appreciate their approach to art-making in a whole new way. The time they have spent building and honing their extensive set of skills is admirable for any creative practitioner.
Instagram story screenshot about the launch of 婆婆 Popo, 2022
Good Bad English
Emma Ng — Satellites Editorial Director
We have lots of zines and zine-makers in the archive, largely thanks to the work of Satellites archivist Jenn Cheuk. Asian artists have been very active in zine communities over recent decades, so they represent an important form of creative expression — and we hope the archive reflects this! I especially love the way that these entries include things like social media screenshots and messages between zine-makers, alongside PDF copies of the zines themselves. Social media activity can easily be lost to history, but offers such a rich record, so it’s so great to be able to archive things like calls for submissions, thank-you messages from zine contributors, and Instagram stories — like this extremely cute one from the page about the zine 婆婆 Popo.
