Letter from the Editor by Emma Ng

This is it, the final issue of our Satellites online magazine, at least for this season. But don’t worry: our online archive of Aotearoa Asian art will keep growing, and we have a few more treats in store through our events programme this year.

This issue is called Shelf Life because if the pieces are united by a theme, it’s the continual need to refresh — to always ask, what's next? Even good ideas have an expiry date.

It's this feeling that drove the development of the visual identity of Satellites, and to close out, our designer Son La Pham shares his thinking. From our very first late-night Zoom call with me and Rosabel, Son La has contributed so much to this project, always encouraging us to push the edges of what ‘contemporary’, ‘Aotearoa Asian’, and ‘art’ can mean.

We also have a piece by another longtime collaborator, spatial designer Micheal McCabe. Micheal has played a role in many of Satellites’ most iconic moments, working with Rosabel on projects such as The Claw, the Fortune Cookie Cart and Twin Cultivation. Here, he reflects on the first decade of his career and the ways we shape and tell the stories of our own practices. I think many of us will see ourselves in his questions about patience, relationships, and creating your own turning point.

Shifting to literature, author Brannavan Gnanalingam surveys how the Aotearoa Asian literary scene has accelerated over the past two decades. One of our most prolific writers, Bran offers insight into why he writes with such urgency — his drive to see the fictive world reflect migrant experiences in all their beauty and ugliness. Both Son La and Bran reflect on how migration and its after-effects are characterised by warp, mistranslation and continual change. The goal of Satellites is to hold all of the variation that this produces, even when we exist in tension with each other.

We began, in Issue 1, by exploring the Aotearoa Asian voice as a tangata Tiriti voice, grounding us in the place we’ve come to call home. I wanted to conclude by returning our awareness to the way we sit as just one node in a global mesh/mess of Asias — forever connected to other people and places across Asia and its diasporas. It’s for this reason that this issue features two special guest contributors from shores beyond our own: art historian Ming Tiampo and artist Yarli Allison.

We’re thrilled to share an essay by Ming, first published by the Asia-Art-Activism network in their publication Art-Asia-Activism: Experiments in care and collective disobedience. In it, she explores ‘Global Asias’ as a disciplinary ‘starting point for thinking through new ways of imagining Asia from multiple, contradictory, and entangled vantage points’.

Asia-Art-Activism is a grassroots network, centred in the UK. When we got in touch with Annie Jael Kwan, one of the AAA publication’s editors, she suggested the possibility of commissioning a new piece to accompany Ming’s essay — pairing Ming with AAA member and artist Yarli Allison. Their conversation brings to life this notion of ‘Global Asias’, exploring it from the bottom up, through ‘lived experience, real people, real choices, real consequences.’ There are so many resonances between the stories they share and those we hold here in Aotearoa: indentured labour, never-ending layers of migration and movement, and moments of chance and choice.

You’ll see echoes of these themes in the work of this issue’s featured artist, Tony Guo. We’re including a selection of images from Swan Crash, his February show at Season Aotearoa. Tony’s paintings move fluidly through time and place — melding memory, family history and cultural subconscious — producing intriguing allegorical spaces.

Thank you for reading. I hope the pieces we’ve published continue unfolding for you long after their publication dates. As Son La shares in his piece, Satellites’ visual identity was inspired by expiry dates: warped markers of specific moments in time. Each piece in the magazine is stamped with its publication date (or its original date, if republished). This felt important to us — a way of acknowledging each work as a snapshot of its moment, mapping conversations across generations, and inviting us to bookmark those spots but keep moving forward.