Exhibition Dates: 18 January to 12 February 2023

A group exhibition exploring the ‘third cultural space’ experienced by people who navigate multiple traditions, influences and values.

A Willoughby City Council curated group exhibition, Inner Edge Drifting explores the cultural space experienced by people living in Western cultures (and specifically Australia) who have Asian roots.

This third cultural space (often referred to within the experiences of third culture kid) can be experienced by people whose upbringing is culturally different from their parents or where their upbringing has traversed across different geographic locations.

The exhibition examines the nuances of such experiences and the culture of navigating across two or more societies or traditions—which can arise from possessing singular migrant cultural roots, or mixed cultural roots. What grows out of cultural navigations is unique and expands on, and critiques the set parameters we have applied to cultural identities.

Those with such experiences may not identify with any established culture, but more with the notion of culture without edges and the fluidity required to undertake such navigations. Similarly, they may connect more with their own interpretation of an existing culture.

Artists: Casey Chen, Sai-Wai Foo, Hyun-Hee Lee, Karen Lee, Mylyn Nguyen, Mai Nguyen-Long, NC Qin, Zoe Wong, Wei Rong Wu and Tym Yee

Inner Edge Drifting is part of Chatswood Year of the Rabbit Festival, the North Shore’s premier Lunar New Year celebrations presented by Willoughby City Council.

Dreaming of Willows

Dreaming of Willows is made in Sai-Wai Foo’s signature style with paper and collected objects. It references the Blue Willow pattern used on ceramic tableware at the end of the 18th century in England; an image of Chinoiserie as imagined by artisans in Britain. Reclaiming this narrative by using kitsch collectibles made of the Western market, these incongruous items are synthesized together to create a pastiche to represent this cultural third space that many Asian migrants sit within. Dreaming of Willows sits in the ambiguous space between cultural artefact and a sightseer’s souvenir of an imaginary Orient.

Small Divinity and Inconsequential idol explore personal Sai-Wai Foo’s iconography and maximalist aesthetic; embodied in a pair of seated figures their faces heavily gilded in gold foil. The forms are covered in ruffles of pleated paper, reminiscent of lace, adorned with freshwater pearls, delicate chains and secured with pins, contained within glass cloches a nod to curio in collections Victoriana.

They evoke a sense of containment, of tethering and restraint. Weighted down with adornment, these diminutive forms entwined in bindings kerbing their metier. Celebrating the beauty, and value in the tiny and the discarded and ephemeral painstakingly collected and composed.