And Still I Rise

Hi, I'm Chun Yin Rainbow Chan. I was born in Hong Kong and I moved to Australia with my family in 1996 when I was six years old. I grew up in Sydney and I now live in Melbourne, Naarm, on Wurundjeri land. I started my career as a pop singer. I wrote my first song after my first heartache in high school, and I kind of became addicted to this feeling of being able to write about the complexity of human experiences. A lot of the media around my work at the time was talking about me, first of all, as a woman and as a Chinese person in Australia, even though my music didn't really have anything necessarily to do with that. And I realised that as someone who didn't look like the so-called dominant person who existed in that kind of music space, I had to answer and justify my existence really and why I was making the work I was making.

And so, visual arts became a way for me to critically unpack a lot of those conversations and stereotypes and to reclaim a bit of agency around who I was and what stories I wanted to tell. In 2017, I asked my mum whether she could teach me her mother tongue, Weitou. The Weitou language, which is a dialect of Cantonese on the brink of disappearance. My mum is a Weitou woman and Weitou people are the first settlers of Hong Kong, who migrated from Southern China in the Song Dynasty and moved to the area now known as the New Territories. And my mum's matrilineal line can actually be traced back to the first clan that moved there, the Tang clan. My mum was quite shocked at first when I asked her, because many people in her generation didn't pass the language on, as it was quite stigmatised. But knowing that I am a musician, she thought that I would be able to learn more about the Waitau language through music.

And so, I reached out to this group of women, or I like to call them pawpaw, which means grannies. They welcomed me into their community and started teaching me these women's ritual songs called ‘bridal lament’ or 哭嫁歌. They were historically performed by young girls in the lead up to their arranged marriages. And it involved three days and three nights of reciting these beautiful poetic songs of protests while wailing and crying in front of family and friends. And the lyrics for me were so shocking, because they were really defiant and they really cursed the groom's family and the matchmaker, given that this was the only moment in a girl's life where she could complain. And the grannies talked about how it was really important for them to perform the sadness of losing their own identity and of losing their connections to their home, in this liminal space between becoming a wife and shedding their identity as being someone's daughter. I think that moment of that threshold is a really important theme in my practice too, in the way I think about gender, place and time. I've reimagined a lot of these traditional laments in a contemporary way, whether it's through performance or through electronic music or through these large silk paintings where I transcribe the lyrics into a sort of abstracted calligraphy form.

And I paint the lyrics, as you can see fruits and fish and beautiful flowers that the women would use to express their inner suffering. And I hope that, as I continue to make this work, that you too, as viewers, can feel the power of singing vanishing worlds into existence.

My name is Rubaba Haider. I'm from Quetta, Pakistan, and currently live on Bunurong/Boonwurrung in Melbourne, Victoria. My practice is informed by the intersection of personal memory, cultural identity, and collective experiences. As a Hazara woman who has lived through displacement, migration, and the ongoing echoes of persecution, my work grows from the need to translate experiences that are often left unspoken, like a sense of belonging, loss, resilience and repair. I draw deeply from my community's history and my family's stories, especially the quite strength of the women around me. These relationships form the emotional architecture of my work.

I am trained in the discipline of miniature painting at the National College of Arts in Lahore, and I carry its precision, patience and reverence for detail. Yet I also push against its boundaries using thread, suture and knot as both material and metaphor. Through these forms I explore what holds us together, what tears us apart and how the process of mending itself becomes an act of resistance and healing. My practice is also shaped by movement between countries, languages and states of belonging.

Each relocation carries both rupture and renewal, fragility and strength, silence and articulation, damage and repair, and I try to hold these contradictions in my work. Ultimately, my art is a way of stitching together fragments of memory and identity, which is an attempt to visualize the unseen threads that bind people, places and emotions across time and distance. It is not just a medium of expression for me, but a vehicle of reflection, questioning and connection.

My name is Marikit Santiago and I am an artist living and working in Western Sydney in Parramatta. I was born in Australia to migrant parents and so I experienced an upbringing where Filipino and Australian customs would often clash. I was painfully shy as a child, so having a name like Marikit and dark skin made me quite different to my peers. I was embarrassed to call my parents nanay and tatay in front of my friends who all address their parents as mum and dad.

I resisted speaking Tagalog for a long time and I always resented people asking me what nationality I am. I was born here, I'm Australian. These negative experiences made me reject my Filipino heritage. It's only as an adult, as an artist and more significantly as a parent that I've learned to acknowledge my ethnic identity. My practice investigates this personal conflict of cultural plurality and articulates the complex sensations conditioned by my experiences in and between adopted and inherited cultures. Confusion, uncertainty, and discomfort are potent to my practice. Articulating these sensations draws my most interesting work and most rigorous processes. My work is forged by, with, and for my children. My practice is informed by my experiences as a mother and my artistic processes are dictated by this maternal role.

Art practice and motherhood are not segregated duties but are instead collaborative, though offering both reciprocal favour and hardships. My interest in articulating the complexities of my cultural identities has only been heightened by motherhood, and my work seeks to expose this personal conflict, not only for myself, but as a legacy for my children. Their naive yet confident mark-making that are entwined with my sometimes rigid and refined technique add a visual intrigue and deep sentimentality. Their collaborations with me are reserved only for the deeply personal and passionate pieces in which they are the muses.

My name is Bic Tieu. I am a contemporary jeweller and object designer. My practice is very much about connecting material language with lived experiences. I am interested in creating objects that invite reflection on how identity is layered, negotiated and reimagined. I predominantly work with the medium of metal and Asian lacquer. I think these materials hold deep cultural significance through how I work and combine these mediums and understand their alchemy.

I try to create works that give new perspectives on object making and meaning. My practice is informed by an interest in how objects can act as carriers of memory, culture and knowledge. Growing up between Chinese and Vietnamese heritage within an Australian context has shaped the way I approach making, often through themes of hybridity and belonging. I'm particularly drawn to place-based making and narratives within diasporic communities. Through a series of sculptural objects, I use the archetype of the charm to map memory and identity, reflecting how cultural stories are embedded in the everyday. For me, making is about experimenting with materials while telling these layered cross-cultural narratives. I'm using objects as a way to navigate and articulate complexities of cross-cultural experiences.

My name is Wendy and I come from Sydney, Australia and I'm living in Sydney at the moment. I came from a modern dance background and before that ballet too. It was always really great working in choreography and I loved doing it, but what drew me more was to design dance for large immersive gallery spaces. This is where you, the viewer, walk into a room and there's floor-to-ceiling projection with immersive audio and engaging storytelling. So this is where I found a lot of the passion to keep pushing my creative work forward, was designing storytelling and great stories for rooms like this that make you feel this awe-inspiring feeling when you see it.

So in the past few years, I've been working and being able to show my works with light festivals and different media LED screen content. And it's given me the opportunity to present artworks for cities around the world. And this is where the work Acts of holding dance came from too. It came from a residency that I took part in in 2020 with the Centre for Projection Art in Melbourne. I was working with a dancer there, and we had the challenge of designing content for a vertical lift shaft that was narrow in width, so the challenge was to design content that flowed vertically down. And this was the original stimulus for creating the work in the way that it did end up being.

In the next few years that came, I was able to present this work to a few other cities around the world and in each of these cities I suggested to work with the local dancers there because I think that it's important to see local faces amongst the locality in which you're creating public art for. Acts of holding dance is my attempt to make the viewer feel an emotional impact when they see the work for the first time and to feel like they can start to enjoy the work from the moment they see it rather than feeling as if they can't because they're excluded from understanding what the work conceptually means. So this is why it's important for me to do the work that I'm doing at the moment. I want to make dance more accessible to more people in these beautiful, large, immersive spaces. So thank you for seeing this work.