“One strand of flax is easy to break, but many strands together will stand strong.”

Robbie Handcock speaks to Wai Ching Chan and Tessa Ma’auga about their current collaborative exhibition Kāpuia ngā aho 單絲不綫 at The Physics Room, Christchurch.

Robbie Handcock: On the surface it appears that there are existing shared interests between both your practices in terms of research, materiality and approach. Can you each speak to how this collaboration came about?

Wai Ching Chan: We first met each other in person at the Aotearoa Asian Arts Hui held at Te Papa [Tongarewa]. We were introduced by Amy [Weng] and I didn't know who Tessa was and I wasn't sure if she knew who I was. We just had a chit chat, then left the hui and went back home. I think a while later Tessa sent me an email saying, let's meet up for a chat, and we found that our practices are pretty similar. So we met up and started talking about how our projects were coming along and what we were looking into.

Before this exhibition we'd been looking into whether we could go back to China and go to the villages and look into more of our cultural history, or just try to understand the crafts and folk art that could be inspiring. But with the pandemic and everything going on it became impossible, so I just took this chance before Tessa got too busy, and this becomes something that would never be realised, to ask if she still wanted to do something. 

Tessa Ma’auga: I actually had forgotten we met at that hui. Later I came across one of your artworks, I think it was just on Facebook. You had this beautiful knotted thread that went from the ceiling to the floor; and had also done this collaboration with one of your Māori friends. Your work seems to be a lot about friendship, and friendship across cultures—really similar to things I'd already been thinking of as well. I was also looking for people to collaborate with, and to learn about different types of collaboration—community collaboration, but also with other artists. I reached out to you [so that we could] get to know each other with the hope that maybe one day we could collaborate.

WCC: By the time Tessa approached me I'd already done my first public exhibition outside uni at Artspace [Aotearoa]. That particular work you mention is a chain of knots. I was thinking about writing a letter—but how to write a letter without a common language, if I don't speak Māori or if I don't speak English? I was thinking about being a new, fresh off the plane, migrant. A lot of them are aunties or grandmothers and they don't necessarily have the language to understand how to navigate being tauiwi here, but I see them have a lot of interest in getting to know Te Ao Māori [and make friends with indigenous groups]. I was thinking about this in relation to the Treaty of Waitangi—partnership and mutual respect and friendship; and a lot of key ideas about how to be here. I think that's how everything kind of started.

With my work with Arapeta Ashton, we were already good friends before we collaborated. We thought, why don't we just do something together, and it just happened to [be around] the whole idea of forming a genuine friendship without the thought of making it too political. Essentially we were just two people who happened to be friends and wanted to do things together and make this beautiful aho together. This was our connection, basically, and we were building it quite easily. 

When Tessa and I collaborated in our current exhibition Kāpuia ngā aho 單絲不綫, these ideas manifested. I think this time I've been trying to find my own voice being Chinese tauiwi from Hong Kong—and Tessa [similarly wants] to voice her own ideas—before I continue to just collaborate with Māori artists, to know what I want to be rather than relying too much on having a Māori person's voice. I thought it was time to explore this with Tessa.

RH: That's one of the things I was thinking about, looking at the exhibition and your practices. It appears to me that a lot of Asian New Zealanders look to Te Ao Māori and Māori principles to help guide their own understanding of being tauiwi in Aotearoa. It's the case with a lot of artists, but seems super prominent in Asians involved in activist spaces. By way of context, I'm Filipino Pākehā so kind of come from a similar viewpoint to this. Do you think this has informed your relationship with and how you look back at your own heritage as well?

TM: For me definitely it has. I grew up in Paekākāriki on the Kāpiti Coast and I was in a Māori unit at school. That Māori education continued throughout my life. I've always been in more Māori spaces and when I'm not in them I often feel kind of uncomfortable in Aotearoa. I tried to go to AUT for a little bit and I nearly went to some other art schools, like Elam [School of Fine Arts]. It just didn't really feel right until I came to the Māori Visual Arts programme down here at Massey. These Māori concepts of whakapapa are so important, this extended family identity—probably for Filipino cultures as well, and for Chinese I think it's really similar, growing up away from it you don't really realise it until you start learning more about your culture and history. My dad was born and raised in the States because his grandparents both migrated from Southern China to Canada and then to California. He didn't really hold on to a lot of concrete language or culture and he also experienced a lot of racism being the only Chinese in a black neighbourhood. He's very culturally African American himself. Now that I'm a bit older and learning more about our heritage, I'm realising that it's all about the rohe that you're from, the whanau name and making all these connections. It is interesting to think—if whakapapa is so important, how far back is really important? There is that whakapapa connection to Southern China between Māori and Chinese. Seeing the way that Māori is being revitalised and people are regaining a sense of mana from learning about their language and culture, I think it's the same for us.

RH: Yeah, totally. It's only been in the last few years for me seeing the experiences and histories of Filipinos in America, in particular, being talked about and the contemporary experiences of huge populations of second or third generation Filipino Americans as a distinct experience. While it's a very US-centric discussion, it still resonates with me as it's a discussion I didn't have access to or simply didn't exist when I was younger.

One thing I was thinking about was that Vera May recently held a curatorial hui over Zoom talking about being from migrant families, and that if you're from parents who migrated, the culture that you know about is often the culture that they left with, that it's kind of frozen in time or is a snapshot in a way. I also remember an anecdote from some old family friends who were Dutch. Their grandparents were really keen to keep their language and culture alive in the family, so after two generations of Aotearoa born kids they were also still Dutch speakers. But on a family holiday to Holland, the first for their younger children, they found it really hard to communicate with kids their own age. They were speaking their grandparents’ Dutch, so there was this linguistic, cultural and generational divide. Living in the diaspora, we can kind of be shut off from what’s contemporary in the ancestral homeland. I’m curious as to your thoughts or experiences with that particular phenomenon and in particular how it relates to your material approach. You both deal a lot with tradition and traditional craft and making methods. How do you relate that to contemporary experience?

TM: Growing up here and doing art history and art classes at high school, it's either all Western or it's all Māori depending on where you go. I always really longed to learn more about Chinese art or to have these crafts that came from whatever our heritage is. There were so many Chinese objects around the house, and they're so beautiful and amazing, and I had always wanted to learn more. I explored different ways a little bit in high school to incorporate them into my work. 

In art school here in New Zealand you don't really learn particular crafts. It's like, we pay so much money and you think, what did you teach me?. I think both Wai and I have had experiences at uni where teachers have asked us, You're Chinese, why don't you make some Chinese art?. That was confronting to us and felt a little bit racist. Like, how do you expect me to do that? Do you realise the history of my family, my upbringing? You want me to make art about my ancestral homeland, how am I supposed to do that when I can't even pinpoint where we're from or speak the same language. I guess we've also used it as an opportunity to speak about it. It's been a real opportunity to learn a lot about it, too. No one had ever asked me to learn about my own heritage before in school. 

It's interesting, traditionally we would have these crafts that would be localised to the village that we're from using materials that are local to the area, making crafts that were functional but also beautiful and served the village. Now there's this other place where we're actually able to just make works to make a statement. It's not even very functional and it serves a much broader community. Like you said, generations of us are in this diasporic situation. Growing up we always thought we just didn’t fit in any box because we're not that Chinese, and it's really interesting to now realise there's a whole generation of us that like that. I feel like I have a real thirst to learn more practical crafts that come from our heritage, because they're so beautiful. Personally, I find a lot of contemporary art not very beautiful and not very inspiring or uplifting and I’d like to bring that kind of thing back. There are so many different parallels when you look at customary Māori art or Oceanic art and customary Chinese art and I like to highlight those.

RH: Wai, in reading about your previous exhibition at Enjoy Gallery, Wishing Well, you were working against the idea that this knot making was purely decorative. I was wondering if you could talk about knot making and its significance and, to carry on from the last question, your relationship to that tradition as someone who's also not quite as far removed from the idea of an ancestral homeland, being Hong Kong-born?

WCC: Like what Tessa mentioned, I was asked to make "Hong Kong art" and that's how all these things started. I thought, what about my artwork is not Hong Kong enough when I'm already a Hong Kong person? At that moment I took it quite literally and started to go into this frantic mode of looking into what Hong Kong art should look like. I realised there's not one way to make Hong Kong art because Hong Kong identity itself is ever-changing since the beginning, even when it was still a colony. 

The idea of making Hong Kong art, and what my cultural identity is, should be allowed to have space to change with time, personality, and growth. It took me a long time to realise I can't just look into what contemporary Hong Kong is when I don't really know what it was before. Being a Hong Kong person and not knowing my personal ancestral history is quite a funny place to be in. I overheard Tessa talking to Kim Lowe when we were in Christchurch, referencing a city in Southern China where her grandparents or great-grandparents come from. The funny thing is, even though I was born and raised in this particular city, Hong Kong, I don't know what to trace back up to. On my grandparents' grave it says a certain city, but it's actually made up because no one knew. You had to put something on the gravestone so they said, maybe around there? It was so the soul has somewhere to reference and to have a home for this unknown situation. There has also been family that say they're boat people, that they were just on boats and moved to this shore and then lived in public housing. There's different talk.

Personally, I didn't really look like a Chinese person. I'm a little bit darker and my features are a little more Southeast Asian than East Asian, so I feel foreign in my own way. I don't feel Hong Kong and I don't feel Chinese. One thing that I know is that I grew up with all these little things ingrained in me, little philosophies, practices or rituals. Simple things like there's always certain things put up during New Year or there's always a certain type of traditional art at home that's just common practice. I take all these bits and learn in my own way. I took the form of the knots, which I always saw around. They're essentially borrowed from Tibet or whatever Buddhism has said to be a representation of Chinese folk art. From all this borrowing, no one can tell anyone who this art is about and who owns the art. Where is the actual origin? It's more like a shared origin and a shared anchor for a lot of people. I love that about these knots and I love that about folk art or crafts in that it's so easy to learn, but it's also hard to make it fine and beautiful. I love that no one actually owns the skills and everyone can learn it and perfect it. That's what I like about using this and navigating contemporary art, like this is me using something that I can't own.

RH: Is that part of the reasoning behind inviting other people with Chinese whakapapa to contribute taonga as part of the current exhibition at The Physics Room? There's a kind of rejection of authorship and ownership and embracing of community there.

WCC: Yeah, I feel like this work can't just exist in me and that it has to be collaborative.

RH: Like the art demands it, that the making demands other people to be part of it in that way?

WCC: It's relational in the sense that the topic is not just about me. I'm just one part of several voices.

TM: Part of the issue is trying to diversify the perceptions of what it means to be Chinese. Even when I was asked by my art tutor why I didn’t make Chinese art I thought, what do you expect Chinese art to be? That's another reason why we wanted to collaborate. We know there are a lot of other people facing the same kind of perceptions and issues and it's really nice for this art exhibition to be part of a conversation, a discourse that others can contribute to. This represents just one contribution and others can share their perspectives as well. By more people sharing their perspectives, then that can diversify these perceptions. I think we both like this idea that it's not really about us as artists, it's just this story that's being told.

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