Exhibitions
GOLDGOLDGOLD
L-R: YANRU PAN, I Prayed For Lightning, 2023, Acrylic on Canvas; YANRU PAN, Icy, 2023, Acrylic on Canvas
Beginning as a small workshop group, the eight artists of GOLDGOLDGOLD met together once a week to discuss a variety of topics surrounding their identities as Chinese-Australian artists. With the aim to discover connections and share stories with fellow artists, the group explored materiality, environment, relationships and memories that have impacted and shaped their artistic practice. The artists exhibited their first group show, ShuāngCóng, at the VCA Artspace in 2022. The show included artworks that responded to each artist’s connection with their Chinese-Australian background. Objects such as red pockets and luck cats boldly responded to the theme of the artists’ dual identity.
RACHEL ZHOU, The Colonial Gaze, 2024, Photographic collage
Following their previous show, the eight artists decided to reflect upon their own practices, creating an entirely new show. GOLDGOLDGOLD exhibits the progress and development of these artists, showing a combination of old and new work in a way that explores the future. As new and emerging artists, they raise questions surrounding the next generation of Chinese-Australian people. As new technologies are developed and society undergoes changes, these artists examine the complexities of navigating the world with identities that may be difficult to define.
The artists of GOLDGOLDGOLD hope to connect with their audiences through expressing their own personal navigation of self discovery. As we all work, study and live on stolen land, audiences are invited to also consider their own definitions of identity and home.
Enya Hu, Curator
SUKI YIJUN MA, Baby Tooth, 2023, Acrylic on canvas, 158.5 x 128.5 cm
Qiao Ruan, Fragments, 2024
LARISSA HOGG, Escapism, 2024, Oil on Canvas 46 x 35.5 cm
ARTIST BIOS
Enya Hu
Enya Hu’s work involves concepts surrounding sex, sexualisation, identity, the physical body and emotions through the use of various materials and mediums.As a queer Australian-born-Chinese person, the world of sex often stirs up thoughts associated with their identity. They acknowledge that they possess a body with breasts, a vagina and a uterus, which is commonly associated with womanhood, femininity, and gives them a female experience in their life so far, thus, their work reflects that. They’ve always felt that their identity and physical body has been a target for fetishization in a white, patriarchal society. The racism and homophobia they have navigated in the world of sex puts them in a place of curiosity - why is their identity a fetish? They are interested in human emotions surrounding strong feelings of disgust, lust, horror and euphoria. Their artworks investigate a duality between the repulsiveness of the body’s internal liquids and the sexual desire caused by the transference of fluids, inviting audiences to consider their personal relationship to body, life, flesh and death.
Jiayi Huang
Jiayi (Jen) Huang is a Melbourne/Naarm based, Shanghai-born artist currently studying third year at Victorian College of the Arts. Before she moved to Australia to study in VCA secondary school, she studied art at China Academy of the Arts secondary school under the supervision/guidance of the artist and teacher Chen Huafeng. The mundane, personal memory and collective consciousness are the themes her artworks revolve around. She engages with various mediums like archival images, darkroom prints and expired films to explore personal to familial tangible experiences, researching how storytelling and the presentation of images can change in authenticity and create deviations from the real. She also utilises artificial intelligence as a medium for examining the veracity of images, inspecting modes of perception, and delving into subconscious motifs. In 2023, she had her first independently curatorial practice Forget Me Not at the VCA Artspace featuring all the international fine art students at the University of Melbourne.
Larissa Hogg
Larissa Hogg is an artist based in Melbourne/Naarm who works primarily in oil paint, watercolour and gouache. Being born to an Australian father and Chinese mother, her work explores personal identity, culture, landscapes and natural forms. Her style includes organic, free forms which creates a sense of fluidity, usually depicted in a muted colour palette to convey a sense of calmness. She is inspired by experiences from travelling, cultural practices as well as observation of people and natural forms in everyday life.
Suki Yijun Ma
Suki Yijun Ma is a Melbourne/Naarm-based Chinese painter born in Guangzhou, whose practice involves mostly painting and poetry, where the two inform each other and interchange emotive processes on her personal and cultural voyage. Each work is set up like a stage play narrating an existential-poetic-melancholy that studies the vulnerability and intimacy in relationships. Ma’s practice consists of abstracted organic forms of teeth and nature that metaphorically portray a childhood memory that spiked through from the unconscious to reality.
Yanru Pan
Slicing, grafting and transforming, Yanru Pan’s painting is an operation on images sourced from facets of visual culture to critique the vanity of the middle-class. Cruelness and coldness are the backbone of their work. Singular scenes and scenarios in each piece are connected by apparitions of metal-fabricated objects that mirror; offering a reflection of reality and the quest to take a glance at the alternative beyond the looking glass. Reflected in these gleaming metal façades within the painting’s subjects, cowardice and hypocrisy lie side by side. Inside enclosed spaces, the protagonists in these paintings seem to be involved in enigmatic incidents. Like a closure scene for a video game, the artwork casts an apocalyptic shadow, making a crack to be suspicious in this failed utopia.
Qiao Ruan
Qiao is an Australian screenwriter based in Melbourne/Naarm. It was with great disappointment that Ruan’s parents found out she wasn't going to be a doctor, a lawyer, or an accountant, but at least they have made a spare. Ruan moved from China to Australia at fifteen, and has lived down under ever since. In order to escape from reality, she is drawn to sci-fi and fantasy, and developed a dark sense of humour as her go-to coping mechanism. After writing much murder and gore, she found a passion in writing content for children. It is said that writers put pieces of themselves in their work, and Ruan believes there is some truth to it. Inviting the audience to find parallels and similarities between the writer and her work, Ruan explores her cultural heritage and how it shapes her identity, evident in motifs, themes, and narratives.
Yoria Shi
Yoria Shi is a Chinese-born Melbourne/Naarm artist practising mainly in sculpture and installation. Her work often involves a kinetic aspect which calls on gestural movements that either imitate or juxtapose the human body. Often these motions are circular, cyclical, and repetitive; whilst in other works a finite death and deconstruction opens discussions surrounding their temporal qualities. In terms of materiality, the artist uses a combination of freshly mass-produced and found objects to elicit a language of mechanisms, manufacturing and the naturally organic. Shi is also interested in the effects of sound – often her supposedly silent works produce their own hums, from whirring motors to spinning wheels. The artist’s main intention is to continue creating a body of work that will form a playground of mechanisms.
Rachel Zhou
Rachel Hongxun Zhou is a Chinese-Australian artist working with photography and other various media. She has particular interests in identity issues within migrant communities, the meaning of diaspora and a multicultural society. The international relations, geopolitical conflicts and history of colonization affect people’s opinions towards different races, hence the formation of prejudice. To tell the stories of minorities and help strengthen their voices reduces misunderstanding and reform the connection between human beings. Culture is the breaking point of understanding, but it can also be detrimental by evoking hatred towards people that are different. Zhou’s work aims at reducing people’s bias and constructing a dialogue bridge. Growing up with the asian society’s influence of having a prestigious job, Zhou becomes a dentist thinking that is what she wants to do, now she is pursuing her artistic career, recollecting all her memories of being trained in painting as a teenager. She is currently undertaking the Masters of Contemporary Art course at the University of Melbourne.
CURATOR BIO
Enya Hu is an Australian-born-Chinese artist and curator that is based in Melbourne/Naarm. They completed their Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) course at the VCA in 2023 and are undertaking their Honours in 2024. Enya has worked with various artists across Melbourne/Naarm in curating a variety of exhibitions. They are interested in creating group shows that involve different identities that come together and have a conversation. While working with emerging artists, Enya has developed a fascination with the way new artworks speak alongside old ones. Their curiosity emerges as they play with a combination of the past and future. Enya’s more notable exhibitions include Grey (2023) at the Library at The Dock Gallery andClarity (2023) at Second Space Gallery.
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