New Zealand artist tackles Asian culture

New Zealand artist tackles Asian culture

Following the successful nationwide tour over the last two years, Heather Straka’s magnum opus comes to Wellington in a special exhibition at Page Blackie Gallery.

When Heather won one of New Zealand’s premier art awards, she took her prize, a three month scholarship to Switzerland, travelling through Asia both ways. During these stopovers, Straka was overwhelmed by the huge numbers of Asian women who work in the service industry in a helpful-but-invisible sense, and the way these women follow certain ‘look’ and ‘dress’ conventions, based on advertising, television and Asian popular culture.

In response, Straka decided to create an enormous artwork to address the importance of understanding the differences in Asian cultures. So she travelled to the Shenzhen painting village in Southern China, and commissioned fifty-nine copyists (who generally work on replicating the Mona Lisa or a Monet or van Gogh) to copy one of her own paintings. The result is The Asian, a huge wall of sixty versions of the same painting, but with each showing small differences, thanks to the individualism of each copyist.

This wonderful art installation has travelled the country in public art galleries, starting at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Page Blackie Gallery director, James Blackie says, “We were disappointed that Wellington’s public galleries were unable to exhibit this incredible work of Heather’s, so we decided to clear an exhibition in our calendar so that Wellingtonians would still have a chance to come and see it”.

Over the last five years, Straka’s work has increasingly examined Asian sub- and popular culture. This has partly been a response to the increasingly multicultural environment in New Zealand, but also to the way New Zealand is increasingly looking to Asia in matters social, cultural and economic. This interest first appeared in Heather’s work in the reworking of Hokusai’s famous woodblock print of Mount Fujiyama some years ago. Then her interest developed to focus on Asian popular culture, using traditional Chinese New Year posters from Shanghai’s ‘golden age’ as the inspiration. This focus allowed Straka to explore both the changing role and the objectification of women in Chinese culture over the last Century, to present day. From this point, commissioning the enormous work, The Asian, was a natural next step.

The Asian will open at Page Blackie Gallery on Tuesday 29 May and will run until 16 June.

ENDS

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