Featured Artists

Wai Ching Chan is a Hong Kong born artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She has been navigating paths to foster the connections and unity that exists between tauiwi and tangata whenua in Aotearoa. In her textile installations she uses Chinese knots and the affect of the soft materials as her language to express the hopes for a stronger, closer community. Wai Ching’s work featured in a temple, a commons, and a cave, curated by Amy Weng at Meanwhile Gallery as part of AAA2018.

Tessa Ma’auga has been exploring how the arts can be used to foster harmonious cross-cultural connections, conversations, and shared understanding. Her recent works employ a language of knots and weaving to explore the nature of essential relationships within the universe, particularly the connections flowing between Aotearoa and Southern China. Her main passion is community building together with young people and their families in her neighbourhood in Palmerston North.

Linda Lee (Ngāti Huia, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Kuri, Te Rarawa, Te Aupōuri) is an artist, kairaranga, arts producer and kaiako based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Āotearoa. Linda discovered she was whāngai at age 19 and as a mixed-race artist - Māori, Chinese, Pākehā, Dalmatian/Croatian. This led her to explore identity, researching and reinterpreting family, whakapapa, and further indigenous histories through exhibition, installation, raranga, mātautauranga Māori, photography, and book form. As well as being the Creative Director of Shared Lines Collaborative, producer of Ōtari Raranga Weavers and co-producer of Urban Dream Brokerage, Linda was a participant in the first Chinese New Zealand Artists Hui in 2013, and producer for AAAH2018. Her artwork for New Illuminations is created in collaboration with artist Ngaroma Riley (Te Rarawa, Te Aupouri, Pākehā).

Wailin Elliott started potting at school in the late 1950s encouraged by a teacher friend at Epsom Girls' Grammar. She found A Potters Book, by Bernard Leach on the shelves in the library there and asked the art teacher May Smith if she could sit in in one of her classes and make a pot or two. May encouraged her to attend the Auckland University Summer School for artists. Her father allowed her a fortnight off working in his shop over the school holidays and Wailin and with her elder sister Eva for support was able to attend. It was there that she met other aspiring potters from all over NZ as well as making friends of well-known potters, Helen Mason, Barry Brickell and Len Castle who supported and encouraged her. She made her entire living as a potter in Auckland's Browns Mill, NZ's First Craft Co-operative market which opened on two days a week (Friday and Saturday) at a time when nothing opened in the weekends. She and her husband Tom, supported themselves and their family by their crafts for over 30 years and still pot carve today, even though they have both retired.

Emiko Sheehan (Japanese, Māori: Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Kahu Ngāti Unu, Waikato Tainui, Raukawa, Tūwharetoa), is a multimedia artist, following the medium that best fits her focus at the time. She has worked in video, poetry, drawing, installation, performance and harakeke. Emiko’s works often explore themes of identity and indigeneity from both her Japanese and Māori whakapapa. She featured Moonchild as part of our AAAH2018 programme notably as part of Chur: Asia Pacifika Kaikai at Big Thumb Restaurant. In 2023 she created the artist collective Waawaahi Tahaa, a group of Māmā that would meet weekly to create with each other, and give themselves and their babies community. The result of the group's year culminated in a residency and exhibition at Ramp Gallery.

Robbie Handcock is a Filipino/Pākehā artist and curator based in Tāmaki Makaurau. He graduated with a MFA from Massey University in 2016 and is currently Kaiāwhina Whakaaturanga Assistant Curator at Artspace Aotearoa. He has exhibited at Jhana Millers Gallery, play_station, and Enjoy Contemporary Artspace in Te Whanganui-a-Tara and RM Gallery in Tamaki Makaurau. In 2021, he curated the exhibition The Inner Lives of Islands at Te Tuhi in Tamaki Makaurau.

New Illuminations: 10 years of Asian Aotearoa Arts Exhibition

The Engine Room Gallery
Whiti o Rehua School of Art
Toi Rauwhārangi College of Creative Arts
Massey University
63 Wallace Street, Wellington
Entrance C, Block 1

Thurs 18 April - Friday 10 May
Opening hours: 12-4pm, Mon-Fri

Exhibition Opening: Thursday 18 April, 5:30pm

The idea was to mark 10 years with 10 artists, however this proved not to be an easy task! New Illuminations, celebrates a decade of Asian Aotearoa Arts by esteemed artists, Wai Ching Chan & Tessa Ma'auga, Xin Cheng, Linda Lee, Hanna Shim, Wailin Elliott, H Y Chai, Ant Sang, Emiko Sheehan, Kathryn Tsui and Robbie Handcock, responding to AAA2024’s anniversary theme of Past, Present and Futures

Through painting, collage, weaving, printmaking, video, drawing, illustration, graphic design, soft-sculpture, installation and artist books, this group show brings to light the invisible threads that connect us across distances – as teachers, students, peers, mentors, fans, friends, colleagues, correspondents and collaborators over the years.

Following their first collaboration Kāpuia ngā aho 單絲不綫,(2022) we are excited to feature a new collaboration between Tessa and Wai, 千千絲萬萬結，結實累累 Bountiful Knots, Fruitful Ties, where they use the fibres and knowledge they have inherited to weave a shared aspiration of a united world. Responding to Past, Present and Futures, Tessa and Wai revisited their previous works and give them new revised meanings and narrative. Tessa’s cascading knotted threads emphasise the evolution of the diverse universe from one source through patterns of reciprocity, and ascent and descent. Her paper cuttings are given new illumination, highlighting our shared origins and organic relationships across spiritual and physical realms. In addition, Wai comes in with soft textile sculpture, offering an abstract expression of a similar focus on interconnectedness. Walking backwards towards the future, the pair offer symbols of connection, continuity, inseparability, and harmonious relationships. 

FREE and all welcome.

Xin Cheng works across art, social design and local ecologies. Since 2006 she has been researching and hosting workshops around the creative making by non-specialists across the Asia-Pacific and Europe. Recently she set up 'A Place for Local Making' with Adam Ben-Dror, a convivial space for transforming and thinking with materials and life cycles. She also enjoys attending to interspecies kinship in her surroundings, unveiling micro-cosmos and intricate stories through moving image and sound. She was a co-director of the artist-run space RM in Auckland and holds a MFA from Hamburg University of Fine Arts, and currently teaches design and fine arts at Waipapa Taumata Rau | The University of Auckland.

Hanna Shim is an artist based in Tamaki Makarau. Born in Seoul, Korea, and raised in Auckland, New Zealand, Hanna identifies herself as a maker, working across various mediums including installations, paintings, soft sculptures, textile art, and video works. Her practice embodies qualities of playfulness and a touch of childishness, evident in both her creative processes and visual outcomes. She engages in condensing and blending contradictory imagery, objects, and stories drawn from her diasporic background. Hanna completed her Master's degree in Fine Arts at Elam School of Fine Arts MFA in 2015. She has showcased her work in solo exhibitions such as Headless at Whitespace Gallery (2016), Lost in Forest at Whitespace Gallery (2017), Smer Smer at Aigantighe Gallery (2019), Mushroom Room (2020), and Wishing You Well (2022). Additionally, she has been part of numerous group exhibitions.

H Y Chai is a designer and illustrator currently based in Ōtautahi, whose work strives to explore the intersections between the divine and the monstrous, the romanticisation of the mundane, and articulations of their Chinese-Malaysian identity. As a second-generation immigrant, many of their stories draw from their previous experiences of life in Hong Kong and Malaysia, and the memories of their family and personal piecemeal traditions. Their line-art-heavy style draws inspiration from a childhood of manga, as well as a mish-mash of later interests such as art nouveau, advertorial illustrations, and traditional Chinese art. Through their work, they’ve also discovered a passion for character animation and motion graphics. In their spare time, they enjoy participating in collaborative zine projects, drawing, and making earrings.

Ant Sang is a cartoonist and illustrator based in Auckland, New Zealand. He’s the author of graphic novels The Dharma Punks, Shaolin Burning, and co-author of Helen and the Go-Go Ninjas. His graphic novels have won awards and been published in the US, UK, France, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand. Ant has also worked in film, television and theatre. He was the head designer on the hit, animated television show bro’Town, for which he won two Production Design awards.

Kathryn Tsui graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Sculpture) from Auckland University of Technology (2007). She has Cantonese Chinese ancestry, and is based in Tairua, Coromandel Peninsula where she is a textile artist who works primarily in weaving and beading. In 2023 Masterworks presented Tsui’s solo exhibition redwhiteblue and in June 2024 she will have a solo exhibition at Objectspace. Her work is held in the art collections of The Dowse Art Museum, the University of Waikato, Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato and Tūhura Otago Museum. She was an artist in residence at Driving Creek Pottery in 2023. Tsui is also the recipient of a Creative New Zealand Arts Grant 2023-2024. Kathryn organised the first Chinese New Zealand Artists Hui with Simon Kaan and Kim Lowe at Corbans Estate, Auckland in 2013, and featured in our 10-year Anniversary Founders Kōrero as part of AAA2023.