IN-PERSON ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

This presentation examines the historical roots of Orientalism and contemporary expressions through art and design in Aotearoa New Zealand. Visual artist, designer, and researcher Kerry Ann Lee draws on her own creative practice alongside works by Chinese and Asian New Zealand artists including Guy Ngan, Joseph Churchwood, Simon Kaan, Kathryn Tsui, Amul Topiwala, the Migrant Zine Collective and others. Heritage motifs—such as the Staffordshire blue willow pattern, ‘Chop Suey’ typeface, and dragon iconography—are explored as visual shorthand for Cantonese Chinese identity. These fragments serve as visual shorthand: entry points into a broader investigation of cultural memory, diasporic migration, and identity shaped by art, design, commerce, and settlement over the past two centuries. The paper contextualizes Chinese settlement in New Zealand since the mid-19th century, highlighting post-colonial perspectives on Chinese–Māori relations and contributions to New Zealand’s art and design history. It considers the influence of 20th-century commercial aesthetics, the NZ Chinese Growers Monthly Journal (1949–1972), and the emergence of 21st-century Asian Tauiwi (non-Māori) creative expression through Asian Aotearoa arts. Positioned within a global framework, the presentation challenges colonial narratives of Orientalism and proposes a localized Asia-Pacific Futurism. It centres Asian Tauiwi in dialogue with Māori, Pacific, Pākehā, and other Tauiwi through culturally grounded art-making and relational practices. Through the use of type, image, ornament, and design, the paper critiques Asia as a Western construct and responds to Romain Rolland’s concept of an “oceanic feeling”—reimagining future connections across the ‘Near’ and ‘Far’ East. A new graphic design history emerges through bricolage, shaped by personal, historical, and transnational understandings of artefact and heritage in flux.