Bamboo

This watercolour painting was created by Grace Ko and depicts two strong bamboo stalks. It is complemented by a painting of five peonies created by Grace's mother, Lu Xu, also in Te Papa’s collection. The two artworks, and another by their painting teacher, Tina Lin, were donated to the museum in connection with the museum’s Asian mental health project in 2022.

Grace was introduced to painting at the age of seven, when her mother began taking her to Tina Lin's weekly Chinese painting classes. The pair have shared a love of Chinese watercolour ever since. A thoughtful observer of her own and her mother's practice, Grace sees their respective artistic affinities as revealing of their personal qualities:

"We would eventually find our 'signature' plant. Mum's was the Peony; a flower that required intricate twists of the brush and well throughout floral construction. They're also known to symbolise beauty and healing. Mine was the Bamboo; a plant that required one seamless stroke and confident precision. You can't overthink the Bamboo, the certainty of the brush translates to the beauty of the plant. They're known to symbolise strength and growth…

“We stopped going to Chinese painting when I moved to Auckland for university, that was ten years ago now. But when I think about mine and mum's paintings, a lot about our fears and ambitions come to mind. Mum thought about things a lot. About her relationship with her mother, how she didn't want to project her fears onto me, how she wanted to intricately curate a well-rounded childhood for me, how she fears that she can't ever mend her relationship with her mother. Every thought of hers, was like every fragile petal off the Peony. Whereas I didn't overthink, I could be present and grounded in the stroke and not think about the next. Like how I trust in the process of my healing and lean into the growth I experience. The thinking and planning that one does when painting a Peony, comes when the brush is hitting the page, whilst the thinking and planning that one does when painting bamboo, comes before the brush touches the paper.

“Although the two plants are at each side of the spectrum, they're usually painted together to show the yin and yan[g] in the artform; a motif that Chinese mother and daughters share. The notion that no matter how painful the relationship can be due to childhood emotional enmeshment and lack of boundaries in Chinese families, the pair are still drawn together and share great chemistry." 

Grace grew up in Pōneke/Wellington with her Chinese mother and Taiwanese father. Her relationship with her parents, and particularly her mother, has been central to her personal mental health journey – this is detailed in her article ‘4-days-as-me’ in the zine Unravelling Threads: Asian mental health (Te Papa, 2022).