Untitled (Red masks)

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Yuk King Tan, a Chinese New Zealander born in Australia, has referred to herself as a Chinese import. She sees her ‘straddling of Chinese, New Asian, European family cultural traditions [as] “not quite, not sure”’.1 As a result, Tan’s work engages with the complexities of cultural identity, migration, global politics and trade. She works with a diverse range of media — video, photography, drawing and installation — all underpinned by her interest in transformative processes. This is manifested most strikingly in an ongoing series of wall drawings, begun in 1995, made from strings of tiny firecrackers, which are ceremoniously lit by an audience member during the exhibition. Once the firecrackers have burned away, a trace of the original drawing remains scorched on the wall.

Untitled (Red masks) is a group of eleven masks wrapped in plush red thread that trails down to pool on the floor. One is a wax mask of the artist’s own face; the rest are of animals — pig, sheep and rabbit — from Chinese astrology, human caricatures and an alien. Mass produced in China and exported worldwide, these masks are easily obtained from Asian supermarkets and discount stores. Tan’s covering and remaking of these masks reflects the changes that are part of the immigrant experience. Masks, by their very nature, have the power to either conceal or reveal individuality. In Tan’s hands, they refer to the masks of anonymity and conformity that immigrants adopt in order to fit into a new culture. They also reference long-held traditions of Chinese craft and symbolism. In particular red symbolises happiness and prosperity — aspirations of particular poignancy for people forging new lives.

Equally important for Tan is the impact immigrants have on the culture they settle in, and she is acutely aware of the subtleties of cultural exchange and assimilation that shape individuals and communities in these situations. With this exchange in mind, in Untitled (Red masks) Tan knowingly plays off the exoticism traditionally associated with the East against the throwaway items of mass production that have come to represent modern China.

Charlotte Huddleston

1 Yuk King Tan, artist’s statement, in Bernice Murphy, Julie Ewington and Nicholas Baume (eds), Localities of desire: Contemporary art in an international world, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 1994, p. 68.

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Untitled (Red Masks) is series of plastic and wax masks covered with red fabric tassels. The tassels cover the surface of each mask and then fall to the floor where the threads pool in uneven piles. The eleven masks in Yuk King Tan's sculpture consist of representations of symbolic animals from the Chinese calendar, an 'alien' mask, and a wax mask of the artist's face.

A mass-produced culture
Tan's masks and red tassels are made from the materials of mass-produced Chinese culture available in Asian supermarkets and food stores around the country. In Tan's hands the mass-produced merchandise becomes a sign of the effects of cultural migration and resettlement. The flow of consumer goods is a sign of a mobile global economy, while the sometimes strange juxtapositions of cheaply produced items points to the complexity of identity in the contemporary world.

Alien faces
Although she was born in Australia, Tan regards herself as a Chinese New Zealander. She has described her own identity as 'not quite, not sure'. Untitled (Red Masks) puts the artist into the picture through the wax mask of her own face. Masks both hide and reveal facial features, and Untitled (Red Masks) makes the most of this dual purpose to talk about stereotypes of 'alien' cultures within mainstream society. The prominence of facial features in Untitled (Red Masks) also makes reference to now-discredited ideas of race and the notion that difference and identity are represented in features like skin colour or the shape of a nose or lips. In this line-up of different faces, Tan asks, who is the alien?