As Artists in Residence at Museum of Brisbane (MoB) for BrisAsia Stories, Christine Ko and Louis Lim will extend upon their ongoing project Departure. In this iteration of the project, Christine and Louis will lead a series of informal conversations and workshops with various members from Brisbane migrant communities. Participants will be encouraged to share their stories of migration and create paper kites using photographs from their family archives.
Christine and Louis are interested in kites as a symbol for the migrant experience, for they evoke “flights of joyous and naive childlike wonder and optimism that is simultaneously at the whim of external circumstances, constantly buffeted by the surrounding environment that can sometimes lead to deep disappointment (crash landing)”. Over the residency, more and more kites will be added to an evolving installation in the MoB Hallway. The kites will be accompanied by written transcripts of the recollections of the participants. In sharing these stories, the project will contribute to larger conversations about immigration and race in Australia.
View the kites up close and read the letters here.
Read our Q&A with Christine and Louis here.
As part of this residency, Christine and Louis are looking to work with first and second generation migrants from a variety of cultural backgrounds and age groups. They would like to have informal conversations with participants between 11 January and 1 March 2024 and would ideally like to meet with participants at their homes, although there is the option to meet at MoB if preferred. Participants will also need to be available for a kite-making workshop with the artists between March and May 2024.
This invitation to participate is now closed.
This residency is delivered as part of Brisbane City Council’s BrisAsia Festival 2024, produced by Sounds Across Oceans. Official Media Partner SBS.
MoB’s Artist in Residence program is supported by Tim Fairfax AC.
Christine Ko is a Brisbane-based visual artist working with installation and photomedia to explore marginality, hybridity and spaces characterised by the ‘in-between’. Drawing from her personal experience as a Chinese-Australian, she examines feelings of ambivalence—between hopes, dreams, invisibility and shame, through the lens of the contemporary Chinese-Australian migrant experience.
Christine has exhibited locally and internationally and had artworks acquired by the Macquarie Group as a finalist in the 2017 Macquarie Group Emerging Artist Prize and Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery as a finalist in the 2016 Toowoomba Biennial Emerging Artists Award. She has been a finalist in numerous other art prizes, including the 2017 Churchie National Emerging Art Prize, 2016 MAMA Art Foundation National Photography Prize, 2016 Clayton Utz Art Award and 2016 Moreton Bay Region Art Awards. In 2018 she was selected to take part in the inaugural Biennale of Australian Art in Ballarat for which she created her first site-specific public artwork. Since then she has also created public artworks for Botanica: Contemporary Art Outside at the Brisbane City Botanic Gardens and Willoughby City Council in Sydney.
Louis Lim is an Australian-based photographer and visual artist whose work explores the diversity in human conditions, specifically those that are under-represented in mainstream media. With a keen interest in light, his practice focuses on non-fictional visual storytelling and conceptual photographic portraits with a collaborative methodology.
Louis’s work has been exhibited in several Australia galleries and presented internationally. He was awarded the Queensland Festival of Photography Portrait Prize 2012 and was shortlisted as a finalist in 2019 Bowness Photography Prize, 2017 Churchie National Emerging Art Award and 2015 Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award. He has also completed an artist residency at the Royal Children Hospital School and Queensland Children’s Hospital School in 2015, where he worked closely with children to present photographic stories of the unique school environments.
Motivated by his local community, Louis has worked closely with people from migrant backgrounds and differently-abled groups within the creative arts sector. He currently works as a freelance photographer and together with Christine, they run a fine art printing lab and creative space in Meanjin, Brisbane’s inner south.
