WEBVTT

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- My family, the women in the family, used to get together

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to practise paper crafts when I was a little girl.

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Whenever I do have the opportunity to stage

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a paper cutting class I somewhat relive that memory,

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so it's really lovely for me.

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(slow piano music)

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People always assume that we pre-draw it,

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but we don't, I just cut straight.

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I draw into it with a knife.

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It's all tacit knowledge.

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It's just something that just builds up over a long time.

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Scherenschnitte is about paper cutting

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being all about dialogue, so it's considered

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a repository for...

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Particularly women with varying levels of literacy

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so they use the cut-outs to communicate

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with each other and let the work do the talking.

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And paper cutting itself has been recognised

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as a form of ethnography, so it's very, very important.

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Typically my work is quite modest in scale.

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For personal use, unless somebody requests something.

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It's not something that you would do

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over a matter of size.

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They're very intimate things.

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Intimate in scale, and they're

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often very personal in terms of subject matter, too.

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I just find it really relaxing.

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You do your commercial work, or what

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has been requested by a client,

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and then I'm still often cutting at night

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because it's how I relax.

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My technique quite closely resembles Foshan

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paper cutting, which comes from Guangdong Province

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where my mother's family originates.

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And in a way, it's fortunate that it

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does have that relationship back to my maternal home.

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I don't have a lot of patience for drawing.

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Because I don't use a template,

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I'm free to cut the main form

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from the outside and put the detail in.

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I know my favourite imagery is the spaces like this.

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It's the pattern.

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More than anything, it's just the immediacy.

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So after I started paper cutting,

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there was not really any going back

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because you start to see how much paint and canvas costs.

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Particularly now, as I have a child,

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you can understand why so many women practised it.

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Because they could put it down.

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Even I do this now, between tending

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to my daughter or other household chores,

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I take ten minutes out to do a cut out.

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In a way, it keeps the work fresh.

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If I sit here...

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I used to do these large works,

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particularly in China, and just fall

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asleep at the table in the middle of doing it.

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I'd be cutting for hours straight.

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Especially when you're a young person

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and sort of unbridled by domestic requirements.

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I could do it in the evenings

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with very little set-up involved.

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It doesn't need drying time or anything like that.

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It's really immediate.

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(gentle piano music )

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In this exhibition, there's a series

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of 16 Chinese-Australians which I've depicted

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using two paper cutting traditions.

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One, obviously the Chinese style

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of paper cutting and the European silhouette portraiture.

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Just to describe the composition,

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in each of these images, the motif on the top

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is usually in colour and is of the flower emblem

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of the place of origin, Bombax ceiba.

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The red silk cotton tree.

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It's symbolic of Guangdong Province.

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The cutout composition that I have here is of Ho Lup Mun.

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She was a prominent woman

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in the Chinese community in Melbourne,

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from the late 19th century, early 20th century.

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And with Mrs. Lup Mun there's a ginseng,

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which is one of the herbs that she

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would have stocked and distributed.

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I have another example, Lowe Meng Kong.

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He arrived as a 23 year-old on his own ship to Melbourne.

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He was a merchant, he a number of different

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industries of which he became prominent in.

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One of them, as you can see here,

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this is a sea cucumber, so he was harvesting them.

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One of the subjects, Jimmy Ah Foo.

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He had a slaughterhouse, he had a market garden,

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but what he's best known for is as a publican.

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So we have a beer, sort of, cup.

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I think, why I did it, the motivation

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is largely because with no wide Australia policy,

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it also meant that these personal

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histories became invisible.

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So it wasn't just that they were excluded

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from parts of community life, they just were never recorded.

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They didn't exist, more or less.

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So it's a real privilege to be able to

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work with this institution to...

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Draw attention to this whole

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generation of amazing Australians.