“Where you from?”
Chris Ng
28 Oct → 16 Dec 2023

Batik workshop, 29 Oct, 12 – 4 am

Chris Ng, 'Where you from?', 2023. Image courtesy of the artist.

West Space presents a new body of work by Mparntwe/Alice Springs based artist Chris Ng.

"Where you from?" is a question often asked in Mparntwe. It is a colloquial phrase but given the context – spoken on land where local Indigenous cultures and languages are still commonly practiced – it can also hold deep ancestral meaning.

The population of Mparntwe is a melting pot of people, from Central, Eastern and Western Arrernte, Pitintjara, Walpiri and Luritja peoples, to non-Indigenous people "born and bred in Alice”, to national and international migrants who have relocated for work opportunities and to escape city life.

Where you from? is born from the artist's experience of living in such a place, as a person of colour and first-generation 'Australian'. It is a project for the culturally ambiguous by the culturally ambiguous, for whom the term “culturally diverse” is complex.

Realised across ceramics and installation, Where you from? looks to reimagine cultural identities and histories, to redefine an understanding of multiculturalism in so-called 'Australia' by presenting it in intimate and individual scale. Where you from? is about voicing the unique insights that people of layered cultural backgrounds have to share, and focussing on the diverse cultures that we know rather than what we have lost.

Read Optimal Listening by Ender Başkan.

Batik making workshop in the Collingwood Yards courtyard, Sunday 29 October, 11am → 3pm.

Presented in partnership with Watch This Space (NT) and Situate (Tas), as part of Craft Contemporary. This project is supported by Arts Northern Territory and the City of Yarra.

A mural painted in blue paint on a white wall. The image depicts a location known as "the gap" in Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia. Two rocky mountain peaks coverge at a low point where a road and train track pass through the middle. There is text that says "there mparntwe". Above there are two birds in flight with text above them that says "always was, always will be"

Chris Ng is an emerging artist living and working in Mparntwe/Alice Springs. A first-generation born “Australian” of South-East Asian/Chinese family background, Chris grew up in the suburbs of Sydney. Their art practice is informed by their experiences and identity as well as their immediate surroundings and natural, political and socio-economic landscape.