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Exhibition

Hoa Huy

Jazmine Deng

About the exhibition

Jazmine Deng

Hoa Huy is an exhibition born from the contemplation of generational divides between parents and children of the Asian diaspora and their untold family histories.  

Grounded by Cambodian history and the effects of the communist regime that led her maternal side to seek refuge in Australia, Jazmine’s processes consider the remnants of ‘ghostliness’ and intergenerational transmissions that occur from those who survived genocide or were children of those who did.  

Photos, sounds and cultural artefacts tell the story of a re-constructed biography that splices, remembers, forgets and retells, correctly and incorrectly over and over again. 

Nexus Arts Gallery
10th April 2025- 16th May 2025

Audio Transcript of Artist Statement

Jazmine Deng’s Artist Statement

Hoa Huy   

Pronounciation: (ho-ah hu-e)  

During the period of the residency I arranged to sit with my mum semi-regularly. My intention was to share with her the research and readings that I was doing around diasporic Asian women. It was an attempt to be together, collaborate, and share insights into mother and daughter epistemologies and co-knowledge creation.  

Since moving out, and since visiting Asia last year, there have been many things that I had wanted to unpack around my cultural lineage. How did we get here? What happened that informed our survival? – like most migrant families, it looked like work.  

Moments with my mum were simple. We sat down together, outside of the gallery, and had warm black tea, with oat milk she delivered to the studio. We sat and peered through her own biography, and she smiled at how young she used to be.  

This has been a time of reawakening, to my mum’s fervor and sense of self. A thing that’s brewed for many years. As she stops different working roles and takes new ones on, as she verbalises to me now, what really matters to her.  

In my meetings together there have been foods shared, tea drank and recounts of what she is inspired to do. To look after her health. To ground herself. A simple being, our relationship unfurls at the crevices in this white spaced room. Tensions and uncertainties ooze from its tear ducts, curious to learn more.  

Within the gallery, there are traces of my mum’s life scattered throughout the space – photographs, her writing and moving sounds and footage. She speaks to me, in these whispers, and I pick them up gently to make up a story that I can recall.  

A pathway forms backwards of a migration arc, a pathway arc marked by offbeat objects – freshly mixed studio paint, bamboo offcuts from a home up in Salisbury Heights, to-be-eaten noodles that I’ll probably cook for a dinner soon, a computer mouse, my dad’s cigarette butts, and some oil paintings hung up on the walls…  

Am I this or that? Am I there or here? No one will tell you, so we’ll need to find the answers for ourselves.  

The written pieces have been taken from a precious book, my mum’s auto-biography that she had made in year 10 at Adelaide high school. I found this biography in 2021, hidden in a box, in the room beneath the stairs of our family home. A precious thing to discover as a young person, amidst dust, curtain rods and red wine.  

In these pages, she attempts to describe who she is, recounting her travelling by foot to the Thailand border with my grandparents.  

In par with this, is a video work projected on the wall.  

The video shows snippets of a conversation I had with my mum taken from 2021. I ask her similar questions that she had asked herself as a teenager:  

Who am I?  

Why am I here?  

What am I doing on this earth?  

A jarred, and discombobulated sight, scenes of the present superimpose on top in colours of green, pink and yellow. Moments of pandan dessert and java apples both tenderly homemade and homegrown by my grandma that she had offered to me, appear in the film.  

“Cambodian. Australian. Chinese.”  

“I am three”  

“I don’t know who I am now (giggles)”  

The footage of her wearing the headscarf, while sitting in the bedroom were recorded earlier this month. Still as goofy as ever, she tells me she would rather be Asian than Australian, to which I agree. Over the course of time between both recordings (2021 and 2025), illness and separation have occurred, and loss and injustice continue to devastate our contemporary world. I speak to my mum to bridge any known gaps.  

I am so thankful to my mum. My process of seeking to understand her past makes me better understand my current ethics, not because we are the same, but because we are different.  

Her unseen labor invites me to bear witness to female migrant bodies and their legacies.  

My parents’ lives are remnants of another form that I have taken on.  

Forms of survival look different – a survival arc, butts up against certain edges of what is meant to be, asking itself to be exposed.  

Actions to perform, for generating repairs in ruptures include: crying, talking, communicating, being with… to name a few.  

I actually have no idea how to put on a show, having it exist there makes me feel so weird, especially with all the things I have had yet to want to do. Time feels still, so I am thinking about how to extend that time.  

Jazmine  

Hoa Huy at Nexus Arts Gallery (10 April – 16 May 2025)  

Funded by an Arts South Australia Professional Development grant  

Cristea Nian Zhao accompanied essay, ‘The Incomplete and Uncompleted Story’

Mentoring alongside Kosta Stefanou  

Catalogue essay

The Incomplete and Uncompleted Story  

 

Grafting: 
An ancient horticultural technique to interlock tissues of two plants.  

To graft is to:  
cleave. 
strip. 
splice. 
bridge. 
slip. 
inarch.  

What you are seeing here is a story of your life. 

When I say, your, it’s not associated with a particular person as what you might have seen. In fact, the so-called story doesn’t effectively communicate a comprehensive narrative that could be grasped on either. The accounts conflict with and dissolve into one another as words come out of my mouth. In silence. Words will have no sounds so that the consequential consciousness can then step down. I was, am, will be in the beginning, the middle, and the end of this story, of your story. A story stretches out with no arch.   

I am accessing this story with you now because it has set to happen then; almost without suspense, but a sense of obligation, a matter of urgency. Wheels settle into the rut before they could mark the ground. With you, I: 

 

    See now then.  

 

See now, then.
See–now, then.
See.
Now.
Then.

It is within this framework that I enter the ‘cataclysm’, with you. I scatter it out on a surface so as to make sense to myself. At what point, quantitatively, does the cataclysm begin? Where does it come to an end, if there is one? Can the singularity of annihilation ever be bodied forth? You cannot apprehend but you bring it with you. The unrepresentable and unspeakable void. Your alterity imprints onto mine: 

Why you felt the pain. Why you feel the pain. 
Why I feel the pain? 

no matter how it is heard, no matter how it is felt, and it is such a disappointment, right now, for right now is always so incomplete, or so we feel, and that is a blessing, for it transforms then into what will come, all that will come, even though all that will come must contain right now and the unfathomable longing for the then,… 1  

To graft is to: 
wound. 
join through wounding. 
heal as one.  

Heal as one? 

In disguise, right? What does it mean to be made whole through rupture? A dubious motive, a deceptive outcome.  

I stumble along fragments of information. Representations have long failed in face of the cataclysm so I construct my own. I see you through an object. A screen. A silhouette. An abstract form. A character, word, phrase. I am bound by no allegiance to restore the past, or to tell your truth. I slice and piece together your body. Meanings percolate through the orifices, connecting my incompleteness to yours. We are not so different after all.  

I hold my declaimer underneath my tongue, dissolving it into my pulse. In watching, I speak; in speaking, I act. I speak without speaking as my words are soundless. My speaking is an utterance, an action in motion, an ongoing process of moving forward. It is deictic, grounded in my witnessing and combining of ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘you’, ‘I’, ‘now’, ‘then’. My eyes become my mouth. In silence I carry you. 

To graft is to: 
disarticulate. 
redeem. 

Your absence puts my presence in place. I am here only because you are not, in the space where the rupture never quite closes. You see, it is always unfinished, restless, discontent. And yet, we somehow survive in it—to be precise, we survive on it, persisting on the very fractures that divide us.  

Cristea Zhao Nian
March 2025
Writer, Artist

Read full essay +

Additional words from Cristea Zhao Nian

‘The writing is informed by the horticultural technique of grafting as a cultural & psychic translation model, and the aftermath of historical catastrophes, specifically mass destruction events – the ‘cataclysm’ by philosopher Edith Wyschogrod – which provides us a general historical context to access the work. Another side inspiration is Ted Chiang’s sci-fi novel Story of your Life. Your mum’s ‘Who am I’ strongly reminded me of this piece. I think of determinism: the unavoidability of generational trauma, the impossibility of reconciliation. Though it might have a passive tone, it still goes back to the transformation practice of grafting: we bring it with us; there is wounding, there is pain, there is incompletion, we don’t know what the answer is but maybe we will find out.   

I said ‘healing as one’ is deceptive – this is not an implication that we will always be broken. I wanted to question the concept of reconciliation; it’s often futile to pursue reconciliation because it retains the narrative to only the past.  

What I want to emphasise is, even though there is emotional neglect/incomprehension that [is] induced by past trauma (the ruptures), what’s important is the great courage to carry on in life with the experience of a traumatic event. 

Your mum of course is the centre of this exhibition because she enabled everything. She enabled you. She enabled this project. Your works here – an utterance, an action – is not really looking back in time but in fact carrying her with you to the future, through shared care & love.  

The metaphor of grafting works beautifully here because later findings have demonstrated that nuclear genomes could be transferred across the graft junction to generate new species. I think this is crucial to understand your practice.’  

 

Special thanks to Kim, Makeda, Kosta, Cristea and May.  

This exhibition has been made possible through generous funding and support from Arts South Australia. 

I pay respect to the Kaurna people as the custodians of the land on which this exhibition is taking place. I acknowledge that sovereignty has not been ceded and pay respect to Elders past, present and emerging.  

 

Meet the artists & curators


Jazmine Deng is an early-career multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans performance, screen-based media, sculpture, assemblage, painting and installation. As a second-generation Chinese-Cambodian Australian, her practice is informed by cultural contradictions experienced as a child of migrants, living amidst late-state capitalism. Jazmine’s processes aim to foster a reciprocity between our bodies and what European dominant worldviews call the external world. Through her existing relationships, places and excess within the twenty-first century, she seeks to develop a process for making that is in relation with the world. She values investigative, curious and question-inducing approaches. Her process id informed by the ethical implications of colonial constructs.  

She has recently undertaken a residency at the Mongolian International University in Ulaanbaatar (2024), was commissioned by the Adelaide Film Festival to develop a moving image for their Reflective Screen project (2024) and been commissioned by fineprint magazine for their online presentation PAUSE~PLAY (2023). Jazmine has exhibited across Adelaide at The Little Machine, FELTspace, Nexus Arts and The Kerry Packer Civic Centre and was the inaugural performer-in-residence for MUD: HUMUS.

Christea Zhao Nian is a Chinese emerging artist who now lives and works in Melbourne, on the land of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation. Coming from a background in filmmaking and critical writing, Zhao has written, directed and screened several short films and documentaries, and worked as a digital editor for international art magazine LEAP based in Shanghai. Since emigrating to Australia, her practice has expanded into performance, video and text-based work. She has exhibited and screened her works at Kings ARI, The Capitol and Hopkins Creek Festival. She is currently finishing her Masters of Fine Art at RMIT.

Zhao’s practice centres around the themes of loss and melancholia through live performance, video installation and text-based work. Language, spoken narrative and shared-listening is crucial in her works. She unearths narratives from her personal history, collective memory to investigate various forms of loss both material and conceptual. Zhao is interested in integrating live performance with performance-oriented video and sound in order to perpetuate the disappearing body. In this way, she seeks to evoke the prolonged psychic existence of the lost object during the psychological state of melancholia. The possibility/impossibility of mourning and comprehension frequently lies beneath her practice.

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