Jazmine Deng’s Artist Statement
This is an audio recording of an artist statement written by Jazmine Deng, for the Nexus Arts exhibition Hoa Huy, by Jazmine Deng.
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
Jazmine Deng is an early-career artist who lives on stolen Kaurna Land. Her processes and ephemeral work incorporate personal narratives, migrant identity and societal reflections in order to dissolve Eurocentric dominant worldviews.