Stepping out of the bone-rattling cold of a winter afternoon and into the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, I attended the preview of A Soft Touch, an exhibition that honours the choice of softness as resistance against the atomisation of our colonial, neoliberal world.
Situated in the heart of Chinatown, the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art was established in 1997 by the Asian Australian Artists’ Association, celebrating and showcasing the works and perspectives of contemporary Asian-Australian artists.
Featuring the works of ten BIPOC artists, A Soft Touch is comprised entirely of textile works, each one providing a new dimension to countercultural compassion and care, ranging from the queerness of Andrew Chan’s It’s you, Miss 花 (Hua) to the Black sovereignty of Kait James’ Life’s Pretty Shitty Without a Treaty.
As the exhibition program states, “the artists of A Soft Touch invite audiences to recognise the importance of living in the world with softness at heart and what possibilities are granted by these expressions”.
Curator Sophia Cai noted that “part of the impetus for this exhibition was to declare very loudly the strength and beauty and power of textile practice, and to also recognise that those artistic forms can have a lot of agency and power when talking about some of these broader issues.” While not curating or writing, Cai is a sessional lecturer in the department of Critical and Theoretical Studies within the University of Melbourne’s Victorian College of Arts.
Soraya Abidin’s Guardians of Wellbeing is displayed in the gallery’s street level window, an interpretation of a headdress worn by a Bomoh, a Malay spiritual healer. Adorned with Peranakan beads, the reversible headdress allows the wearer to ‘switch’ between two avian appearances, symbolic of Abidin’s experience as a Malay-Australian navigating both white and Malay spaces. While the question and struggle of cultural belonging is a topic of frequent discussion within bicultural communities, Abidin’s contribution to the discourse in the form of Guardians of Wellbeing is as conceptually elegant as it is visually beautiful.
Photograhy by Alana Ramshaw.
The exhibition explores the process of religious deconstruction through Anney Bounpraseuth’s The Garden of Life and Living, a bright and rowdy tapestry depicting the Garden of Eden made of donated and salvaged fabrics. Featuring a biblically-accurate angel covered in eyes and a tree made of human arms, the piece is a powerful yet heartwarmingly kitsch celebration of Bounpraseuth’s ‘expulsion’ from the ‘paradise’ of her upbringing as a Jehovah’s Witness.
Photography by Alana Ramshaw.
Yasabelle Kerkow’s Our Inheritance, is a woven pandanus mat featuring weiqia, traditional Fijian women’s tattoo designs conveying the bearer’s heritage and place within their community. Through its interpretation of the sacred tradition of weiqia, the piece impresses upon audiences the importance of the preservation and continuance of culture and spirituality within diaspora families and communities. Our Inheritance was a finalist in the 2020 Churchie Emerging Art Prize.
Photography by Alana Ramshaw.
Haneen Mahmood Martin’s Agar-agar is a triptych of prints depicting embroidered turmeric-dyed cloth panels. The third print recounts a conversation between Martin and her mother:
Mama told me they ate agar2 and fruit – rations from the 1969 racial riots in KL City in lockdown
“Do you think about that every time we have it together?”
“Of course, sayang”
I lingered on Agar-agar a little longer than the rest of the works on display, lost in memories of my own Mama sharing with me the story of her own experience of the 1969 May 13th riots in Kuala Lumpur. A curious four-year-old at the time, she poked her head above the living room window of her family home to watch military tanks patrolling the street, armed forces enforcing the 24-hour curfew with a shoot-to-kill order. Agar-agar captures a moment of tender intimacy, underpinned by the enduring trauma of racial and political violence.
Photography by Alana Ramshaw.
Overall, Cai has curated a heartfelt nod to duality, honouring the strength required by the revolutionary practice of choosing softness amidst a hard world.
If there is one commonality shared by the works of A Soft Touch beyond the exhibition’s conceptual thesis, it’s that they are each visually and texturally warm and vibrant. Even if you’re not necessarily analytical in your enjoyment of art, A Soft Touch is more than a worthwhile viewing in so far as it is simply and precisely what it says on the tin.
A Soft Touch will be exhibited in the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art until August 13th, open every Tuesday to Friday, and Sunday.
