Talking about what drives his practice as an artist, Phuong Ngo says: "To put it in simple terms, it's that question that every single person who isn't part of the mainstream Australian community gets asked: 'Where are you from?'

"What it really means is, you don't look like you belong here. And if you are constantly asked where you are from, and the answers that you give aren't satisfactory, then you have to question 'Do I really belong here? Am I encroaching on someone else's space?'

"And you then start interrogating who you are and where you have come from — literally, metaphorically, personally, emotionally."

Ngo is one of eight artists in this year's edition of Primavera, the Museum of Contemporary Art's annual showcase of young Australian artists, all of whom explore issues of identity in their work.

His statement resonates with the comments of many other artists in that exhibition, for whom an interest in issues of identity seems like an inevitable offshoot of living in a predominantly white, heteronormative society.

In an age in which identity politics is such a major force and subject of debate — including within the art world — these eight artists are particularly worth keeping an eye on.

Hoda Afshar

Born 1983, Tehran, Iran. Lives and works in Melbourne, VIC.

Hoda Afshar. ( ABC Arts: Teresa Tan )

Hoda Afshar trained as a photographer in Tehran, and began her career working as a documentary photographer there.

Her art practice often explores the nature and possibilities of this particular genre.

In making her most recent work Remain, however, she was thinking about the ways in which the documentary approach had failed when it came to conveying the experience of the refugees on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea.

She sought instead to find "a new visual language that can impact people about this issue".

"We've become absolutely immune to images of suffering — whether it's war or the refugee crisis," says Afshar.

Remain, a two-channel video work, was made in collaboration with several men still held on Manus — including Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani.

It juxtaposes visually ravishing images of the tropical island (an island adjacent to Manus, in fact) — featuring tropical fish, verdant jungle and azure ocean — with portraits and tableaux featuring the men, overlaid by spoken poetry (by Boochani and by Iranian poet Bijan Elahi).

The effect is haunting, unsettling, beguiling.

Behrouz Boochani in a still from Remain, 2018 ( Supplied: Hoda Afshar )

Remain is profoundly effective in underlining the humanity of its subjects, by providing a platform for them to present a story of themselves that they have co-authored.

It's a product of a method that Afshar calls "staged documentary", which she has been developing in recent years: "Working with real people in real spaces, allowing them to re-enact their narratives with their own bodies and giving them autonomy to narrate their own stories."

Westoxicated #5 from the 2014 series Under Western Eyes. ( Supplied: Hoda Afshar )

Afshar divides her practice into pre- and post-migration phases, but says an interest in social categories and marginalised communities has been a throughline.

"The society that I grew up in was very much divided into those social categories and hierarchies, and I wanted to understand why they existed and how they functioned.

"I used the camera as a way to look closely at these lines that divide."

After migration, she found herself pushed to the margins: "Now I was the one that previously I was looking at.

"And there was this image of the Iranian female migrant that existed in the mind of the society that did not belong to me — was imposed on me. Everyone felt they knew my narrative."

These days, Afshar's practice is driven by a desire to find a visual language that can "dismantle" the stereotypes and misconceptions around marginalised communities.

"A lot of our suffering and pain, as 'others', has been created and perpetuated by images — and in the last couple of centuries, photography.

"If images have the power to shape our perceptions, then they have the power to dismantle them too."

Ryan Presley

Born 1987, Alice Springs, NT. Lives and works in Brisbane, QLD. Marri Ngarr people.

Ryan Presley. ( ABC Arts: Teresa Tan )

Talking to artist Ryan Presley, what strikes one most is his interest in why the world got the way it did. A conversation might take you down the rabbit hole from Australian currency to colonisation, then further back to the medieval Crusades, the history of bartering, and the birth of the modern banking system.

Blood Money–Infinite Dollar Note–Dundalli Commemorative, 2017 ( Supplied: Ryan Presley/Carl Warner )

For Primavera, he is showing large watercolour paintings of bank notes, from a long-running series called Blood Money that explores the connection between Australian currency and our British colonial history.

Presley's beautifully rendered versions of alternative Australian currency feature Indigenous leaders — including the resistance fighter Pemulwuy, activist Vincent Lingiari, and poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal.

Presley dates a preoccupation with money, and the systems of control, back to childhood.

"Most of my childhood I lived in public housing, the very lowest rungs of the working class, and for most of my childhood my mum was a single parent, working all the time, trying to get money, making our way through that limited access to activities, and things like diet.

"Understanding why I'm in this position that I'm in personally, and how that came about [was interesting]."

These days he balances academia (in 2016 he completed his PhD in the connection between colonisation and conversion-based religion) and a peripatetic art practice that ranges from printmaking and painting to wood and metal work.

Caroline Garcia

Born 1988, Sydney, NSW. Lives and works in Sydney, NSW.

Caroline Garcia. ( ABC Arts: Teresa Tan )

Caroline Garcia describes her 2014 video montage Primitive Nostalgia as "like a Where's Wally". "Because I'm in every single clip — sometimes you don't notice and sometimes you do."

Using a green screen, Garcia inserted herself into scenes from Hollywood classics that portray cultural dance — including the "African" dance scene from Coming to America and the Hula scene from Gidget Goes Hawaiian.

Cut together as a montage, these scenes form a testament to the casual cultural appropriation of Hollywood cinema, and call attention to the problematic representation of cultural groups that many of us have grown up seeing on our TV screens.

This includes Garcia: "I was always watching telly," she says of her childhood.

But the third-generation Filipina didn't see herself on the screen.

Later in life, she combined her training in dance and photography, her love of music and her nostalgic affection for the screen into an art practice that includes (and often marries) video art and performance.

"All of this [work] stems from looking at representation — and lack of representation for me — as a woman of colour, growing up in Australia."

Imperial Reminiscence, 2018 ( Supplied: Caroline Garcia )

Primitive Nostalgia appears in the Primavera exhibition alongside Garcia's new work Imperial Reminiscence, a cinema montage that explores "whitewashing" in mainstream cinema (the practice where a white actor plays a person of another ethnicity).

Whereas the former explores problematic representation, the new one explores the absence of representation.

Instead of putting herself amongst the dancers, Garcia inserted herself over the white body playing the "exotic other".

The tone of the films is overtly playful, but Garcia says that making the work was at times confronting: "My discomfort comes through sometimes, but a lot of it was behind the scenes — where I was like 'Urgh, It's killing me to re-perform these [sequences], to wear the outfits'."



Andrew Tenison

Born 1984, Albury, NSW. Lives and works in Canberra, ACT.

Andrew Tenison. ( ABC Arts: Teresa Tan )

Andrew Tenison describes himself as a "maker of photographs" rather than a taker of them.

This is partly because he hand-prints his photographs in the darkroom, but also because he often builds sets within which to stage and photograph scenarios (he also hand-makes Coptic-bound books and guitars, as sidelines to his art practice).

In Primavera, he is presenting the photo series Let Me Imagine You, inspired by a single vintage negative that he found in a thrift store in Berlin in 2014.

It was a portrait of a Nazi air-force (or Luftwaffe) private.

"I'm never going to know who this individual is unfortunately, because I only found a single negative … [and] I would have to have some more context."

Instead, Tenison created an "imagined narrative" — even giving this private a name: Otto Hoffman.

Let Me Imagine You (Untitled 4), 2017 ( Supplied: Andrew Tenison )

"I'm always interested in people's biographies," Tenison says of his practice. "It's been a part of my work from the beginning."

In a 2010 series, Calenture, he made photographs inspired by the life and work of English-born Illawarra-based painter Joan Meats. In one of these photographs, Memory of the War, he depicts a man in uniform, his head bandaged; it was inspired by Meats' brother, a Spitfire pilot who was killed during a training exercise in 1944.

With the German negative, he adopted a similar process of research — albeit more generalised. He found himself focusing his research on Germans who came to Australia after WWII who had served in the Luftwaffe.

Many of these were processed through Bonegilla, a migrant reception centre in north-east Victoria. (Tenison, who lived nearby, says he grew up hearings stories about the centre.)

Consequently, Tenison chose to shoot some of his photos at Bonegilla.

But for the artist, the specific context is not the point: "This is not a work about Nazi Germany," he says.

Instead, he uses the single negative as a leaping-off point for a work that demonstrates the fragmentary, subjective construction of identity; the images are as significant for their framing (what is outside the shot, for example, and what is prominent) as their content.

And how the viewer interprets the images, and makes their own narrative, is part of the point Tenison is making.

Reflecting on the ethical implications of imagining a real person's life for an artwork, Tenison says: "One thing I've thought about a lot is the use of photography.

"[As a photographer] what is your responsibility [in a context where] images are so ubiquitous, and we consume them so quickly?"

Hayley Millar-Baker

Born 1990, Melbourne, VIC. Lives and works in Melbourne, VIC. Gunditjmara people.

Hayley Millar-Baker. ( ABC Arts: Teresa Tan )

There's an uncanny quality to Hayley Millar-Baker's photomedia works. At first glance, you're seeing a scene — a dead whale on a beach; a river with sacks of flour on its bank — but as you look closer, you realise this is not a straight representation. It's not even a single image.

Millar-Baker says that one of the images in Primavera is comprised of around 300 different layers.

Untitled (The Best Means, of Caring for, and Dealing with Them in the Future), 2018 ( Supplied: Hayley Millar-Baker )

Millar-Baker trained as a painter (at Melbourne's RMIT), and found her way to photomedia via watercolours of nudes, oil paintings of carcasses and black-and-whites of churches — all the while moving towards black on the colour spectrum, and her brushwork increasingly textural.

"I had so much to say, but I didn't know how to say it," she recalls.

She was making textural 'pure black' paintings when she inherited her late grandfather's photographic slides. He'd been in the air force, and then retrained as a photographer; some of the slides were staged scenarios he'd created on spec for advertisements (a Cornflakes ad, for example), featuring his daughters.

Millar-Baker started to splice cultural signifiers into these images: a feather from her totem, the yellow-tailed black cockatoo; an eel trap.

From these beginnings, a sophisticated practice blossomed.

Across the four photomedia works in A Series of Unwarranted Events (2018), Millar-Baker explores the impact of colonisation on the Gunditjmara people of south-western Victoria.

Each scene is painstakingly stitched together from hundreds of elements from photographs taken by Millar-Baker where she grew up or on Gunditjmara country.

"I don't like using the actual places — because these are all massacre stories, and I don't want to point out where exactly they are. It's super sensitive," the artist explains.

Phuong Ngo

Born 1983, Adelaide, SA. Lives and works in Melbourne, VIC.

Ngo says that the red tassels in Colony (pictured) reference the strong vein of Chinese cultural heritage in present-day Vietnamese identity. ( ABC Arts: Teresa Tan )

Phuong Ngo's interest in his personal history has turned into a much broader — and deeper — interest in the Vietnamese diaspora and the history of colonisation in French Indochina (and stretching further back, the period of Chinese colonisation).

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It started with his family: his parents were refugees from Vietnam, and his father spent several years as a "people smuggler" (a loaded term that Ngo uses deliberately, in order to interrogate it) helping fellow refugees escape Vietnam via boat.

One of the first bodies of work Ngo made explored his childhood home: a former Housing Trust property that his parents bought, that he remembers as "literally falling apart — but somehow that house was representative of who I was and why I was interested in what I was interested in".

He says his practice, at its heart, is "pretty much trying to figure out why certain things exist".

One of the products of this is his Vietnam Archive Project (2010, ongoing) which currently sits at around 20,000 items — mostly slides and photos taken in Vietnam that Ngo buys in bulk mostly from deceased estates. These images are shot from what Ngo describes as the "very white lens of US military personnel, but also French colonial [perspectives]".

Installation view of Colony (left) and The Vietnam Archive Project. ( Supplied: MCA/Jessica Maurer )

For Primavera, he presents selections from the Vietnam Archive Project but also photographs and objects from his family (including a marble table that his mother's family sold to his father's family in desperate times, before they met and married).

Jason Phu

Born 1989, Sydney, NSW. Lives and works in Sydney, NSW.

Jason Phu. ( ABC Arts: Teresa Tan )

"As a Chinese Australian you grow up knowing that you are two halves — rather than one whole," says Jason Phu.

"But then you realise — or I did — that being 'Chinese-Australian' is one thing, rather than being half Chinese and half Australian … it's a unique thing."

Phu credits this experience for his tendency to "riff on the idea of authenticity" in his art.

In his cheeky ink paintings (with which he has twice been an Archibald Prize finalist) he hitches the aesthetic of Chinese scrolls to humorous side notes and cartoonish figures.

Phu was a finalist for the 2014 Archibald Prize with his painting Evan on a Sunday morning. ( Supplied: Jason Phu )

Elsewhere, he hijacks historical incidents and narratives in order to explore similar issues in a contemporary context.

For example, in the 2018 exhibition The Burrangong Affray, he reimagined the infamous 19th-century Roll Up Banner, used as a rally point in the anti-Chinese Lambing Flat Riots, as a personal response to the racism he experienced as a child.

In recent years, he has used the true story of Chinese-Australian bushranger Sam Poo as a "vessel to reveal the truth of history but also the reality of what being Chinese Australian, or Asian Australian, or an immigrant, is".

Installation view of The 5th Reincarnation of Sam Poo, Infamous Bushranger and the Mustard Horde: The Last Stand, 2018 ( Supplied: MCA/Jessica Maurer )

The photo series presented as part of Primavera (titled The 5th Reincarnation of Sam Poo, Infamous Bushranger and the Mustard Horde: The Last Stand) depicts a motley crew of figures from history, mythology and Phu's imagination, including Sam Poo, played by the artist himself; the Monkey King, played by artist Abdul Abdullah; and the granddaughter of 19th-century pirate queen Ching Shih, played by dancer Angela Goh.

"It's a big mish-mash of histories," says Phu.

The 5th Reincarnation of Sam Poo, Infamous Bushranger and the Mustard Horde: The Last Stand, 2018 ( Supplied: Jason Phu )

Spence Messih

Born 1989, Sydney, NSW. Lives and works in Sydney, NSW.

Spence Messih. ( Supplied: MCA/Jacquie Manning )

In their practice, Spence Messih explores one of the most publicly contested areas of identity at this moment: gender.

For Primavera, Messih presents three elegant, minimalist steel sculptures (Conjure, Re-Re-Re and Confect) and a poetic wall text titled Stars Above/Concrete Below.

"I was thinking about boundaries — systematic and bureaucratic boundaries or walls that people, specifically trans people, myself included, come into contact with," says Messih.

"And how a wall is just as much of a wall whether it's physical or invisible."

Installation view of Confect and Re-Re-Re, 2018 ( Supplied: MCA/Jessica Maurer )

The structures, sitting on the concrete gallery floor, are "porous" in a sense (you could stick an arm through the negative spaces in them, for example) but prohibitive (you can't walk straight through any of these works). They take up space. They are, to a certain extent, non-negotiable.

As abstract works, these sculptures are also representative of the complexity and porousness of identity, and the ways in which it defies the viewer's attempts to "know" it. (You can't recognise or interpret these steel forms with the same ease as you might recognise and understand a literal door, or gate, for example).

"With transness, there's a lot that people don't know based on the way that you look … I'm interested, in my work, in things not being totally available to be 'read'," says Messih.

"I was also thinking about this notion of visibility and representation … as not being an inherently productive force for the people being represented."

The artist points to the issue of on-screen representation as an example (think transwoman Laverne Cox playing transwoman Sophia Burset on Orange is the New Black).

"You know, everyone's like 'It's great that this person is in this show, it's great for diversity' — which it is — but it also comes at a cost; it's not inherently productive for everyone."

For Messih, for example, the risk of being included in a show such as Primavera 2018 might be that their work is construed as being exclusively about identity, or about gender — or viewed exclusively through that lens.

"I hope my work is not interesting just because I am trans; I hope it is interesting for other reasons."



Primavera 2018: Young Australian Artists runs until February 3 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

