Surrealism, Counter-Mapping and COVID: Confluences in Contemporary Asian Australian Art

Abstract

Abstract: COVID-19 originating in China was all it took to destabilize Australia's claim to a proud, multicultural society, and with it, the sense of place and belonging felt by much of the Asian Australian community. Living and working in Melbourne, the most locked-down city in the world during the COVID period, the Asian Australian multimedia and performance artists Eugenia Lim and James Nguyen witnessed firsthand the resurgence of sinophobia, which exposed the ongoing resilience of the government's former White Australia Policy in the national imagination. Working approximately one hundred years after André Breton's Dada excursion (1921), and the surrealist survey on "Irrational Embellishments" of Parisian monuments (1933), Lim and Nguyen's counter-mapping practices echo these reorientations of site that seek to dismantle ideological codifications of space and reestablish them as imaginative and inclusive. As a strategy of spatial contestation and world building, Lim and Nguyen counter-map several historical and culturally significant sites across Australia, offering a decolonial inflexion of the more iconoclastic gestures of their European progenitors. Refracted through the lens of COVID, these Asian-Australian interventions bring the underlying cultural and racial tensions in Australian society into sharp relief. Their work resists reductive narratives of nationhood and renders the Australian landscape permeable to an interplay of hybrid stories and identities.