Interview #122 — Gok-Lim Finch
by Stephanie Lai
Gok-Lim Finch is a community artist and writer who lives and works on the unceded lands of the Whadjuk Noongar people.
They have a migrant settler background with English, Cantonese and Hokkien heritage, and an ancestral connection to Christmas Island.
Stephanie Lai interviewed Gok-Lim at Perth City Library, on Whadjuk Nyoongar Boodja, about being a settler migrant, colonialism, and intent.
What does it mean to you to be practicing art as a settler Asian-Australian on Nyoongar country?
I think of being in right relations to Aboriginal people. Professor and Noongar Elder Len Collard’s research into Noongar place names, which was the basis for a project with Community Arts Network and the City of Albany that resulted in a documentary filmed by young Aboriginal people called “Noongar Boodjar” (Noongar land). And it’s work like this that Aboriginal people are doing for all communities living here, to put them in right relations.
We’re on now Whadjuk Noongar Boodja, which I think stretches out to the Darling Ranges and down South past the Swan, I think almost to Mandurah. I’m not an expert and I would caution against learning Aboriginal cultural information that is inappropriate for wadjelas (non-Aboriginals) to know, but it’s important for me to listen, and this is what I’ve heard from a Welcome to Country performed by Dr Richard Walley.
This year I was a Creative Research Fellow at the State Library of WA with Gabby Loo, exploring the stories of Asian migration into WA. My research into Christmas Island delved into stories of my Gung Gung and my Ah Gung, who were indentured labourers on the phosphate mine. They both died of tuberculosis. They were brought into, or swallowed by, Empire through a process of the British crown wanting to extract phosphates from Christmas Island. When Singapore became self-governing, Australia campaigned for access to the phosphate, despite it being much closer to Singapore’s border. Perhaps access to this phosphate was more central for Australia because of our reliance on the types of genocidal monocultures that make up the farmlands of Australia, and the ways in which that’s artificially created. Yet through all that history my existence here and now is predicated on resource extraction. I am someone with Cantonese and Hokkien ancestry, but I am part of the White Settler project.
The way we conceptualise it, Gabby and I, is that we are oppressed by colonialism/White supremacy but we also benefit from colonialism/Aboriginal displacement and oppression. That is the space we navigate, the space our recent ancestors were led into and that we profit from. And that’s partly choice, partly the only choices offered. But now we need to connect to self, to culture, to history in a different way. We can make a choice for true solidarity and friendship. We put these thoughts into the group exhibition that resulted from that research, Seasons, Histories, Hopes: Imagined Migrant Futures, the catalogue of which is available here.
As part of this, I think it’s important to build solidarity within the false nation state. Listening to and supporting Aboriginal and Indigenous people. Sharing resources and time with them, and doing the work in speaking to other people in your community about supporting and showing up for Aboriginal people. I’ve learned a lot from listening to and reading people such as Celeste Liddle, Nayuka Gorrie, Noongar elder Kim Scott, Ellen Van Neervan, Murrawah Mooroochy, Uncle Noel Nannup, Uncle Ben Cuimermara Taylor, Auntiy Doolan Leisha Eatts, Esther McDowell/Yabini Kickett and Claire Coleman. But I’ve also learned from from POC that work in activist spaces, such as Roj Amedi, who shared this Paying the Rent document a few years ago.
I don’t think art is the way I want to do this work still. I’m unhappy with how contemporary art and literature is framed and contained. As an artist, your actions are often reduced to statements when we all know that they are ongoing conversations. They are how we practice meaningful living, with people and community. I am suspicious of some of these structures of art, like the novel, like “contemporary” art, and how they stem from colonial knowledge practices. Aesthetic theory and artistic appreciation has origins in Kant, who kept lists of which race was the best. Kant and his followers destroyed records and texts written by anyone who was not part of his culture, gender, and heritage. This is something Gabby Loo and I came across when researching for the workshop Epistemicide in the Western Art Canon for the Disrupted Festival of Ideas.
Epistemicide is the colonial act of killing knowledges, like how white settlers seperate people from languages and forms of meaning-making as a way of controlling them and enacting genocide and erasure. I first came across this term while studying at the Centre for Cultural Partnerships and hearing Tania Cañas talk about Boadventura De Sousa Santos. This article from UNESCO about decolonisation of knowledge in higher education is also a good introduction.
If we want to be in right relation, if we want solidarity, we have to be in a truthful relation, where truth is not universal, but part of living with each other.
Is that collaborative intent why you’re really into zines?
I was into Lester Bangs as an alternative teen. So I was also into punk, and zines are a cultural production of punk subculture. The idea of being able to express what you need with very little was very appealing. What I really loved about punk is the impulse to connect and create with people and community on that non-hierarchical level where no-one’s the expert; everybody shares knowledge. That’s what is still appealing to me about art and zines. It’s also why I love fanfiction.
My research into Christmas Island delved into stories of my Gung Gung and my Ah Gung, who were indentured labourers on the phosphate mine…
They were brought into, or swallowed by, Empire through a process of the British crown wanting to extract phosphates from Christmas Island.
With Patches of Hope and Resistance, you curated the artists but not the pieces themselves. What is it that you look for when you’re curating?
Someone that shares heart. The idea with Patches of Hope and Resistance was to work with people that inspire us to move towards intercultural solidarity. Like you! It’s very much wanting to seek out how to make something good together, rather than necessarily wanting to acquire objects from people.
Instead of making a work or a piece, Ruby Doneo ran a workshop on self and community care. This was about dismantling the Western notion of therapy as individualised care separated from community, when how we actually live and care is with other people, with communities, with intimate relationships. I don’t really see myself as an individual; I want to see myself completely, as the relations that I have. There was this moment where Ruby was talking about the difference between a community of care and a community of justice which really transformative moment for me, understanding how a lot of the time, what we refer to as justice is actually motivated by a refusal of care.
What has working on Lotterywest Story Street meant for you?
In the ten or so years I’ve been organising art stuff in the public sphere, co-founding a literary and art journal, living in a nomadic structure off-grid, co-directing a zine festival, founding an eco-cult, curating a youth arts festival, running a gallery, this has been one of the most transformative. Not just because I moved towns for this. This seemed a dream job, to have support to run creative projects with a positive lasting effect on people.
But then I started to be disillusioned and exhausted by constant conversations about cultural diversity.
I am on a Diversity Working group for the arts facilitated by Zheela Vokes from CAN that aims to speak with arts and cultural organisations across the WA sector on making a culturally safer arts sector that is more representative of the diversity of people in WA. One of the conversations we’ve been having it that CaLD is the wrong term. It doesn’t really come from community, and it’s one that silos, alienates and objectifies. Gabby and I instead we refer to work done by Coloniality/modernity Working Group on Decolonial Aesthetics, where we use the term intercultural rather than multiculturalism.
It’s not necessarily the term, it’s that way of thinking culture and race. The logic of administration uses these terms to direct human lives, even under the auspices of wanting equality, is flawed. Administration is often a capitalist, colonial tool. The concept of diversity is not going to get us what we’re interested in, which is Aboriginal sovereignty, equal access, intercultural solidarity, and de-coloniality. Having diverse representation in leadership positions is going to be for naught if we don’t also change all the systems that rely on inequality to function. So the question really is how do we unpack these white settler notions and structures that make up the majority of our arts sector?
Working on this all as a Person of Colour has meant unpacking and confronting a lot of internalised racism, trauma, and dysphoria. I’ve grown, but I am also in real emotional pain now.
Do you think Story Street has changed your practice?
Yes. I’m clearer now about these issues, but unclear about my future. I’d rather write, research and educate myself and others, and make community, perhaps. It’s unknown.
I started to be disillusioned and exhausted by constant conversations about cultural diversity.
What would you like Asian Australian artists who aren’t from WA to know, based on what you’ve learnt coming from this specific area?
Staying humble and community focused, looking for independent spaces to express yourself, and not being afraid to make your own thing. Know that what you choose to do, who you choose to be, has an impact here, and so you need to be accountable.
When I was working in Albany /Kepjarling/Kinjaling, I realised that the size of the community, meant that everyone had to be thought of in each event. There’s a sense this exists for Perth too. Once you find someone and connect to them and they connect you to this place, it opens up your eyes to what is happening. The structure of the town, the structure of the arts allows for that to happen, and that can be magical thing, but there’s also a sense that that’s what created this old guard, this entrenched nepotism, as well.
Perth is dominated by mining culture and is haunted by a deep-seated racism. We can look out that window at St George’s Terrace and know that’s where apartheid was conceived of by AO Neville. And you’re going to Wadjemup/Rottnest Island later and that’s a deathly place, a former concentration camp for Aboriginal people. Mining companies fund the Perth Festival and the Fringe Festival, the same companies that directly dispossess Aboriginal people of their land, and that contribute greatly to the destruction of earth systems. So all of these deep seated power structures are still there, and wealth in the arts gets distributed through those systems.
Do you have any advice for emerging community artists?
Connect to organisations and communities. I’m on the board of Paper Mountain and Propel Youth Arts WA, and I work with Community Arts Network. They all have people who are there to help. And know that so many people have done the thing you’ve wanted to, and often they will help you. There is an organisation (like Liminal) that is supportive and there for you.
When you do community art, a question that is simple to ask but hard to answer is: how much actual power are you giving to community? If you’re just creating an artwork that people can interact with in a very particular way, that’s not community, that’s mining, that’s extraction of labour and expression. I always think of Sherry Arnstein’s ladder of citizenship participation - are you engaging in lateral dialogue or are you coercing people into your narrative?
Gabby Loo and I had a conversation with Dr Elfie Shiosaki, a Lecturer in Indigenous Rights, Policy and Governance at the School of Indigenous Studies at the University of Western Australia, while we were Fellows at the State Library. She wrote an article on letters of Noongar people in the archives (Hand on Heart). These were devastating letters that she returned to community through this research. The physical location of the repository with these letters was historically in a place that Aboriginal people were not allowed to walk to. The places where these archives are kept are still not very accessible to the community whose knowledges have been taken and are kept there. Instead you have a lot of White Settlers entering these spaces and using this information as resources and research to further their careers. This conversation was so illuminating in helping to connect the material effects of knowledge production and how they function in colonial knowledge institutions.
Who are you inspired by?
Dr Kim Tallbear. I recently re-listened to the episode of the All My Relations podcast, “Can a DNA Test Make me Native American?” We both know that using DNA to determine ancestry is harmful for a lot of people, and actually more about datamining and policing than accurate information about ancestry. Race and culture just don’t work that way.
So Kim talked about how for her, identity isn’t the right word, sexuality isn’t the right word, she refers to her sense of self as relational. It’s in relation to other people, her culture, her ancestors, and the people she’s with, and it’s place-based too.
That’s inspirational because having had so many conversations now about “diversity” whatever that is, and dealing with feelings of being mixed race, being a very specific part of the Cantonese and Hokkien diasporas where origin and authenticity can be harmful and dehumanising ways of thinking about myself and my place in the world now, that’s a healing quote for me, when she talks of how thinking self as relational crystalised her refusal to be preoccupied with her own identity.
What are you listening to?
How to Survive the End of the World with the Brown sisters. I am really keen to learn what to do to transition out of the collapse of capitalism, and from people with an understanding of legacies of colonialism on earth systems. I’ve also been listening to Rainbow Chan, Lizzo, Solange, FKA Twigs , Mitski, and Alicia Keys. Also, this Eve Tuck lecture called I Don’t Want to Haunt You But I Will.
When you do community art, a question that is simple to ask but hard to answer is: how much actual power are you giving to community?
What are you reading?
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee. A quote on drag from the essay entitled ‘Girl’:
This beauty I find when I put on drag, then: It is made up of these talismans of power, a balancing act of the self-hatreds of at least two cultures, an act I’ve engaged in my whole life, here on the fulcrum I make of my face.
I dressed up as a Deleuzional pot plant for a collaborative eighties office drag project with Gabby Loo, Patrick Bryce, Ruby Doneo and Colin Smith. People have plants in their homes and offices, but I always think of their isolated roots and dysphoric rhizomes. They are placed in a completely artificial context, and then have to provide authentic nature. For me, binary gender structure is a colonial tool. Male and female don’t really make much sense for how I understand myself. So I wanted to be this sexy pot plant to articulate my diasporic feels as hot desires, trying to be beautiful many things in my dysphoria.
How do you practice self-care?
I have a childhood background where I needed to ignore my own boundaries in order to placate and tend to the needs of others, and so hurting myself by overworking makes me feel I am being useful and good. I have been trying to change that this year, thinking about community care, letting myself be cared for, reaching out to people and working on my feelings of being a burden. Letting other people in.
What does being Asian-Australian mean to you?
This is something that I’m waiting to decide upon.
My dad was raised in an orphanage in England, and at six was asked if he wanted to move to Australia or Canada as part of White child migrant programs. When Christmas Island was made a territory of Australia, Christmas Islanders obtained access to Australian citizenship as part of this process. So that’s how they became Australian. Their citizenship hinged on processes by which the border came to them. So I’ve had a contentious relationship with the idea of being Australian. The more that we learn about how the enduring legacies of settler colonialism have treated Aboriginal people and People of Colour, the less sense that the concept of Australia makes. You have to forget reality to accept an Australian identity.
I do refer to myself and others as Asian, but definitely there’s this eyelid flicker for me where it’s like, that’s not quite right. That it’s perhaps a colonial way of carving things up. But it’s what we’ve inherited. It speaks to our experience. It builds solidarity, friendship and care for each other as Asians. Being Asian is a feeling that emerges when I am with chosen family, and when I am with friends who identify as Asian. Being Asian, and more specifically being Cantonese being Hokkien, that is something that is reawakened with relation.
For me, binary gender structure is a colonial tool.
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Interview by Stephanie Lai
Photographs by Leah Jing McIntosh