“I take risks because there is nothing to lose. Writers who are too precious about their public image will only decline into a reproduction of themselves.”
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‘Positionality is crucial. You cannot ignore who you are, where you are situated and come from, and what you bring to the table in the cultural and creative sector.’
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‘When I land on the right words to describe what I want to understand and/or convey, it is like a burst of colour, an incredible “a-ha” moment and feeling of peaceful validation, because when the words exist, our experiences seem all the more real.’
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‘Finding solidarity in political purpose with fellow Asian Australians is a constant gift.’
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“Whinging and crying that you can make the same dish at home for $6 and that paying $28 is expensive is so misguided, and prevents any sort of progress in hospitality. If the industry could offer better wages, we could hire more staff, and people wouldn’t have to work 60+ hour weeks at minimum wage.”
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‘My advice is to keep your heart open, but find that balance to not spread yourself thin, so that you don’t burn out.’
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‘Labour is definitely an important part of my work, and the process of refining something, making something from raw, or from “nothing”.’
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‘I made most of my friends online. It means a lot to me to have an online space to be yourself, chill out with people, muck around and make jokes. There’s been lots of attempts to make professional versions of those spaces in the past year, but I find them boring.’
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‘I make the work I do in order to combat needless disenchantments. So much of history shows how the things we’re capable of now could be considered as myth becoming realised. That’s just as powerful now, no? Let’s re-enchant the world!’
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‘That's the essence of de-centring whiteness in our narratives, it’s about moving away from whiteness as being the ‘norm’ and transferring power to our communities through platforming and amplifying our stories and narratives.’
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‘Poetry is history, it is contemporary politics, it is religion, and it is popular culture. To me, poetry has always been the people’s literature.’
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‘But essentially space is also land. I think that’s where I contest this differentiation between ‘IRL and URL’ digital and physical space. They aren’t separate. There’s no third space that we occupy online.'
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‘I love working with materials that have had a life—that have memories and histories that I can intervene in or alter.’
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‘For so long, art criticism has been seen as this hermetically sealed bubble, propped up by old white men and their faux-universal perspectives and I love— and feel encouraged by—people thinking and writing about art as if it’s something with real stakes.’
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‘In this community of just you and me, you have helped me heal in many ways.’
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‘This is a question I am constantly asking myself. Why poetry? Why writing at all?’
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‘We put a lot of pressure on ourselves as artists of colour, to have concept-driven and culturally sensitive work—but you know, sometimes I just want to take beautiful photos that aren’t conceptually dense, that are simply nice to look at.’
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‘We lose nothing, and gain everything, by ensuring voices of minority groups are represented in food media.’
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‘When I visit schools to give talks, it means I get to show students that this is what an author looks like— I’d never had an Asian-Australian writer visit when I was in school, so on a personal level I understand the significance and privilege of the position.’
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‘Being Asian-Australian is an understanding that there is no centre and no periphery, only several crisscrossing flows.’
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