Window Shopping in Brick City 2006
Window Project, The University of Auckland
courtesy of the artist, the Window Project
and Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland
photo: Stephen Cleland

DANIEL MALONE New Zealand with Kah Bee Chow and Long March Project
Lantern Festival - Albert Park, 2- 4 March 2007, ARTSPACE, The Gus Fisher Gallery, ST PAUL ST, radio transmissions and online

Take part in the No Chinatown survey

Download the No Chinatown architecture competition entry form

Described variously as a cultural ethnographer, scavenger, archivist and producer, artist Daniel Malone tends to defy categorisation. Working across mediums including painting, sculpture, video, performance, sound, ceramics and photography, Malone is adroit at creating situations, assemblages, and spaces, that play off and with preconceptions of familiar social and cultural identity. Conceptual concerns are consistently at the core of his practice however, as is evident in Malone’s fascination with navigating foreign terrain in an attempt to extrapolate relevant historical and social connections with specific sites, thus revealing or at least humorously prodding dominate ideologies and didactics.

No Chinatown

For the 2007 Auckland Triennial, the Long March – Chinatown will be brought to Auckland in a collaborative project with artists Kah Bee Chow and Daniel Malone entitled No Chinatown. The project takes a public minded approach by utilising public spaces not just as exhibitions sites, but also involving the contributions of many other individuals, communities and collectives as a vital part of the work. The metaphor of ‘Chinatown’ will be used to engage with the Triennial’s curatorial theme of turbulence, and the subsequent dynamics of immigration, tourism and cultural diaspora raised in the process of globalisation. Within this framework Chinatown serves not as an illustration of identity politics or post colonial discourse, but rather, as a metaphorical site to explore general notions of performed and constructed identity, as well as focusing on the local context of Auckland, a city, which has been deemed a ‘high-immigration’ city.

No Chinatown will engage with the ambivalent social atmosphere, at times ambiguously, at times provocatively, around the relationship between Auckland and its Chinatown(s). Should Auckland have a Chinatown? Does Auckland in fact already have Chinatown(s)? What indeed constitutes a Chinatown or any (self) determined cultural identification with place? No Chinatown will raise these questions and the discursive space for any number of simultaneous answers, sometimes contradictory, acting as a catalyst to precipitate the emotional state of Auckland; at times lamenting a lack, or proposing an action, at others giving voice to confusion or resisting over-determination. It will engage in the Triennial’s broad discourse around multiculturalism, as well as the unique context of Aotearoa New Zealand’s bicultural geo-politic and the notion of Maori as Tangata Whenua (people of the land).

- Long March Project, Kah Bee Chow and Daniel Malone

Background

Born in Greymouth, New Zealand in 1970, Daniel Malone is currently based in Auckland. His early work was surveyed in the retrospective malone@artspace, ARTSPACE, Auckland, 2003. Other solo exhibitions include Take Me To Your Dealer, Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland, 2004; Still Life With Still Life, Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland, 2006; and Window Shopping in Brick City, WINDOW On Site, University of Auckland, 2006. Malone’s work featured in On Reason and Emotion: Biennale of Sydney, 2004; Telecom Prospect 2004, New Zealand Film Archive, Wellington; World Famous in New Zealand, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, 2005; Local Transit, Artists Space, New York, 2006; High Tide – New Currents in Contemporary Art from Australia and New Zealand, Contemporary Art Center Vilnius, 2006; don’t misbehave!: SCAPE 2006 Biennial of Art in Public Space, Christchurch Art Gallery; belief: Singapore Biennale, 2006; and TRANS VERSA, The South Project, Galería Metropolitana, Santiago de Chile, 2006. Active also as a performance artist, Malone has recently presented works as part of Mostly Harmless, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, 2006 and 5 4 3 2 1: Auckland Artist Projects, Auckland Art Gallery, 2006. For further reading see Jon Bywater, Da Nile is not a river in Africa, 2000 or Kate Montgommery’s essay in the don’t misbehave! catalogue.