Creator Spotlight: Monica Trieu
EMERGING ARTIST & TATTOO ARTIST
Tell us about yourself and your practice as an Asian Australian Creator
Hi. I’m Monica (she/her), an Australian-born emerging artist of Teochew-Vietnamese descent, residing and practicing on unceded Darug and Gadigal land. My practice engages with ethnic concepts and language structures, to break down connections between westernised upbringings and losses of cultural ties. I’m interested in storytelling and memorialising migrant narratives of childhood, and in capturing stories of the community in the West. My practice materialises dominantly in the forms of drawing, printmaking, installation, and sculpture, and in a career in tattooing.
What work have you chosen and what’s the significance/story behind it?
One of the most significant works I’ve had the chance to produce is ‘when will we next see this warm place’, an interactive website made in collaboration with my sister, Lilian. It was published as part of Framework Issue 33: Tethered, my university’s critical arts and literary journal, and the amount of time we had to finish the site versus how ambitious the idea was, was very tight, so I never would’ve had the ability to do it by myself (even with more time tbh). So I really valued the collaborative aspect of the project, and working in collaboration with others is not something I find myself doing a lot so for this project to have gone in that direction and the outcome having come to fruition as it did, I hold it dearly.
‘when will we next see this warm place’ offers glimpses into shared personal memories found between two sisters of their home in western Sydney. The piece materialises in the form of a premature interactive website, constructed collaboratively by the two. The background, animations, game character and supporting text, references to the popular arcade game, Midnight Maxitune, and to lad youth subculture from the south-west. The work is informed by conversations on language as sources of identity, and how memories of upbringing in a place forms an unbreakable tether. They lay bare the feelings that arise when these connections are threatened, and ruminate on the future of a familiar home, which lays unclear in the wake of gentrification.
What excites you most about being an Asian Australian creator?
As an Asian Australian artist, it excites me to be part of a community of POC artists and creators who are making work that is significant and vulnerable. From friends and other creators that I respect and look up to, I experience works that are truly beautiful and healing in what they are. It excites and inspires me to be a part of this community that has important things to say and to teach about heritage, history, identity etc.