Safety Zone, 2010

60 works, digital print on photographic paper and chalk on blackboard-painted archival cotton paper

320 x 1590 cm

In 2013, John Young was the recipient of the Australia Council Visual Arts Fellowship to research the History of Chinese Diaspora in Australia. The Fellowship supported a two-year program of funded research with a team of part-time researchers distributed across Australia’s major cities to engage their specific local archives, resources, and communities. Over 130 stories were unearthed through primary and secondary research, out of which Young has developed visual, interdisciplinary, collaborative projects and exhibitions that engage these narratives. The resultant History Projects are an amalgamation of historical imagery, investigative visual reports and contemporary artistic synthesis that evidence the long presence and rich contribution of the Chinese in Australia since the 1840s.

The History Projects stem from the artist’s ongoing interest in cross-cultural perspectives, aesthetics, actions, and ethics. Young is interested in historical instances in which a person reaches beyond or outside of their own cultural background in order to aid a stranger, because such moments represent instances of rupture, re-inscription, or displacement of the prevailing values of a culture or nation. These events also point to the rich and generative position of the diasporic or bi-cultural figure, who in living ‘between’ or across multiple cultures, is able to draw on the values and perspectives of each and thereby reinvent or renew the culture or nation in which they find themselves.