The Field, 2018

HD video

8.05 minutes

Image courtesy Town Hall Gallery, Boroondara. Photograph by Christian Capurro.

THE BURRANGONG AFFRAY
The Burrangong Affray, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, 29 June-12 August, 2018
The Lives of Celestials: John Young Zerunge, Town Hall Gallery, Hawthorn Arts Centre, Boroondara, 31 August - 20 October 2019

Created in response to his research of the Lambing Flat riots, this video work brings the events of the night of 30 June 1861 into the present, removing the complacency and apathy that the distance of history and cultural positioning can provide. In the film, Young has subverted the roles of oppressor and oppressed, swapping the historical Chinese miner with an archetypal white Australian woman with deep red hair and dense freckles. Her hair is tugged back and forth in an act mimicking the scalping of the Chinese miners in the riots. The reversal of identities between perpetrator and victim within this work is in order to infer a universal capacity (to violence, trauma, or benevolence), and to thereby make it more difficult for a viewer of the work to distance themselves from these histories on the basis of their own cultural background. The purposeful discomfort induced by this slippage reveals the significant role that cultural subjectivity plays in the retelling of histories.