Joy is a way to take ownership of the way you exist in the world.

For artist and illustrator Steffie Yee, joy and play were creative choices from a very young age.

“I think I heard someone say that joy and play are a form of resistance, which I think is really cool. And as a kid, you obviously don’t know that, but it’s a way that you take ownership of the way you exist in the world,” she says.

Yee, who spent many years gathering stories and images of her family’s history in the town of Branxton, NSW where her parents successfully ran a Chinese restaurant, has recently opened her solo exhibition Chinese Restaurant Playground on home ground at the Maitland Regional Art Gallery.

Growing up as a Malaysian-Chinese kid in a regional town in Australia has been formative towards the shaping of Yee’s creative practice. As one of the few Malaysian-Chinese families in Branxton in the 1980s, Yee and her siblings devised creative ways of finding belonging and meaning in a town where there were very few like them.

“So despite the fact that sometimes we’d encounter racist people, or we felt othered, we really just did our own thing and made sure we had fun. We were creative, and we created our own joy in our own environment,” adds Yee.

Snapshots of this are on display through her works in the exhibition which features archival photos and videos, animation, illustration, and sculptural installations: a floating menu designed on the original menu from her parents’ restaurant, and a wok with a stir-fry preparation mid-air.

From rollerblading on the restaurant floor to playing bowling in the foyer, the archival videos in the exhibition share an insight into the life of a Malaysian-Chinese family that is often missing from narratives of regional Australia.

“We had a really big backyard, and my dad bought us a little motorbike. So, we’d just ride that through the backyard and my dad would ride it as well.”

“Even the way that my parents documented everything about our lives was their way of preserving that joy essentially,” she adds.

Senior Curator Kim Blunt shares that the works in the exhibition recreate the atmosphere of the restaurant within the gallery.

“It’s actually adjacent to the cafe. So, everybody sitting in the cafe is going to be having a front row view of the exhibition and the story that Steffie is telling,” says Blunt.

The exhibition tells a story both of resilience and joy, but not necessarily grave or sobering and one which humanizes the family behind the local Chinese restaurant. Yee believes that when people think about people of colour, they automatically picture stories of a serious nature, or only around racism, instead of silliness or fun.

“And that’s kind of why I decided to lean into the side of play and joy and innocence, because those are very real things.”

“In the context of how I grew up, and the way my siblings and I played, and how my parents encouraged us to be creative, I think that was a buffer for any otherness that we felt growing up in a small town,” adds Yee.

It’s been a labour of love that has seen Yee collect stories not just of her own family, but also local oral histories that celebrate the lived experiences of Chinese-Australian families in regional NSW.

“Over the last decade we’ve heard a lot more stories from the Asian diaspora, and often these stories might be quite sad. And for me, presenting another lens of joy is actually just adding more dimension to the stories and the experiences that I feel I haven’t seen much of.”

“Also, a lot of the stories we hear about diaspora are from major cities. We rarely hear anything from regional Australia despite the fact that there’s a large diaspora living [there] too,” adds Yee.

An Australian story that’s not on the menu, but very much a part of it.

Chinese Restaurant Playground
Steffie Yee 余淑婷
Maitland Regional Art Gallery
Until 24 August