Art making is perhaps one of the best vehicles to carry forward cultural memory, through stories, rituals and traditions. But is cultural memory authentic? Can it be renewed and remade? Can it be a site of healing?

These are some of the questions seven NSW-based artists answer in their own ways by using storytelling as a device to explore personal identity and cultural memory as part of Within Heaven and Earth at Fairfield City Museum & Gallery.

Artworks by Agus Wijaya, Celine Cheung, Jess Bradford, Kean Onn See, Linda Sok, Tianli Zu and Vipoo Srivilasa look at renewal and healing through spirituality and rituals based on familial, cultural and communal traditions.

One of the artists in the show, Linda Sok, complicates the idea of authenticity.

Sok, who presents two works in the show—White elephants, gajasimhas and buildings, a woven silk piece called a Pidan (a Buddhist ceremonial weaving used in Cambodian ceremonies), and a performance-based installation, Ritual for Return—uses concepts of playfulness in her work, challenging what’s authentic or verifiable through her recreated, then undone and then rewoven silk weavings.

White elephants, gajasimhas and buildings was inspired by museum registration cards that verify the existence of lost weavings in the collection of the National Museum in Cambodia. Sok got Cambodian university students to interpret and draw from the museum registration cards, and these drawings then became the basis of symbols she used to weave into the Pidan, which ‘originally’ would have religious iconography on it.

“There was a lot of playfulness,” she says. “The university kids drew a flying object, and little bears and mosquitoes and just different things that aren’t necessarily described in the text of the card. And I think this playfulness is very exciting. I really enjoyed that idea of undermining this idea of authority, or truth that’s been archived and kept in the vault.

“I’m thinking a lot about how contemporary generations can dig into archives and things that have been lost in the past and find a new way to have some sort of attachment or connection with them.”

Finding access points for future generations to continue cultural traditions and rituals by blending the traditional with the contemporary through playfulness is also something artist Tianli Zu explores in her work My Secret Golden Flower, which features her distinctive paper cutting work on watercolour paper, hand cut on six pinewood panels, in deep blue and gold with a digital animation that floats above the work in a kind of a celestial space.

The work, which takes its title from a Chinese Taoist book on inner alchemy meditation, Buddhist teachings and Confucian thoughts, is a tribute, a ritual ceremony for her departed grandmother. The cutting done as a continuous act on one piece of paper has numerous skulls, a cross section of a brain, spilling blood, a baby being born, big eucalypt trees among other symbols she has created to tell this story.

“Rather than to make it quite sort of sad, I made it playful. I want people to celebrate and hope it will make people laugh,” she says. To her, this is freeing and allows for the spirit to become free and accepting.

Her medium allows for both destruction and creation, in a way. Despite its perceived fragile nature, paper is a strong medium for Zu. “When I’m cutting through the surface, I experience a sense of killing, and simultaneously I give birth,” she says. “For me, cutting through paper is not merely an act of creation, but it’s a most intimate transfusion and interpretation which prepares for new birth.”

But none of this is made in isolation. Collaboration appears to be a central echo through all the works in the show. An underpinning sentiment of the show is how cultural memory is safeguarded, renewed and remade through the act of collaboration, through witnessing and response.

This sentiment is carried forward through an invitation to musicians and writers to respond to the works by the seven artists which resulted in very intimate and expansive contributions by musicians Andrew Zhou, Heart Armour, Maggie Tra and writers Carielyn Tunion, Annabella Luu, Winnie Dunn & Natalia Figueroa Barroso, and Tian Zhang, that also feature as part of the show through a printed publication.

As Sok wisely proclaims, “I think this idea of cultural tradition being so far in the past is something that I want to displace and disbalance through the process of weaving, because the act of weaving itself is constructive, and you have to be so present in order to do that act.

“I see that analogous to the idea of the continuation of culture and continuation of people building that culture and that’s why the collaborative element works well.”

Within Heaven and Earth
Fairfield City Gallery & Museum
On now— 28 June