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On display
Julie King Memorial Lecture 2026
Grace Gassin, 2019. Photo by Rachael Hockridge. Te Papa
Book Cover Between Dreams: Resistance and Representation in Asian Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2026).
Friends
Sunday 6 September, 2.30pm
Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū
Free, bookings recommended
Dr Grace Gassin is curator Asian New Zealand histories at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and editor of Between Dreams: Resistance and Representation in Asian Aotearoa. She observes in the book: “Dreaming is an active state. It is a time when we engage with our past and play with...our potential futures.” For this talk, she explores featured pieces from Te Papa’s collection, illuminating what each reveals about Aotearoa’s Asian communities and their relationship with history in the present.
Grace’s wide-ranging interests encompass the historical and contemporary experiences of Asian diaspora communities in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. Over the past decade, she has led or been involved in several major collaborative initiatives combining the diverse strengths and aims of curators, historical researchers, activists, and artists in various ways. These projects include: Chinese Languages in Aotearoa, the Asian Mental Health project, The Pandemic Chronicles, and the We Are Kiwi Hong Kongers protest collection.
Dr Grace Gassin (林素真) was raised in her mother’s Malaysian Chinese family and proudly identifies as a second-generation Chinese (Hokkien) New Zealander of mixed heritage. Grace’s overarching focus is on highlighting the diverse historical and contemporary experiences of New Zealand’s many Asian diaspora communities. Her wide-ranging interests also encompass the politics of inclusion and interpretation that frame our understandings of Asian diaspora histories, and transnational dimensions of Asian Australasian diaspora experiences.
Lecture presented by the Friends of the Art Gallery courtesy of the estate of the late Julie King. Art historian Julie King was senior lecturer in Art History at the University of Canterbury and an honorary life member and patron of the Friends.
The 2026 Julie King Memorial Lecture is presented in partnership with WORD Christchurch Festival.
Related reading: Friends
Notes
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Notes
Underworld 2 by Tony de Lautour
This article first appeared as 'Painting offers a multiverse of symbols' in The Press on 21 June 2017.
Notes
Walk the Beat
Volunteer guide Rod McKay talks about his life, being an art tourist, and guiding Gallery tours.
Notes
The Art Whisperer
Christchurch Art Gallery volunteer guide Bella Boyd talks about her love of guiding, her favourite works in the Gallery collection and interpreting art with poetry.
Commentary
Mediating Reality
In the late 1980s, a significant shift for photography in Aotearoa New Zealand was identified in two art publications. The essays and images in these books showed how artists were utilising new strategies, breaking away from the prevailing documentary photography tradition that was, and still is, widespread in Aotearoa. Six Women Photographers (1986) was edited by artists Merylyn Tweedie and Rhondda Bosworth for Photoforum; and Imposing Narratives: Beyond the Documentary in Recent New Zealand Photography (1989) was the catalogue for an exhibition curated by Gregory Burke for City Gallery Wellington. The artists included in both publications questioned in various ways the assumptions and rules of image making, manipulating the media and making a political move from the standpoint of taking a photograph, to making one. No longer was a photograph considered a truthful representation of reality. Instead, photography was seen as a product of, and a participant in, current social and cultural values.
Commentary
Do You See?
With the death of Julie King late in 2018, art and art history in Aotearoa New Zealand lost one of its great champions and major scholars. Julie was born in Yorkshire and grew up and was educated in Alnwick, Northumberland; she moved to Christchurch in 1975 to take up a role lecturing in the newly formed art history department at the University of Canterbury. She retired three decades later, having pioneered the teaching of New Zealand art in Canterbury.
Collection
Julia Morison Dulia
In the early 1990s, Julia Morison used gold and shit in many works, exploring the idealised and base elements of human experience. She drew on the Jewish Sefiroth as a model for thinking about the relationship between the physical and the metaphysical. “Personally, I need to put some kind of order on experience for sake of sanity and negotiation,” she said. “The Sefirothic structure, or Tree of Knowledge, is really a metaphorical file and folder system for all; a conceptual paradigm for understanding everything. Putting that at the core of my practice gives me the freedom to admit everything and anything, micro and macro, metaphysical and corporeal, as legitimate content. It also gives me an interface to compose works.”
The title of this work, Dulia, is a Catholic term for worship given to saints and angels. Here Morison has pressed gold and excrement on to handmade paper balls, which are threaded together like the beads of a catholic rosary—an invitation to meditate on the relationship of the sacred and the profane, on a monumental scale.
