Earlier in the year, my six-year-old niece grabbed my sleeve and dragged me into the garden, where she’d laid out toy cutlery, plates, cups and a teapot. We began our lunch. The cups were filled with grass clippings, the plates were empty. We pretended to eat, making the appropriate exclamations and lip-smacking and slurping sounds, and then I got bored and tried to leave but, dismayed, she said, “You haven’t finished your bread!” and pointed at the little plastic plate. I looked into her cute AF face with its glittering eyes. By preparing this faux meal and sharing it with me she was showing me something—perhaps love, or care—and by dismissing it and questioning its legitimacy I was disrespecting her gesture. I picked up the red fork and resumed poking the air.

I often miss playing pretend, but find it’s harder to get into as an adult. Art, literature, music—these are my imaginary worlds now, where it’s easy to lose track of time, my sense of self. Using the imagination to rejig things, and then returning to ground your sense of reality. There’s power in this. One thing I love about writing is that you can reimagine memories, blur fiction and reality. Like Play-Doh, life feels more malleable and blobby. And we know memories are reshaped, edited, each time we recall them, so the power of imagination manifests in real ways. With her knitted yum cha, Bev Moon has tapped into something interesting—using replicas and ‘fakes’ to harness a greater truth or idea. Engaging with the idea of realness, authenticity, originality. What do they even mean? The incongruity of histories, the fuzziness of memories, the warmth of ancestry. Using ‘play’ to take control of a narrative.

I love fake food. There’s something about a fake-food menu on display in a restaurant, or a fake-food keyring, that makes me squeal. Likewise, Moon’s work gets me all heightened, makes me want to become tiny and walk around the table, put my head on a dumpling and take a nap. The smallest details are remembered: a single cut of spring onion, a few scattered sesame seeds. The ‘real’ and ‘fake’ intermingle—real paper wrappers under fake sticky-rice flour balls, fake char siu baos in real bamboo steamers.

There’s power in food, too. It nourishes, and gives us pleasure and a sense of belonging.

The ritual of food can be heady; each time you prepare a meal, set the table, eat the food, you are acknowledging and remembering a part of yourself, of your wider story. Giving thanks.

Fortune is a delicious, welcoming exhibition. It is a tribute to the artist’s mother and grandmother, who were skilled cooks and knitters, and the work is deliberately delightful—a celebration. The show has been touring the country since 2022, but the Hocken version is special in that it is curated to include family photos, and Moon’s mother’s and grandmother’s hand-written recipes, alongside her own handwritten knitting instructions—a blueprint for this feast. It tells the wider story of early Chinese immigration to New Zealand, and the exhibition has been partially funded by the Chinese Poll Tax Heritage Trust. This is meaningful because Moon’s great-grandfathers settled around the Gore region during the gold rush, after paying the £10 Chinese poll tax ($1,770 today), a payment imposed solely on Chinese immigrants when entering New Zealand. Their wives were unable to join them. In time, their sons migrated too, also paying the poll tax, which had increased to £100 ($20,000 today) and included an English language test. The New Zealand Government made it as hard as possible for Chinese immigrants; during the Sino-Japanese War, Moon’s mother and grandmother were among the lucky 500 Chinese women and children granted a two-year temporary refugee permit. They paid a bond of £200 to the government and arrived in Wellington in 1940. Imagine going through all of that and then people being stink to you when you arrive. Where’s the hospitality, aye?