In a darkened gallery space, stun- ningly illusionistic porcelain lilies and lily litter—stamens, filaments, anthers, buds, bulbs, sepals, petals and leaves—lay on the ground, exquisite and vulnerable and fragile. Tracing a Gilded Trail, an installation by Rotorua-born, Tāmaki Makaurau-based artist Cindy Huang, is an emotive response to the devastating experiences of nineteenth-century Chinese migrants who came to Aotearoa to mine gold in Ōtākou Otago and Murihiku Southland, bringing with them and planting lilies that now grow wild near historic water races in the region. These are barely-there and often invisible histories, and the installation is accordingly quiet, one of the quietest object-based installations I’ve experienced, and yet, there’s a real weight, a thickness, to this kind of noiselessness—a story untold, some- thing left unsaid … a silencing?
When preparing the installation for its first showing at Te Atamira in Tāhuna Queenstown, the artist undertook research into the gold mining communities, revealing disturbing histories. This is a story of racial persecution by both authorities and settlers; migrants were dying young from dangerous work, suffering through extreme weather and terrible living conditions, experiencing segregation imposed by Pākehā. These are the kind of things that should be unforgettable and unforgiveable, but they have been quite brutally forgotten within Aotearoa’s national history. Huang’s installation might well be described as a memorial, the lilies a symbol of these countless losses: funeral flowers, but without the bouquet’s formality. Chillingly, they perhaps recall the unmarked graves where many migrants were buried in the region, though mostly they evoke the scattered planting of wildflowers, living evidence of these histories that persists in the land today—rogue and uncultivated yet self-propagating, much like the migrant story.
In the alcove near the gallery’s entrance, a painting is installed as a companion to the lilies—a large canvas, Whakatipu-grey and wreathed with the lines of a poem that is also the exhibition’s extended title. I am a fan of long titles, and this is probably the longest one I’ve come across. It speaks of the wind, of disappearance, of mountains and sea:
Following the smell of his faint breath
southern breeze washed his scent clean
tracing a gilded trail
The sound of whispered past
tethered essence left
caught in stone, gravel and tale
Sifting flour gold
each grain well travelled
his name unremarkable
Sea edge resettled
roads and temple in hand
akin returned to till
The best objects hold stories in silent and felt ways and sometimes objects just simply have a way of saying so much more than words can, but the symbolic and ephemeral poem-painting is treated as an essential companion for these objects—it is a vital, haunting hint toward the stories from which these lilies emerged.
I first arrived at Huang’s work via her social art practice. In 2022, for a project produced by Satellites, Twin Cultivation, she created 240 ceramic food objects: kūmara, bush kūmara, gourd, bok choy, eel and taro, that were given away to participants. Pairs of strangers were invited to enter a space together, dig up a chosen ceramic object from where they were buried and have a conversation. Making gifts of her artworks, Huang was gesturing to the histories of trade and exchange between Māori and Chinese settlers, who would often swap their respective crops. In Southland, this included lily bulbs, which were swapped for other medicinal plants used within rongoā. Some of Twin Cultivation’s participants found it a challenging experience, some made new friends, but all were offered a way to think through diasporic experience and cross-cultural entanglements, as well as forms of collective care for painful and difficult histories.
In neat synergy with her social practice, walking through the installation of lilies generated trepidation, too. Something close to one thousand individual pieces, ranging from small to tiny, some almost entirely invisible on the flaked and stained concrete floor, required an intense degree of self-awareness and care to navigate. I became highly aware of my foot falls, my bag slipping off my shoulder … I dared not step backwards before checking first. I ended up engaged in an awkward dance with the lilies. The artist has made some peace with the potential breakage of the work’s elements. She wants the work to have this fragility and danger—not because she wants it to break, but because, in what feels like an appropriate gesture given the subject matter, she is putting its care in the hands of the visitors. How will we treat this story?
Header image: Cindy Huang, Follow the smell of his faint breath […] akin returned to till, 2023, glazed porcelain, dimensions variable. Installation view, Tracing a Gilded Trail, Sumer, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, August 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Sumer
