Warriors’ welcome

Wellington artist Kerry Ann Lee has welcomed the Terracotta Warriors about to go on display at Te Papa with an artwork of her own. She tells Sam Gaskin about the connections between her family’s history and the ‘‘dreamscape’’ she’s created.

Two years ago, Kerry Ann Lee’s father dreamed he was flying over Xi’an, the northern Chinese city famous for its Terracotta Warriors. Though he has never been there, having moved to New Zealand from the south of China when he was 12, he told her he knew it from pictures.

‘‘He doesn’t like travelling that much, but he got very excited about it,’’ Lee says. ‘‘I think it’s the romance of being away.’’ Now, as part of the Terracotta Warriors:

Guardians of Immortality exhibition opening at Te Papa on December 15, the Wellington artist is using some of the same pictures that fed her father’s subconscious to create what she calls a ‘‘Dreamscape Transit Lounge’’. It’s a place for visitors to reacclimatise after taking their own imaginative long hauls to that dry and dusty hillside in Shaanxi province.

Lee describes herself as a collage artist. In one of her most iconic works, used to promote the recent Asian Aotearoa Arts Hui, she stuck illustrations of jubilant Chinese children into the Wellington cable car. In keeping with this practice, Lee’s installation at Te Papa combines materials from the museum’s archives with publications collected by her family, what she calls, ‘‘our taonga as Chinese New Zealanders’’.

Her family treasures stretch back to the 1960s, when her dad was working in the kitchen at the Caroline Milk Bar. ‘‘He was on his own as a young Cantonese man in Timaru and it was very lonely,’’ Lee says. ‘‘He liked travelling up to Christchurch to a Chinese greengrocer that stocked books. It started his interest in reading, and his reconnection to China, really.’’

Lee used these resources to create a wallpaper that’s bursting with Chinese kitsch, as if the lyrics to McDonald’s ‘‘Kiwiburger’’ song were rewritten to sell chao mian. There’s: rosewood furniture, flowers, firecrackers, butterflies, Bruce Lee, coins, ceramics, crickets, goldfish, dragons and mooncakes – all arranged in a colourful graphic that wouldn’t look out of place at a Cuba Street gift store.

The installation, entitled ‘‘Return to Skyland’’ also includes home furnishings and a video slideshow that sets objects from Te Papa’s collection against backdrops taken from mid-century Chinese postcards and magazines. Accompanying the visuals is text from the poem Looking Over Sian at Night, written by New Zealander Rewi Alley in 1954. (Sian is an old spelling of Xi’an.) The iconic, flat-bottomed Chinese spoon and the word ‘‘co-operatives’’, for instance, are pasted over an image of smiling workers harvesting lotus pods.

When she discovered the Alley poem, Lee marvelled at the coincidence. ‘‘It was just such an amazing thing to find because of my dad’s dream, the Rewi Alley poem, and the warriors coming. It all seems really surreal.’’

In Looking Over Sian at Night, Alley laments the hardships Xi’an has endured – ‘‘City of so much bitterness, / of bombs, famine, wars everlasting’’ – but celebrates ‘‘Sian today, with bright lights, / level streets, schools, factories, / the Sian that has come to stay.’’

It’s blatant propaganda, but then Alley, who was born in Canterbury in 1897, was a member of the Chinese Communist Party for 40 years. He signed up shortly after moving to Shanghai aged 30.

Lee’s work is more complex. Her juxtaposition of objects and images with Alley’s lines brings the weight of reality to bear on both good and bad.

Alley lost his own personal archive of treasures twice, once to Japanese invaders during World War II and once to the Red Guard, who tore up his pictures in front of him during the Cultural Revolution.

While the Terracotta Warriors endured for more than two millennia underground, much of China’s cultural heritage has been taken by foreign invaders, moved to Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War, or destroyed under Mao. Widespread poverty and a closed economy means there simply wasn’t a lot of excess belongings from the 50s, 60s and 70s for people to hold onto.

During artist’s residencies in Shanghai in 2009 and 2010, Lee says she felt that absence. ‘‘Growing up with the mindset of collecting ephemera, it was really tough. I went to some of the flea markets and it was all repro stuff, fake antiques.’’

Lee suggests overseas Chinese have played a crucial role guarding 20th century Chinese heritage. ‘‘If you go visit my family friends or relatives that are in the States, or in Chinatowns around the Asia Pacific, that for me is home space. We have all the stuff.’’

It’s something that her installation really relishes in.

‘‘You go into any Cantonese grandma’s house – especially here, my grandma’s a classic one – and no-one throws anything