Enter The Multiverse –building a stronger sector for Asian arts practitioners
You can read the full report here
Three Pillars to Raise the Roof
Over the past three decades, we have seen our Asian communities in Tāmaki Makaurau not only grow — now making up 28% of the city — but become more diverse, encompassing a multitude of ethnicities, languages, generations of migration, class, religion, gender and sexuality.
Alongside this, we’ve witnessed the emergence of our Asian arts practitioners, with increasingly rich and nuanced work being developed across the city. Despite this, little progress has been made to understand and serve this rapidly evolving part of the sector. As institutions start to express interest in working with Asian artists — recognising the need to reflect the population they serve; recognising that Asian art is something that can be homegrown, rather than imported — an increasingly pronounced gap emerges, with short-term programming creating temporary visibility but failing to strengthen sector capability. In other words, we keep investing in freshly-cut flowers, rather than the garden itself.
The impact? It’s what we’re seeing now: a fragmented sector, still in its infancy, at risk of stunted growth. This research is a response to this, and seeks to deepen our collective understanding of the necessary investment needed to lay the foundation for a flourishing arts sector for our Asian arts practitioners in Tāmaki Makaurau.
Through this research, we have heard about practitioners’ sense of isolation, as well as their lack of access to culturally supportive opportunities for development — whether these relate to deepening creative practice, building ancestral knowledge, developing skills across producing, marketing and governance, or having access to mental health support, networks and mentorship.
Interventions at this stage have the potential to have an immense impact on the sector’s long-term trajectory. Accordingly, we see it as critical that investment over the next ten years is focused on the following three outcomes:
Mid-career practitioners are supported to become leaders in Aotearoa on an international stage.
Early-career practitioners have culturally safe opportunities to build capability.
Asian diaspora artists have access to the opportunities and resources to develop a distinctive voice within Aotearoa.
In designing different ways to achieve these outcomes, it is vital that investment is strategic and developed with a long-term view in order to support transformative, lasting, sustainable change. It’s only through hyper-targeted investment focused on these outcomes that we will be able to build career pathways, nuanced and multiperspectival Asian diaspora art-making that reflects voices unique to Aotearoa, and culturally confident supporting infrastructure that has been built on the belief that our Asian communities belong in a Te Tiriti-centred Aotearoa.
We recognise that many of these conversations will have resonance beyond our community, because our own success is tied to the success of our peers, and to the industry at large. We hope to create a place for our many Asian whānau within that ecology, and that — over time — these conversations will feel ancient, a distant memory, barely visible in a garden so flourishing you feel giddy.
