Jason Wing

1
jason
wing
Matt Poll
Commissioning Editor
page 1
of internal pages
(not the front cover)
MAY 20

4 5
An Australian Government Initiative

6 7
pp. 2–3
Duty Free, 2013 (detail)
timber, glass and model ship, dimensions variable.
Photo: Adam Hollingworth
pp. 4–5
An Australian Government Initiative, 2010
digital photograph on metallic fuji flex paper, 150 x
100 cm, edition of three
p. 6
Duty Free, 2013
timber, glass and model ship, dimensions variable.
pp. 8–9
The Native Institute, 2013, installation view,
Blacktown Arts Centre. Photo: Silversalt
p. 10
Self Portrait, 2009
cement, bamboo and acrylic paint, 120 x 20 cm
overall
p. 11
Take Away, 2009
plastic and LED lights, 15 x 30 cm
p. 12
Going Going Gone, 2011
found sticker, 15 x 60 cm. Photo: Adam Hollingworth
p. 13
Fleased, 2011
found sticker, 2 x 10 cm. Photo: Adam Hollingworth
Duty Free

12 13
Going Going Gone Fleased

20 21
pp. 14–15
Blood, Sweat and Tears, 2010
mixture of spices, chain, coffee, sugar, glass, cork
and salt, site specific installation, installation view,
Casula Powerhouse, Sydney
pp. 16–17
Migration, 2009
spray paint, site specific installation. Photo: Adam
Hollingworth
pp. 18–19
Sign of the Times, 2009
mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo:
Silversalt
p. 20
Broken Bones, Broken Homes, 2011
brick, spray paint, nuts and bolts, dimensions
variable. Photo: Adam Hollingworth

26 27
Study for Black Boy Growth Chart

30 31
pp. 22–25
Great Wall 1–7, 2012
seven digital prints on paper, each 59 x 84 cm,
edition of five
p. 26
Study for Blackboy, c1985, found photograph,
15 x 10 cm
p. 27
Growth Chart, 2013
pencil, site specific installation. Photo: Shay Tobin
pp. 28–29
No Rights, 2012
installation view, digital print on metal plate, each
70 x 35 cm, edition of three. Photo: Nima Nabili Rad
p. 31
Duty Free, 2013
timber, glass and model ship. Photo: Adam
Hollingworth
Duty Free

36 37
pp. 32–33
Captain James Crook, 2013
bronze, 60 x 30 x 30 cm, edition of three. Collection
of the National Gallery of Australia. Photo: Garrie
Maguire
pp. 34–36
Fossil Fuels, 2013
found Royal Australian Navy pendant lamp and
cast resin, dimensions variable. Photo: Adam
Hollingworth
p. 38
Double Crossing, 2013
found street signs, 130 x 130 cm, installation view.
Photo: Silversalt

40 41
Longing for December 28th

42 43
pp. 40–41
Longing for December 28th, 2013
cheesecloth, powder coated aluminium, spray paint
and projected image, dimensions variable. Photo:
Silversalt
p. 42
None Left, 2012
digital print on metal plate, each 70 x 35 cm,
edition of three, installation view in Redfern, Sydney.
Photo: Nima Nabili Rad
p. 44
Walk All Over Me, 2011
digital print on paper, 400 x 20 cm overall.
None Left

44 45
An Australian Government Initiative

48 49
Blacktown Dreaming Rainbow Dreaming

52 53
pp. 46–48
People of Substance, 2011
installation view, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts
Centre. Photo: Adam Hollingworth
p. 48
Blacktown Dreaming, 2009 (detail)
acrylic paint, MDF, perspex, hypodermic needles,
pillow and spray paint cans, dimensions variable.
p. 49
Rainbow Dreaming, 2009
hypodermic syringes, perspex and food colouring,
20 x 15 cm. Photo courtesy of Campbeltown Arts
Centre
pp. 50–51
Elders, 2011
pigment and PVA, site specific installation. Photo:
Adam Hollingworth
p. 53
Installing work for Survey at Carriageworks, Sydney
and detail of mural created during OzAsia Festival,
Adelaide, both 2010
Survey / Ozand

54 55
Parramatta River Dreaming

60 61
FIX DEEP ETCH
Taihung Mountain

62 63
p. 54
None Left, 2012 (detail)
digital print on metal plate, each 70 x 35 cm,
edition of three. Photo: Adam Hollingworth
p. 55
Parramatta River Dreaming, 2010
spray paint on aluminium, 147 x 230 cm. Collection:
Artbank
p. 56
Redrum, 2011
red wine, site specific installation, Hazelhurst
Regional Gallery & Arts Centre. Photo: Silversalt
p. 57
Slavery, 2011
tobacco and PVA glue, 20 x 50 cm, installation view,
Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre. Photo:
Silversalt
pp. 58–60
Xucun Village, 2014
brick and gold leaf, 300 x 300 cm. Photo: Adam
Hollingworth
p. 61
Taihung Mountain, 2014
found Chinese scroll, 180 x 56 cm. Photo: Adam
Hollingworth
p. 63
White Bread, 2011
white bread, 12 x 12 cm
p. 64
Double Crossing, 2013
found railway crossing. Photo: Silversalt
pp. 66–67
In Between Two Worlds, 2011
installation view, Kimber Lane, Haymarket. Courtesy
of City of Sydney
p. 68
lithograph and screenprint on BFK Rives 280 gsm,
image size 33 x 29.5 cm, paper size 60 x 50.5 cm,
edition of 20. Photo: Adam Hollingworth
fix d/e and add shadow
White Bread

69
Contents
Selected works.................................................................... 2
Introduction Matt Poll........................................................ 71
Essentially Wing Garry Jones.. ............................................... 76
Interview with Jason Wing Matt Poll......................................... 90
Biography...................................................................... 101
Acknowledgments. ........................................................... 102
Captain James Crook

70 71
Introduction
Matt Poll
Over the past several years Jason Wing has produced an uncompromising
and sophisticated body of work that has challenged dominant perceptions
of contemporary Aboriginal art. Through exhibiting in Australia and
internationally in solo and group exhibitions, Wing’s installation-based
practice explores personal and national histories and how these narratives are
being represented in Australian art history.
Working outside of prescribed non-Indigenous audiences’ expectations of
what Aboriginal art should look like Wing has created a nuanced body of work
that interrogates the common representations of Aboriginal people such as
those seen in the mainstream media. His work offers a new perspective on the
social and historical place of cultural hybridism in Australian art.
Many Contemporary Aboriginal artists produce work that operates
through complex social arrangements that are anchored by a need to
acknowledge the historical and modern situations of Indigenous culture.
Referencing Wing’s photographic series An Australian Government Initiative
in her book The Flash of Recognition Jane Lydon describes Wing’s ‘deceptively
simple’ counter narrative of the media representation of Indigenous
masculinity as ‘dangerous’ and the subsequent need for an ‘intervention’ into
remote communities.1
Wing simply challenges the non-Indigenous audience
to consider ‘how would it it feel if it were happening to us?’ thus deflecting an
accusatory ‘them’ into an inclusive ‘us’.
In An Australian Government Initiative and other recent works such as
those included in exhibitions curated by noted Aboriginal curator Djon
Longing for December 28th

72 73
viewers out of comfortable perceptions and stereotypes of preconceived
cultural and historical circumstances.
Wing has created a framework for representing his own individuality,
while at the same time respecting a multiplicity of cultural perspectives.
Ultimately, his work is a contemporary art that is critically engaged with
a cultural grounding that it is too often relegated to political slogans and
standpoints. It presents a new method of representing narratives that
challenge complacent definitions of identity or culture, and is conceptually
translatable to the struggles of a diverse range of marginalised voices in
Australian contemporary art.
1. Jane Lydon, The Flash of Recognition, (Sydney: New
South Publishing, 2012)
2. Cold eels and distant thoughts, Monash University
Museum of Art, 30 March to 3 June 2012
3. People We Know Places We’ve Been, GOULBURN
ART CLASS 2-0-1-1, curated by Djon Mundine OAM,
Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, 3 November to
3 December 2011 and The Rocks Discovery Museum,
5 July – 13 September 2013
4. Bungaree: The First Australian, Mosman Art Gallery,
1 September to 25 November 2012
5. James Clifford, ‘On Ethnographic Surrealism’,
Comparative studies in Society and History, Vol 23,
No. 4 (Oct 1981), pp. 593
Mundine – Cold Eels and Distant Thoughts,2
People We Know – Places We’ve
Been: Goulburn Art Class 2-0-1-13
and Bungaree: The First Australian4
–
Wing has produced works that show a consistent artistic maturity and
a sophistication that signals an exciting new chapter in contemporary
Aboriginal art.
In many ways, Wing’s work operates in a framework similar to that of an
‘ethnographic surrealism’, a term coined by James Clifford to describe the
interrelationship of both ethnographic representation of ‘exotic’ cultures and
the modernist art known as surrealism. Wing presents a modern example of
this idea that also refers back to the categorical shift of Indigenous cultural
representation from Museum artefact to fine art in Australian museums
and art galleries. As Clifford notes ‘to discuss these activities together
(ethnography and surrealism) – at times, indeed, to permit them to merge –
is to question a number of common distinctions and unities.’5
Wing’s choice of re-purposed and found materials that are then intimately
woven with personal significance interrupts dominant ethnographic
definition of Indigenous culture . Common everyday items – bread clips,
beer bottles, hypodermic syringes and road signs – are repurposed and
reintegrated into conceptually rigorous works that lead viewers down
unintended paths that allude to and then undermine hidden histories that
lurk beneath the surface of our everyday reality.
Without overtly or sentimentally alluding to the genocide, ecocide and
loss of cultural sovereignty that has led to the wholesale disenfranchisement
of Indigenous people, Wing’s work reinforces the urgency of addressing
complex, pervasive and misleading historical representations of the process
of colonisation of Australia that exist in the ordinary items of our daily
life. Wing’s work also indirectly addresses the contemporary issue of the
corporatisation and commodification of Indigenous culture and its tangible
cultural heritage as well as Australia’s perceived abundance of natural
resources – free for anyone to take.
By producing work that often intersects with personal and public spaces,
and by interrogating the common perceptions of natural and organic
materials that he assembles and reframes in his installations, Wing coerces
p. 70
Longing for December 28th, 2013 (detail)
cheesecloth, powder coated aluminium, spray paint
and projected image, dimensions variable. Photo:
Silversalt
p. 74
Used By and Best Before, 2012
perspex and copper, each 40 x 40 cm, edition of three.
p. 75
Augustus Earle (1793–1838), Portrait of Bungaree,
a native of New South Wales, with Fort Macquarie,
Sydney Harbour, in background, c1826, oil on canvas,
68.5 x 50.5 cm, reproduced with permission of the
National Library of Australia, digitally edited for
publication

74 75
please colour match the top
breastplate to the bottom one
deep etch pics
Used By / Best Before

76 77
Essentially Wing
Garry Jones
Perhaps it is no surprise … that artists have, in recent years, best
reflected the plurality and fluidity of contemporary Australian
identities … figures who are not easily categorised racially and
culturally, reconfigure Australia’s ‘cultural script’. They invite us to
conceptually overhaul the spaces within and between which Australia
can be imagined in its present and its past, and so further liberate
imaginings of Australia from the … ‘White national space’.1
Terms such as ‘renewal’, ‘recycling’ and ‘rebirth’ are frequently used in
descriptions of the early graffiti-art practice of Jason Wing. They suggest
environmental and spiritual motivations underpinning his development
as an artist, as much as his capacity for appropriating, reassembling and
repurposing the material world around him. His ‘poly-cultural’ heritage
– Aboriginal, Chinese and Scottish – has enabled him to bring together
Aboriginal ‘rock art’ influences, Chinese paper-cut practice and graffiti
culture in a refreshingly hybrid art practice that, in its materiality, resonates
with our urban environment while provoking a more politically attuned
awareness of broader community concerns. More recently, Wing’s practice
has matured through a sharpening of his focus on the ‘unsettled’ business
of ‘settled’ Australia. In the spirit of ‘renewal’ and ‘rebirth’ it seems
appropriate that this essay should mark this transition in Wing’s work with an
acknowledgment of its ‘beginning’:
In April 1770 Captain Cook sailed into Camay (Botany Bay), home
of the Eora people in what is now known as Sydney, Australia and
declared that the country was terra nullius – a land belonging to no
one. He then promptly took ‘possession’ of the country on behalf of
the Crown. Australian politicians state that Australia was peacefully
colonised. This is a politically correct way of stating a truth. Australia
was stolen from the Aboriginal people by lethal force …2
And, it might be said, the ‘rest is history’. But whose history, and what is
‘history’ anyway? Does it really mean anything in the present? In 2012 Wing

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won the prestigious Parliament of New South Wales Aboriginal Art Prize
with his strident anti-colonial assemblage Australia was Stolen by Armed
Robbery (2012). The work – an appropriated fibreglass bust of Captain James
Cook wearing a black balaclava – was a surprisingly daring selection by the
independent judging panel working on behalf of the parliament. Was its
selection a sign that an Australian state government (the ‘First State’ no less)
might be prepared to reflect on its own legitimacy as a sovereign power? Such
a question, however, became irrelevant when it soon came to light that all
was not well in the House. Against the tradition of the prize, the exhibition
catalogue – prepared well in advance and released immediately following
the formal announcement of the winner – was printed without an image of
Wing’s work on its cover or within its pages. Despite the support of the NSW
Minister for Aboriginal Affairs Victor Dominello for the selection of Wing’s
work as winner, the silence following the prize announcement was deafening.
There was no detailed press coverage and no critical response to the work and
what it might represent as the winner of an acquisitive, government art prize
or as an expression of contemporary Aboriginal politics and identity.
The latter is worth exploring because Australia was Stolen by Armed
Robbery marks Wing’s emergence as an insightful interpreter of contemporary
Australian culture and politics, his work provoking viewers to think about
and feel the colonial resonances of the past in the present. While Captain
James Cook is celebrated as the founding father and symbol of the birth
of the modern Australian nation, for Indigenous Australians he signifies
invasion, colonisation, dispossession and displacement – the embodiment of
terra nullius. It could be argued that by blaming terra nullius and Aboriginal
dispossession on Cook the many moral and legal difficulties underpinning the
subsequent invasion and acquisition of the continent initiated by Britain’s First
Fleet are conveniently forgotten. However, the reality is that Cook symbolises
a shared foundational history of post-colonial Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal
Australia. In this regard, he represents a significant means into ongoing
dialogue about Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal histories about the colonial past
and what it means in the present.3
Despite its brashness, Australia was Stolen
by Armed Robbery invites dialogue, questioning the apparent amnesia at play in
which questions of Aboriginal sovereignty – Australia’s ‘unfinished business’ –
are conveniently forgotten by being relegated to a time gone by.
With Australia was Stolen by Armed Robbery it is possible to think of Wing
as a post-colonial artist, a relentless anti-colonial provocateur, hell bent on
inverting the colonial binary that has kept Aboriginal people dispossessed
and impoverished in the ‘lucky country’. While Australia’s colonial history
is certainly in Wing’s sights, he nevertheless demonstrates a highly flexible
capacity to operate in multiple zones of production, demonstrating what
Margo Neale refers to as the ‘highly mobile space of fluid identities’,4
where
Indigenous artists’ work persistently disrupts mainstream concepts of
indigeneity and authenticity. Artists Gordon Bennett and Tracey Moffatt are
early pioneers of this approach, engaging with international developments
in postmodernism, particularly appropriation, and the emergence of
postcolonial theory, and adapting this to an Australian context, while publicly
declaring subjectivities beyond ‘Aboriginal art’.5
Used By and Best Before (2012), made in the same year as Australia was
Stolen by Armed Robbery, is testament to Wing’s imaginative dexterity in
rendering the ordinary and apparently inane as culturally complex and
politically potent. The work was made for the 2012 exhibition Bungaree: The
First Australian.6
Wing was invited by the exhibition’s curator Djon Mundine
to produce a new work that critically reinterpreted the story of the Aboriginal
man Bungaree, a misunderstood and misrepresented historical figure known
in early colonial Sydney as the ‘Chief of the Broken Bay Aborigines’.
For Used By and Best Before Wing took an apparently inconsequential
piece of urban refuse – a discarded plastic bread clip – and converted it into a
powerful symbol of the unreconciled colonial past in the present. Wing saw
in the discarded bread clip a metaphor for the incommensurability between
European and Indigenous readings of Bungaree the man, his connection
to country, the significance of colonial invasion, and the subsequent
destruction of Bungaree and of Indigenous society and country more broadly.
Wing scaled up the bread clip and reproduced it in copper. Two clips were
produced, one inscribed with the text ‘USED BY’ and the other with ‘BEST
BEFORE’, the forms reminiscent of the metal breastplates that colonists

80 81
made for Aboriginal leaders to encourage their cooperation and amenability
– designating them ‘kings’ or ‘queens’ or, just as often, the ‘last of their tribe’.
Bungaree himself is famously depicted wearing a breastplate given to him
by Governor Macquarie in 1815 and inscribed with ‘Chief of the Broken Bay
Tribe’ in Augustus Earle’s c1826 painting Bungaree, a native of New South
Wales. The inscriptions on Wing’s work – ‘used by’ and ‘best before’ – are a
bitterly ironic reference to the colonial assumption that Aboriginal people
were expendable and that Aboriginal society was on the verge of extinction.
Wing grew up in Cabramatta in south-western Sydney in the 1980s,
emerging on the contemporary art scene in Blacktown in western Sydney
in 2006. After completing double degrees in visual arts and graphic design in
2002, he cut his teeth as an adman, working for a couple of years in a high-
end advertising agency in Sydney where he was a talented manipulator of
digital signs and symbols. It was while working in advertising, however, that
he experienced something of a moral crisis, coming to the realisation that the
industry was not suited to his nature. He left his job and began work as an art
therapist with children with disabilities – a role that profoundly resonated
with his concerns for community, the environment and social justice. It was
as an art therapist that he came to see the potential of art as a vehicle for
community awareness and positive social change.
Registration (2009) is an important early work of Wing’s as it signals
his adeptness in turning the ordinary and everyday into powerful signifiers
of broader societal concerns. For this work Wing appropriated the
monochromatic colour scale – the graphic designer’s tool-of-trade – to
comment on the prejudice and discrimination he experienced when asserting
his Aboriginal heritage. In this work vibrant full-tone blocks of black,
yellow and red – the colours of the Aboriginal flag – are stacked vertically,
forming a column under which is printed ‘100%’. Moving from left to right
in descending increments of ten per cent, each colour fades until a uniform
column of white is achieved, mirroring both the colour value and numeric
value of ‘0%’. Adjacent to this scale is a larger square, rendered from black to
white in twenty-five per cent tonal shifts with the industry standard symbol ‘K’
(signifying the colour black) progressing from 100K down to 0K.
100K 75K
25K 0K
60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%100% 90% 80% 70%
Registration

82 83
As Wing has asked: ‘Does a person’s cultural validity depend on how
black/white [they] are?’ Registration draws our attention to the enduring
prevalence of racialised concepts of ‘purity’ versus ‘impurity’ determined
according to phenotype and equated with biological/cultural ‘authenticity’
or ‘inauthenticity’. The white square in Wing’s grey scale with the numeric
value ‘0K’, equates whiteness with being ‘okay’ – denoting racial normality.
Registration highlights the underlying Eurocentrism at play where whiteness
stands as the unquestioned norm from which all other colours are valued and
judged as lacking to some degree. Such binary categories were themselves
instituted in Australia’s history by colonial administrators who drew on the
racist theories of the time to justify their efforts to control Indigenous and
other non-white populations. After Federation in 1901 these theories were
articulated in the White Australia policy, which underpinned government
attempts to biologically assimilate Aboriginal people into white Australian
society by ‘breeding out’ Aboriginal colour.
After leaving advertising and taking his first tentative steps towards an
art practice motivated by cultural self-expression rather than commercial
self-interest, Wing found immediate recognition for his work when he won
the 2006 Blacktown City Art Prize. It was at this time that he also came to
the further realisation of the complexity of his own cultural heritage and
identity and publicly declared his Aboriginal ancestry, which his family had
suppressed during the decades of the White Australia policy. Wing came to
appreciate the multiple ways in which his life had been disrupted by colonial
racism and has since come to resist all cultural essentialisms, drawing
instead on his multiple cultural affiliations to engage his audiences in social
and environmental politics that are both local and global.
A consideration of Wing’s poly-cultural ancestry and fluid public identity
raises the question of how identity relates to his current practice. It also
prompts reflection on ‘history’ in order to untangle and better understand
Wing’s practice in the present. ‘Chinese people’, like ‘Aboriginal people’,
are not socially or culturally homogeneous. In Australia at the turn of
the twentieth century, however, Chinese immigrants and dispossessed
Aboriginal communities might have had more in common with each other
Wing Dynasty

84 85
than either of them had with their British colonial oppressors. While
the Chinese and Aboriginal communities were epistemologically and
ontologically different, their similar cultural practices – such as attachment
to land, belief in ancestral spirits and importance of extended kinship
networks – might have been regarded as grounds for a degree of mutual
recognition and acceptance, which would have implicitly threatened the
colonial authority of the day.7
From 1897 colonial laws were enacted in Australia to segregate non-white
people, in particular Aboriginal and Asian populations. These laws were
motivated by the belief in European superiority and social Darwinist fears
of racial miscegenation, which manifested in a frenzied public discourse in
which the ‘Chinese question’ and the ‘Aboriginal problem’ were defining
catchphrases. Subsequently, the White Australia policy became the principal
tool for addressing what was perceived as the new nation’s race ‘burden’.
Under the White Australia policy laws forbade Asian-Aboriginal marriage or
cohabitation, resulting in shattered families and stolen children. AO Neville,
a public servant and notorious architect of Aboriginal biological assimilation,
cautioned against the ‘unsuitability of Aboriginal-Asian marriages’ as late as
1947.8
But despite great efforts to separate and isolate the cultures, policies
were not evenly enforced on the ground and attempts to disrupt relationships
were often met with fierce resistance – to arrest, to racial categorisation and to
state intervention. These were the common threads of an emerging contempt
for government that criss-crossed the cultural landscape.9
An individual’s decision to deny or celebrate a part of their identity, or
to privilege one part over another, is highly complex and personal. At the
time of the White Australia policy, the identities that Aboriginal and Asian
people assumed had enormous and sometimes tragic ramifications. Until
the abolition of the policy in the early 1970s and its replacement with self-
determination, many Aboriginal communities lived in constant fear of
government intrusion in their lives and of threats to their personal dignity,
family unity and freedom and opportunity within the state. Consequently,
they often concealed their Aboriginality to secure basic rights and dignities
and to protect their children from removal.10
In 2013 Wing participated in The Native Institute Exhibition initiated
by Blacktown Arts Centre. Led by artist Brook Andrew, the project involved
six contemporary Indigenous artists responding to the significance of the
historic Black Town Native Institute, which operated between 1823 and 1829
with the sole purpose of separating Aboriginal children from their families
and educating them in European and Christian ways. The institute is one of
the earliest examples of organised Aboriginal child removal in the name of
assimilation in colonial Australia.
The show comprised a series of artists’ interventions under the title
Sites of Experimentation – an ironic reference to the original intention of the
institute as a colonial experiment with Aboriginal lives. Wing’s intervention
took the form of three poignant works – Double Crossing, Longing for December
28th and Growth Chart – that reference, respectively, the institution, the
children and the families.
In Double Crossing Wing’s fascination with industrial materials and
signage is evident in his reconfiguration of a railway-crossing sign, which
he reshaped into a perpendicular cross, replacing ‘railway’ with ‘crossing’
to generate a literal double-crossing. The work confronts the role of the
church in the establishment of the The Blacktown Native Institute and the
‘acquisition’ of Aboriginal children, the parents of whom (whose consent may
or may not have been sought) were assured that enrolment at the institute
was for their children’s material and spiritual benefit. The work also adeptly
responds to the alienated outer-urban quality of the site of the former
institute, situated at the intersection of busy arterial traffic routes in western
Sydney, a blur in the landscape only ever glimpsed in passing if glimpsed at
all, its meaning never considered and mostly evaded.
Longing for December 28th consists of a series of A-frame tent-like
structures covered with translucent cotton fabric delicately printed with
images or text, such as ‘all the desert weeps’. One structure is adorned with a
line drawing of the institute’s former main residence, while another has one
side covered with a prison calendar, a tally of days passed in anticipation of
a family reunion. This work captures a sense of the trauma of the families of
the institutionalised children, who were only permitted to see them once a

86 87
year. In response, Aboriginal camps were established outside the institution’s
perimeter, where families attempted to maintain ongoing visual contact with
their children or, in some cases, help them escape.
Growth Chart is based on a historic data table uncovered during research
for the project documenting the name, language group and age of each child
living at the institute. In a heart-wrenching translation Wing converts this tool
of institutional management and control into a homemade children’s height
chart. As Wing explains:
Suddenly a seemingly innocent act we all take part in during childhood
takes on a far more insidious tone. Missionaries used records such as
this one to measure, quantify and regulate the process of assimilation.
In doing so, these children were stripped of any rights to a normal
childhood. Constantly monitored, they became the measurement tools
for recording White Australia’s so-called ‘progress’.11
Skilled as a graphic designer, Wing works skilfully with signs and symbols,
mixing a street-art aesthetic with advertising nous. ‘Renewal’, ‘recycling’
and ‘rebirth’ apply as much to his appropriative strategy – bringing together
urban graffiti, Chinese paper-cutting and popular western culture – as they
do to any spiritual motivation for his work. While Wing openly appropriates
western and eastern popular culture, his employment of signs of Aboriginality
is more subtle, less concerned with representing ‘Aboriginal-ness’ by way of
recognisable ‘Aboriginal’ symbols or patterns than with examining colonial
history, race relations and identity politics. The references in Wing’s work to
Aboriginal ‘rock art’, while alluding to his Aboriginal heritage, also function
as a political ruse, scrambling preconceptions of what Aboriginal art is or
should be and demonstrating more of a challenge to pan-Aboriginalism12
than making a claim to ‘authentic’ cultural knowledge.
We might ask if Aboriginal art has entered a new phase – the ‘post-
Aboriginal’, whereby a new type of Australian art has emerged, ‘indelibly
informed by the Aboriginal art movement … and also very different Aboriginal
art that has morphed completely into contemporary art’.13
This may well
1. Penny Edwards & Shen Yuanfang, Lost in
the Whitewash: Aboriginal-Asian Encounters in
Australia, 1901–2001, Australian National University
Humanities Research Centre Monograph Series No.
15, Australian National University, Canberra, 2003,
pp. 9–12.
2. Jason Wing, unpublished artist’s statement, 2012
Parliament of New South Wales Aboriginal Art Prize,
communicated by the artist in conversation with the
author, 10 July 2013.
3. Maria Nugent, Captain Cook was Here, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 2009, p. 124.
4. Margo Neale in Sylvia Kleinert & Margo Neale (eds),
The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture,
Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2000, p. 277.
5. Ian McLean (ed), How Aborigines Invented the Idea
of Contemporary Art: Writings on Aboriginal Art, Power
Publications, Sydney, 2011, p. 317.
6. Bungaree: The First Australian, Mosman Art Gallery,
Mosman, 1 September to 25 November 2012, touring
nationally between 8 February 2013 to 22 August
2015.
7. Edwards & Yuanfang, Lost in the Whitewash, p. 7.
8. Ibid., p. 17
9. ibid., p. 15.
10. ibid., p. 18.
11. Supplied to author at the time of writing by the
artist.
12. See Paradies, Y. C. ‘Beyond Black and White:
Essentialism, hybridity and Indigeneity’ in Journal of
Sociology, December 2006 vol. 42 no. 4, pp. 355–367
13. McLean, How Aborigines Invented the Idea, p. 317.
14. See Gerardo Mosquera, ‘Beyond Anthropophagy:
Art, Internationalization and Cultural Dynamics’, in
Belting, Hans, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel,
The global contemporary and the rise of new art worlds,
Karlsruhe, Germany; ZKM/Center for Art and Media,
Cambridge, MA; London, England; The MIT Press,
2013.
describe Wing’s practice as a versatile and dynamic contemporary artist
opposed to the cliché of the ‘authentic’ as constructed by the colonial
imagination. For Wing, difference, whether Indigenous or otherwise, is
established through active engagement with colonialism and its ongoing
manifestations in Australian society; his art is a form of action rather
than representation.14
p. 76
The Other Other, 2011
installation view, Tandanya National Aboriginal
Cultural Institute, Adelaide. Photo: Grant Nowell
p. 81
Registration, 2009
digital print on aluminum panel, 50 x 200 cm

p. 82
Wing Dynasty, 2012
digital print on metallic paper, 84 x 119 cm, edition
of five
Jason with his grandfathers, c2008. Photo: Jim Irving
pp. 88–89
A collection of social media comments reacting to the
2012 Parliament of NSW Aboriginal Art Prize awarded
work Australia Was Stolen by Armed Robbery, 2012,
sourced by the artist

88 89
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Interview with
Jason Wing
Matt Poll
Matt Poll: There was a surprising reaction to your work – Australia was Stolen
by Armed Robbery – after its selection as winner of the 2012 Parliament of
New South Wales Aboriginal Art Prize. It is not unusual for art prizes to be
challenged in Australia (witness the numerous legal challenges faced by the
Archibald Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney over the years)
but what are your thoughts about the way your work was challenged and
Parliament’s management of the issues raised?
Jason Wing: The controversy surrounding the prize is twofold and
somewhat complex. After the work became the subject of an intellectual
property challenge [the image of the artwork was not included in the
official exhibition catalogue that was produced in association with art
prize], the NSW Parliament responded by putting up a wall of silence.
Shortly after winning the prize it came to my attention that not only
was the work not printed on the front cover of the exhibition catalogue
(which had always been the case in previous years) but also that my
artist statement was not published. To this day, I am still unclear as to
why this happened – the Parliament has never explained why. I’m not
sure if it was a simple oversight or a deliberate attempt to gloss over
my criticism of the Australian Government’s intervention policy [in the
Northern Territory] as outlined in my artist statement.
The situation was incredibly frustrating. The work – a bust of
Captain Cook wearing a balaclava – addresses an issue that I strongly
felt had been overlooked by the Australian Government and the
mainstream media. I wanted to articulate that while Aboriginal
people under the government’s intervention policy were being treated
like criminals, it could be argued that the first European invaders of
Australia were, in fact, criminals themselves, stealing the country from
its traditional owners.
You grew up and began your artistic career in western Sydney. Are there particular
themes or issues you see as coming from the experience of living in that region,
and how has this influenced your outlook on the wider Australian art world?

92 93
I was born in Cabramatta [in south-western Sydney] at a significant
time in Australian history – it was the late 1970s, the Vietnam War had
ended, the White Australia policy was abolished and immigrants were
flooding to western Sydney in search of a more prosperous future. My
weekends were spent between my Aboriginal and Chinese families.
As a young man my grandfather, who was a first generation Chinese
Australian, worked as a prawn peeler at his uncle’s restaurant in
Sydney’s Haymarket. It was here that he met my Scottish grandmother,
who was a waitress at the restaurant, and also grew to be an excellent
cook. Every Sunday he invited the whole family over and cooked a huge
Chinese banquet.
On my Aboriginal side my Mum and her family would take me to
Lake Gillawarna, just down the road from my grandparent’s house
in Georges Hall. This was the start of my education in nature and our
connectedness to it. I use to love riding my BMX down to the water
and sit quietly listening to the ducks and birds. I like to think this
upbringing typifies the experience of growing up in western Sydney.
It has profoundly shaped not only the person I am today, but also the
way in which I approach my art making.
Having said that, although I have many happy memories, times
were tough for the vast majority of people living in western Sydney.
Australia was (and arguably still is) a very racist country, and I
witnessed this firsthand on a regular basis. My grandparents were
often ridiculed, ostracised and abused as they walked down the street,
simply for being an interracial couple. My Aboriginal grandfather, for
fear of vilification and discrimination, spent most of his life claiming
M ori and Spanish heritage. He worked for the government as a tram
driver and had to lie about his identity in order to keep his job. For
many years he felt terrified of being an Aboriginal man in this country.
But it wasn’t just this insidious racism that made life tough. It
was also the constant institutionalised racism that immigrants and
Aboriginal people faced on a daily basis. So many people living in
western Sydney were already on the brink of poverty, suffering from
all sorts of social and economic dysfunction. That they also had to
manage living in a largely racist society could have only, I imagine,
made these obstacles all the more difficult to overcome.
There is something refreshing about spending time with my
friends and family out west – it’s real. I feel privileged to have grown
up in such an incredibly diverse and vibrant community. It has shaped
my understanding of the world and driven me to make art that speaks
to the challenges many people in this community have faced. Living
in western Sydney as an adult made me realise that injustice is a very
human experience. Although my work often responds to specific
issues, I always hope it resonates with the wider community. I hope it
speaks to the universal experience of human struggle.
Your 2011 solo exhibition at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre,
People of Substance, was a turning point in the development of your practice,
signalling a new direction in both medium and subject matter. How
important do you think it is for artists to challenge their practice and explore
new directions?1
I originally showed elements of People of Substance at Blacktown
Arts Centre in 2010, but prior to that I had been focused on street art
and less on conceptual work. For a long time I wanted to make work
that sat within the conceptual, social and political realm but was
nervous as to how it would be received. When I was invited to exhibit at
Hazelhurst I decided to take a leap into the unknown. The Sutherland
Shire was known for being Anglo-Celtic and conservative, and I wanted
to challenge the people who lived there. I decided the best way to do
this was to exhibit Blacktown Dreaming: a series of three beds, one
made from 4,000 hypodermic needles, and the other two from beer
bottles and empty cans of spray paint. To my surprise and delight I
received so much positive feedback after People of Substance that it
gave me the confidence to continue making similar work.

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I think it’s paramount for any artist to take risks. Isn’t that the
nature of the artist? To delve where the rest of society is too scared to
go, to express the fragility of humanity? I don’t ever want to be limited
by expressing myself through one medium or subject matter, and I
think if you make that clear from the outset people are less shocked
when you do decide to colour outside the lines.
It also speaks volumes about my temperament. I get bored with
things very quickly, and always have a million different ideas floating
around in my head – I blame television and the internet. One minute
I’m fixated on native flowers, the next minute human rights abuses
in China. On a practical level, I always like to use the material I think
will best resolve the aesthetic and the conceptual, so in part I think
this is also what informs my exploration as an artist. Sometimes I am
forced to work with new materials so that I can best communicate the
ideas in my artwork.
Have you had any memorable or unexpected responses to your work?
I once met a young fair Aboriginal woman who approached me in tears
after seeing my work Registration (2009) at Blacktown Arts Centre.
She told me that she had always struggled to be accepted and to live
as a fair-skinned Aboriginal. Both of us were emotional – crying and
hugging. It was a turning point for me and it was in that moment that
I felt a profound sense of responsibility to my community. It was the
first time I realised that art really could change the world. Ultimately,
that is what motivates me.
Your recent work has transformed from a graphic aesthetic into a conceptual
and installation-based practice. Was this change progressive or a conscious
decision based on wanting to explore new subjects and forms?
It was progressive, but in truth it was probably more about my lacking
confidence as an emerging artist. I had always wanted to make the
Chroming

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‘gutsy stuff’ but I was too scared, so for a long time I think I played it
safe. Also, for me, it was about experimenting and evolving. I don’t
ever want to get stuck doing the same thing. I guess I have these two
very distinct strands in my practice – my installation work and my
graphic stencil work. They look very different but they are both an
important part of who I am and what I am interested in as an artist.
You have recently undertaken several public art commissions. Is this an area
you would like to explore further? What kind of response do you hope your
public art will receive?
Yes, I definitely want to continue making public art. It’s not often
that an artist gets their work seen by so many people. Recently, I was
commissioned to create an artwork for the Prime Ministers office in
Sydney – the opportunity to reach someone so powerful and so directly
is exciting.
There is a distinct lack of a visual Aboriginal presence in the urban
landscape and I want to rectify that. I want people to be reminded
every day of their lives that they stand on Aboriginal land. That is how
my work The Serpent (2013), on the Canada Bay foreshore [in Sydney],
came about. It was the first time a public artwork by an Aboriginal
artist had been commissioned and installed on Sydney’s foreshore.
The rainbow serpent is so strongly associated with Aboriginal culture
that one momentary glance [at the work] can register meaning for
even the most rushed commuter.
You have extensive experience facilitating community arts projects and
working with incarcerated Aboriginal people. Do you think art can play a
role as a rehabilitative tool for individuals and communities who have
experienced disadvantage?
Absolutely, and it’s one of the things I love most about the visual
arts – nearly everyone can read and understand visual culture. I just
The Serpent

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wish it were better funded. I think the most meaningful art-related
experiences of my career to date have been through community arts
projects. There is something so humbling and transformative about
seeing people discover the joy of art making. I have also taught art
therapy to children with physical and intellectual disabilities,
which was one of the most creative and inspiring jobs I have ever had.
I know firsthand that art is a great tool for building self-esteem
and self-empowerment.
Was tertiary arts education beneficial to your career as an artist?
Not really. Whether it was because I was too young, or not cut out
for the system, I found art school somewhat contrived. The things
I did enjoy were having access to great resources and teachers and,
of course, the social element. I think art school is good in terms of
building a community and network around you. I still cross paths with
a lot of my lecturers and friends from university.
Some of the best artists I know have been five-year-olds with
severe intellectual disabilities. Good art is about conviction, heart
and passion, not thesis papers and HECS debts. I don’t have a
problem with people pursuing tertiary education; I just dislike the
way the system is designed to make everyone think they need a tertiary
education in order to be a good artist.
Some curators have commented that Aboriginal art – particularly by south-
eastern Australian artists – is entering a ‘post-political’ phase where its
ability to raise awareness of social and political justice is declining and is
transforming instead into a more internationally focused aesthetic. Do
you think it is important to express Aboriginal social and political issues
in your work?
All of my experiences as an artist, and those of my Aboriginal peers,
have told me that art is one of the few vehicles that actually can
transform the way people think and view the world. We just need
society to value the arts more than making money. [Suggesting that
Aboriginal art is becoming ‘post-political’] infers that Australia has
moved beyond the impact of colonisation. This is absolutely not true,
and I witness Aboriginal people experiencing the negative impacts of
colonialism every day. I think such terms are incredibly problematic
and dangerous. I think it’s great if my work resonates with an
international audience, but I don’t think it negates the fact that it
is about very local issues. It can be both, can’t it? The day we enter
a post-political phase is the day I give up making art. If art loses the
ability to raise awareness of political and social issues, then to me it no
longer holds much value. It is exactly this transformative power, and
universally understood language, that I love so much about art.
1. Jason Wing, People of Substance, Hazlehurst
Regional Gallery and Arts Centre, 25 June to 6 July
2011
p. 91
People of Substance, 2011
installation view, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts
Centre. Photo: Adam Hollingworth
p. 95
Chroming, 2011
plastic and chrome, 30 x 20 x 10 cm,
edition of five. Collection of the Kluge-Ruhe
Aboriginal Art Collection. Photo: Tom Cogill
p. 96
The Serpent, 2013
Bay Run, Drummoyne, Sydney. Photo: Andrew Mamo
p. 100
Installing work for People of Substance at the
Kluge-Ruhe Museum, Virginia, USA, 2012. Photo:
Tom Cogill

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Biography
Jason Wing is a Sydney-based artist who strongly identifies with his Chinese
and Aboriginal heritage. Wing began as a street artist and has since expanded
his practice to incorporate photo-media, installation and painting. Influenced
by his bi-cultural upbringing, Wing explores the ongoing challenges
impacting his wider community.
Calling into question our understanding of history and of our current
socio-political reality, Wing repurposes everyday objects and imagery,
creating works that are both visually confronting and deceptively simple.
Wing holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from Sydney College of the Arts  and
a Bachelor of Graphic Design. He has exhibited both nationally and
internationally. Significant solo exhibitions include: People of Substance,
Kluge-Ruhe Museum, Virginia, 2012, and Hazelhurst Regional Gallery &
Arts Centre,  Gymea, 2011; Tree Change, Arc One Gallery, Melbourne, 2012;
and The Other Other, Tandanya, Adelaide, 2011. Selected group exhibitions
include: Wondermountain, Penrith Regional Gallery, Penrith, 2014; The Native
Institute, Blacktown Arts Centre, Blacktown, 2013; Making Change, National
Art Museum of China, Beijing, 2012; Cold Eels and Distant Thoughts, Monash
University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2012; Bungaree: The First Australian,
Mosman Art Gallery, Mosman, 2012; Look Closely Now, Lake Macquarie
City Art Gallery, 2012;  and Made in China Australia; Salamanca Art Centre,
Hobart, 2012. In 2012 he won the NSW Parliament Indigenous Prize for his
provocative work Australia Was Stolen By Armed Robbery. Wing’s work is held
in private collections and within the public collections of the National Gallery
of Australia, Artbank, Blacktown Council and Kluge-Ruhe Museum.

102 103
This project was initiated by Blair French, Artspace
Executive Director 2006–13 to address a serious
lack of sophisticated in-print, critical discussion
around the work of contemporary NSW Aboriginal
artists. Put simply, the high quality and visibility
of the practices of a range of contemporary NSW
Aboriginal artists is not matched by a similar quality
and visibility in related discourse. Just as Artspace
throughout its history has sought to work with and
intelligently locate the practices of Aboriginal artists
within evolving local, regional and international
frameworks for contemporary art generally, so
have we consistently sought to advance and deepen
practices in critical writing focused both upon works
of art specifically and upon their broader significance
as forces for cultural change and development. This
is an area of particular organisational commitment
and expertise that we seek to bring to the work of
contemporary NSW Aboriginal artists.
These two publications, on the work of Frances
Belle Parker and Jason Wing respectively, were also
initiated to serve as a development opportunity for
early career NSW Aboriginal arts writers to work in
partnership with two established NSW Aboriginal
arts professionals in the role of Commissioning
Editors, Tess Allas and Matt Poll. In this regard the
project directly addresses both the aim of supporting
career pathways for Aboriginal arts workers as well
as that of initiating new collaborations and key
partnerships within the Aboriginal arts and cultural
sector. We recognise both as being key contributions
Artspace can make to building the NSW arts and
cultural sector generally.
This project is supported by the NSW Government
through Arts NSW.
Artist acknowledgments:
I would like to extend my warm thanks to Matt
Poll, Gary Jones, Claire Armstrong and the staff
at Artspace, in particular Blair French, Caraline
Douglas, Ricardo Felipe, Michelle Newton and
Alexie Glass-Kantor for realising this publication.
Special thanks to Tess Allas, Liz Nowell, Architectural
Graphics, Adam Hollingworth and Tony Albert who
supported me throughout the entire process. Finally,
I would like to thank my family, particularly my dad,
mums, as well as my friends for their continued
support. I would not be the person I am today without
their guidance, generosity and belief in me.
– Jason Wing
Published by Artspace Visual Arts Centre Ltd, Sydney
ISBN 9781920781538
© 2014 Artspace, the artist, collaborators,
photographers and authors. This publication is
copyright. Except in the context of research, study,
criticism, or review, or as otherwise permitted by
the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any
process without written permission.
National Library of Australia cataloguing-in-
publication:
Author: Wing, Jason, artist.
Title: Jason Wing / Jason Wing, artist,
Matt Poll commissioning editor, Garry Jones, writer.
ISBN 9781920781538 (paperback)
Subjects: Wing, Jason.
Art—Australia—21st century.
Other Authors/Contributors:
Poll, Matt, editor.
Jones, Garry, author.
Artspace Visual Arts Centre, issuing body.
709.94
Commissioning Editor: Matt Poll
Production Editor: Caraline Douglas
Copyeditor: Claire Armstrong
Designer: Ricardo Felipe
Image Processing: Spitting Image
Printer: Carbon8
Publisher: Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Ltd
Artspace Visual Arts Centre
43–51 Cowper Wharf Road
Woolloomooloo NSW 2011
Sydney Australia
T: +61 2 9356 0555
F: +61 2 9368 1705
artspace@artspace.org.au
www.artspace.org.au
Artspace is supported by the Visual Arts and Craft
Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and
Territory Governments.
Artspace is assisted by the New South Wales
Government through Arts NSW and the
Australian Government through the Australia
Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Artspace is a member of CAOs (Contemporary Art
Organisations of Australia).
Residency Donors
Rhonda McIver
Peter Wilson and James Emmett
Studio Donors
Anonymous
Peter Braithwaite
Karilyn Brown
Julie Garis
Cynthia Jackson AM
Kiong Lee
Lisa Paulsen
Pillar Donors
Carol Austin
Henry Ergas
Sandra and Paul Ferman
Barbara Hunter
Leuver Design Pty Ltd
Charmaine Moldrich
Deborah Patterson
Becky Sparks and James Roland
Tony Stephens
Ursula Sullivan and Joanna Strumpf
Government Partners
Visual Arts and Craft Strategy
Arts NSW
Australia Council for the Arts
Project Partner
Arts NSW
Media Partner
Time Out
Matt Poll has worked in numerous museums and
galleries in the greater Sydney region over the past
decade, including Wollongong City Gallery, Museum
of Contemporary Art, Boomalli Aboriginal Artists
Co-operative and the Macleay Museum. Matt is
currently undertaking a master of philosophy by
research in the faculty of arts and social sciences
at Sydney University. His research project explores
the modern South East Australian Indigenous
communities response to Indigenous artefacts
held in museum collections and how contemporary
visual artists have interrogated and reinterpreted
the historical legacies associated with museum
collections of Indigenous artefacts.
Garry Jones is an Indigenous printmaker, painter
and sculptor and has exhibited locally, nationally
and internationally. Jones was awarded a Fulbright
Scholarship in 2003 and since 2007 has lectured
in Creative Arts at the School of Visual Arts at the
University of Wollongong. In 2000 he won the
Australian Indigenous Heritage Art Award, Art of
Place, in the works on paper category for a charcoal
drawing titled Thirroul. Garry is currently pursuing
a practice-led PhD in visual arts, at the Australian
National University, focusing on the role of visual
arts in urban Indigenous identity and community
cultural development.
front cover
bronze, 60 x 30 x 30 cm, edition of three. Collection
of the National Gallery of Australia. Photo: Garrie
Maguire
inside front cover
An Australian Government Initiative, 2011
paste-ups in Newtown, Sydney of digital photographs
on metallic fuji flex paper

back cover
Duty Free, 2013
timber, glass and model ship. Photo: Adam
Hollingworth
All images courtesy of the artist unless otherwise
noted.

Jason Wing

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