Photography/ Halfway Seen Halfway Home 半窥半归 by Ming Liew and Will Wang at PhotoAccess until September 19. Reviewed by CON BOEKEL

In launching the exhibition Chaitanya Sambrani, Associate Professor of Art History at ANU, noted that with a camera in your hands you create a here and a there.

The camera thus mirrors the experience of migrants, always in a state of being both here and there while never being fully at home anywhere.

Liew and Wang are Chinese migrants living in Australia. They returned to China for a trip and recorded the seven videos exhibited here.

As a first-generation migrant, I expected this exhibition to resonate personally. It did, but it did so with special Chinese characteristics. I sensed strongly that my lack of knowledge of China limited my full appreciation. The subtitles are a boon.

The videos are fascinating. They succeed in capturing footage, particularly of people in streets, that is both somewhat familiar and somewhat discordant. The artists are at home, but they are not quite at home.

In one of the videos there is a discussion between the film makers and a local. The former explain that they are tourists. China is a large enough and diverse enough for the migrant experience to happen as an internal event and, indeed, China has just experienced the largest internal migration event in world history. Dissociation from home can be caused by domestic or by international migration.

One of the videos features the Nanjing Bridge over the Yangtse River. The bridge is a link to personal relations with grandparents. It was also the first major national infrastructure project under Mao. It features heroic revolutionary sculptures. While avoiding a spoiler, I can state that the discussion with a local around the bridge is both insightful and disturbing.

Another video features a visit to a catholic church, complete with a Santa. It is absorbing. The huge Christmas Tree features generally featureless yuletide baubles – except for a traditional Chinese red lantern hanging awkwardly from near the top. There is no altar, but the stained-glass windows with gothic arches along with the familiar Stations of the Cross – in gold – remain. Santa is plundered of his little bags of peanuts before he can get all the way through the crowd. Again, the familiar and the unfamiliar jangle.

I would have liked to have seen a video which directly focused on families, on the hometowns, and on homecoming. These tend to clarify the migrant dilemmas most intensely.

Diverging political trends in the home country or the destination country can also lead to issues of belonging. As a migrant I live with increased personal tension because of current politics around migration in both Australia and The Netherlands. This exhibition is an antidote to that anxiety.

The camera helps integrate the here and the there by way of our shared humanity.

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