Jacquie Meng’s work explores diasporic cultural identity to portray this experience beyond a simple division between Eastern and Western cultures and geographies. Through her work, she portrays diasporic, migrant identity as an accumulation of experiences and cultural practices. This often involves a fusing of Chinese mythology and folklore from her childhood with memories, fiction, and imagery from contemporary culture. Cute and kitsch aesthetics are central to her work, for their association with her identity as a young Asian woman. Meng’s practice uses her personal experiences to encourage a broader repositioning of the diaspora to resist static categorisations of identity and culture.
In both painting and sound, Meng refers to a variety of cultural practices and artefacts. These include the Chinese children’s poem An Ode to the Goose, i-ching divination practices and water. She also references her current home of Canberra on Ngunnawal/Ngambri land using items such as UGG slippers and puffer jackets. Meng’s paintings draw together lived experiences of cultural difference with historical references to decolonial, narrative and landscape painting, including Chinese silkscreen and Japanese woodblock prints. Through her work, Meng emphasises how identity, culture, and spirituality can exist in an infinite number of ways that are constantly interacting and changing.
