薛美龄 IMAGE ARCHIVE

FAUNA

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During the second half of the 2000s, artwork gained national recognition for large scale papercut renditions of animals in migration.

The first site-specific installation was held by the Queensland Art Gallery in their emerging artist program called Starter Space. It depicted 1000 moths flying east to west. It was inspired by a migration of butterflies I observed whilst living in Central Queensland. Not unlike human migrants, moths relocate in search of favourable conditions to breed. The generation does not return to their place of origin.

Cane toads are the central motif in a second series using animals as allegory. Whereas the invasive species is maligned in Australia, toad are considered auspicious in China as symbols for prosperity. In some of my compositions they are depicted consuming frogs. Do migrants intend to assimilate or consume the cultures that they enter?

Poultry is another reoccurring symbol in my artwork. 'Like a chicken talking to a duck' is a Chinese idiom describing the difficulties in communicating across regional dialects. Roosters are traditional symbols for protection and the government. Ducks symbolise fertility. In my compositions I also reference the difference in their characters; roosters are territorial and many varieties of ducks are migratory. With titles like Offshore Processing, many of these artworks critiqued the migration policies of the Howard Government.

Since mid 2014, I have also been creating artworks examining the influence of metrological events in the global distribution of species. Precipitation references the raining of sea perch in Lajamanu, about 550km southwest of Katherine in the Northern Territory in 2010. The fish were thought to have been extracted from the ocean by a waterspout. Another artwork illustrates an iguana rafting to the Gallipolis Islands from the Amazon Rainforest on debris after a storm.