Hello! 你好 (néih hóu)!

My name is Steven Finch. I'm an writer and community artist currently based in Albany, Western Australia. I am a community artist who writes poetry sometimes. I have been the editing manager of a literary journal, the chair on the board of an artist-run gallery, a wandering poet in a yurt, project officer of a youth arts festival, and for a very short time, a leader of an eco-cult.

Here are a selection of images from projects I have been involved in.

Photos by Erin Kelly, Paper Mountain, Yvonne Doherty, and Danica Zuks.

My Cantonese name is Kau Gok-Lim. I think this is it in Chinese: 厹國令.  My mother didn't learn how to write in Chinese, and I hope to learn. This year I have been exploring generational trauma in my bloodline, and how that trauma feels present in my body today. I have been thinking about what it means that I am Australian of mixed-race ancestry, and the violence that brought me here.

I have decided to explore myself as colonial and the colonised, as Chinese and English, through an art project called Oracle Bone. My father was born in '41 during World War II in Brighton, UK, and grew up in an orphanage. When he was still young, he was shipped off to Sydney, Australia. He was very alone. My mother was born on Christmas Island. My mother’s mother, my Poh-Poh, was Hokkien. Her husband, my Kong-Kong, was Cantonese. He was a worker at the phosphorus mine in a British colony, and he passed away from tuberculosis in the hospital on Christmas Island. He was very poor. I know fragments of these stories.

This project will be foundational to a lot of my future practice - I am exploring who and why I am as a person and artist. For now, I am exploring Oracle Bone through the following confirmed projects:

• A creative research project at the State Library of WA. Together with the artist Gabby Loo I am a James Sykes Battye creative research fellow for 2018. We are researching migrant histories in our state records and working with Culturally and Linguistically Diverse organisations to expand upon the state records, allowing many different state residents to add tjheir histories to our state historical record. From our research, I will be creating Oracle Bone, and Gabby Loo will be creating Be Nice, an ongoing collaborative project with CaLD people creating DIY fashion, as well as exploring what it means to Be Nice in personal presentation as a PoC.

• a video work to be shown at Critical Animals as part of the This is Not Art Festival entitled Oracle Bone 2 甲骨 二: Lum States 林 國.

• a solo exhibition of calligraphy, speculative fiction, Chinese tarot cards, and an illustration at Sawtooth Gallery.

• a divination performance in a geodesic dome to be performed at various festivals.

I hope for it to be an ongoing project of speculative biography, exploring all aspects of myself and my cultures. 

Oracle Bones were part of the first library in China – ox bones and turtle shells used for pyromancy – characters would be carved on the bones, and then burnt, cracking and revealing hidden details of the future. For me, this suggests identity, meaning and providence as relations to our future made possible through materials of the earthly present. I understand divination as not the determination of the future, but an unraveling of hidden aspects in our present, a speaking of unspoken threads of conversation. This is not an authentic Chinese identity that I am seeking, it is a way of positioning myself in the uncertainty of what I am - those types of Chinese identities, like myself, may not be relevant to actual China, but they have their place in our cultural imagining.

Speculative fiction is a way of making hope and a way of making home. I have been interested in the concept of Asia-Futurism, an idea of embracing otherness and familiarity, the future and the past, in one's identity - a way of becoming Chinese without becoming imperial, or of becoming my many identities. 

I have never felt comfortable as myself and I sometimes wonder who I am... I think of this project as finding a way to reconcile myself and my twinned destinies, and perhaps offering a way for us all to find a way to understand what it means to exist now. This is a tremendously important art/life project for me, and I hope to share it with you all, and to discover how I might best be useful in the world.

Thank you to my current and future collaborators on this! Gabby Loo, Desmond Tan, Pia Fruin, Alina Tang and others!

I'd like to acknowledge that this project takes place on Aboriginal lands, and that my connection to my own heritage and culture occurs because of the custodianship of First Nations people, and I'd like to pay my respect to all elders past present and emerging. The place that I call home is on the land of the people of the Noongar nation, and this project tales place on the lands of the Kulin Nation, the lands of the Palawa people, and the lands of the Awakabal and Worimi people.

Photos by Bob Symons.

I am asking for seed money and interest to begin this project. I am putting in as much as I can to this, because I believe it is worthwhile to all to see examples of connecting to culture, redefining culture for the future. Every tiny bit that can help me in this formative time for the project will be so worthwhile and valuable! Even just being interested and believing too will help! Each reward itself is more than worth the money that you put into it. Each of you that supports me will receive very worthwhile things from just a little bit of support!

And your money will go towards these things:

Materials for the construction and design of a custom bamboo geodesic dome $1500

Payment to videographer Pia Fruin for documentation of project $600

Art materials and supplies including calligraphy set, Cantonese opera makeup, paint, printing and research books $510

Printing of Custom Chinese divination card decks $390

(Extra funds will go towards printing more for crowdfunding rewards and making more money to support the project)

If I reach my stretch goal of $4000 the extra money will go towards workshops with Gabby Loo and I facilitating storytelling and art making with diverse communities. I truly believe that what we are doing together will help many people of all migrant and cultural backgrounds. And it will be a joy to work with Gabby Loo on this.