Jun-Ann Lam's North East South West -the Yellow Peril Virus

As a Malaysian of Chinese descent who last year gained Australian residency, digital artist Jun-Ann Lam knows full well the conflict that arises from living a multicultural existence. Among other things, her work concerns her journey through understanding her own culture and grappling with the complexities of learning to live within a new one. In broad terms her work North East South West-the Yellow Peril Virus is concerned with her encounters with cultural diversity.

Lam's romance with computer technology began when her father bought her an Apple Macintosh (her first) soon after arriving in Australia from Malaysia as a teenager in the 1980s. Seduced by the user-friendliness of the Mac, she began to experiment with basic programs like MacPaint and MacDraw. By the time she had finished her first degree in Philosophy at Monash University, Lam had decided that she would like to live and work in Australia. She decided to study graphic design at Swinburne University of Technology.

Lam's learning curve during her four years at Swinburne spanned not only practical and technical skills, but gave birth to an interest in multicultural design. During these years, she also experienced the confusion of attempting to fit into a new culture and trying to learn to design like Westerners. By the end of her degree, however, Lam had realised that she felt the need to rediscover her own culture. Her work has emerged from her journey across cultures, and in some ways results from the coalition of two ways of life. Lam sees multicultural design as being a reflection of who one is and where one comes from. She no longer feels the need to subvert her own culture to fit in to the Western way of doing things, and instead celebrates the possibilities that multiculturalism can engender.

North East South West-The Yellow Peril Virus was created using the Mac-based software Photoshop and Strata Studio. Nothing has been scanned and everything was created from within the computer. In this way Lam has utilised the technology in the same manner that an artist utilises paints and brushes-in this instance the screen is her canvas and the mouse and software her brushes. She describes her work technique as being akin to playing the piano, with one hand on the mouse and the other striking the keyboard in rhythmic fashion. The two interact in a way that Lam describes as seductive. Seductive is also a word that could easily be applied to her finished product.

North East South West-The Yellow Peril Virus is about the artist's encounters with cultural diversity. It concerns the transitional process that immigrants encounter when moving from one culture to another. It comments upon the need to acknowledge differences-cultural differences, gender differences, identity differences. It also comments upon the recurring fear of these differences and the fear of the unknown. The installation itself is structured in such a way as to create a space around the viewer. The work is entered by the viewer and forms a square around him/her as the work is viewed. The four digitally generated prints appear in light boxes which make up each side of the square. The Yellow Peril Virus is a feature of each print, and each print represents the virus in a different way-it mutates, traverses the earth, circles space, and travels with the wind. From an aesthetic and visual point of view, North East South West-The Yellow Peril Virus utilises Chinese symbolism. There are four walls in a square room, the light boxes are square, and the earth is round. In Chinese symbolism the square is a symbol of earth, while the circle denotes heaven. This work imitates the spherical component of a compass, but also relates to the Chinese way of describing the four points of a compass in a circular fashion, which is at odds with the crossed method (north south east west) which is favoured by Western culture. The work alludes to Western society's embracing of binaries and opposites, and to the Chinese celebration of fluidity and journey. In this way Lam's work also explores the idea of change and transition, regeneration, and life and death. In relation to Domestic Disturbances, Lam sees her work as relating to the Australian domestic scene, not just concerning home and family, but encompassing Australia in general-as well as her own mind and body-as domestic space.

While the cultural meanings of certain aspects of North East South West-The Yellow Peril Virus may be lost on some viewers, there are other ways of viewing the work. Lam maintains that, like life, there are many levels to her work, and that any number of meanings could be applied-each of them as relevent as the next. Because the work has had a long gestation period, she believes that the work is subtle and benefits from a second look. Lam tries not to be 'totalitarian' about the way people view her work, and she welcomes the opportunity to learn about her own work from the opinions of others. Accordingly, her work represents an ongoing learning process-expressing the need for continual remapping and rethinking. It makes sense, then, to learn that North East South West-The Yellow Peril Virus is part of a larger body of work entitled Death of a Chinese Australian Princess, which encompasses the changes that the artist has experienced both personally and professionally as a result of her multicultural reality. In this way her work can be seen as an ongoing project; each installation commenting and advancing upon the last, and bringing with it new aspects of the artist's journey.

© Lisa Daniel 1996
Lisa Daniel is a Melbourne-based writer

Jun Ann Lam's work tours throughout 1997-98 as part of the Domestic Disturbances exhibition.

MESH film/video/multimedia/art #10,MESH is published by Experimenta Media Arts