Hatched: National Graduate Show 2022 presents the work of leading emerging artists recently graduated from art schools across the nation. Since establishing Hatched in 1992 PICA has worked with generations of makers and watched many of them establish themselves as leading artists with enduring practices.
Selected by a panel of national and international artists and curators, the artists exhibiting as part of Hatched present a tantalising glimpse into the diverse and exciting practices of arts graduates in Australia, whose unique visions of the future are both urgent and compelling.
This year’s panel, who reviewed 61 nominations, consisted of Rohin Kickett (Artist, Perth), Pilar Mata Dupont, (Artist, Rotterdam), Llewellyn Milhouse (Exhibition Production Designer, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane), and Talia Smith (Artist and Curator, Sydney). The 25 artists selected for the only national graduate exhibition in the country will join some of Australia’s leading contemporary artists as Hatched alumni. Now entering its third decade, Hatched is an exciting signifier of future arts practice.
Finalist, Jacquie Meng, completed her Bachelor of Visual Arts (Hons) and Bachelor of Art History and Curatorship at the ANU School of Art & Design.
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 Meng’s paintings draw together lived experiences of cultural difference with historical references to decolonial, narrative and landscape painting, including Chinese silkscreen and Japanese woodblock prints.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.