Presenting new and existing work from six Asian Australian and Asian artists, An Offering, A Burning, A Prayer explores how fire exists and transmutes in ritual and ceremony. The rituals that accompany Lunar New Year celebrations are incomplete without fire. The joss stick incense and paper is set alight, offered at temples and shrines to commune with our ancestors in the spirit world. Our freshly swept homes are cleansed with smoking sticks of sandalwood and agarwood, mixing with the flaming aroma wok hei wafting from a freshly fried batch of 伊面 [yī miàn] (longevity noodles). 

For millennia, First Nations peoples have often used fire in practices referred to as Cultural Burning, including small blazes set alight to clear underbrush and sustain new growth. This is vital as a practice to improve the health of Country and its people. In a way, these resonances of healing and rupture also speak to the themes of Lunar New Year practices–the new year representing a space for communal ritual, burning and familial ceremony.

Surrounding An Offering, A Burning, A Prayer are ideas of faith intersecting with distinctly contemporary modes of artistic expression, reinterpreting the everlasting legacies of traditional cultural practices by responding to our current times. For many, this Year of the Horse represents a breaking point, a tearing, a reset; a year of new beginnings and clear direction–an opportunity to choose differently. Fire Horse represents a new ferocity in movement.

In An Offering, A Burning, A Prayer, exhibiting artists Casey Chen, Choy Ka Fai, WeiZen Ho, Emma Pham, Jason Phu and Savanhdary Vongpoothorn personally harness the propulsive momentum of renewal. Through moments of meditation and celebration, we are gifted new approaches to consider how and why we participate in our enduring rituals, guiding us into an uncertain yet exciting future.