‘You do what you can with what you have. But I think that if I had seen myself or someone who looked like me in any of these stories, it would have made such a difference in what I believed was out there for me.’
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‘Art and language are cultural products, and culture by definition is communal and cumulative—texts, too, have genealogies; they move beyond their makers.’
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‘Skin colour and background are irrelevant when it comes to an ability to write.’
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‘As a queer photographer, I’m acutely aware of the role that technology has played in inhibiting expressions of homosexuality...’
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‘I think there needs to be a much more nuanced conversation about silence, and all the invisible barriers that prevent all of us from speaking out. Why is it that the victim of violence is expected to speak out? Why not the people around who can see that violence is happening?’
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‘I think a ‘home’ takes a while to build and I haven’t figured out the formula yet. I imagine it’s a place where I can feel at peace.’
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‘If love lives in the heart, I must have the words to outline exactly where it can be found—in that artery, that atrium. There’s specificity, but there’s also the feeling of the incantatory, the potential for magic. If you say the right words, something can change.’
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‘Literature and music deal with honesty, truth and fact in such different ways, and it’s cool to challenge that in a process of balancing and paralleling them.’
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‘The only reason we need to have specific diversity initiatives is that the industry, by default, is already skewed towards one side.’
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‘Coming across that casual reference to Melbourne as a publishing backwater was sobering, and a reminder that for all that new technologies have lowered the cost of entry, cultural behemoths are still created in a few geographic centres.’
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‘[In my] Visual Arts Degree...There was no cultural competency whatsoever. I thought the arts was meant to challenge the status quo! I started asking myself—Why do I care so much? Why do I care about the stories that are left unacknowledged?’
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‘Though I admire memoirists very much, and in the glory of the internet age, the personal essayist, I can’t write like them. Yet all my poems are rooted inside my life...’
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‘At this year’s Sydney Writers Festival, I spoke about self-determination through literature. After the panel, I got approached by a White woman who asked me what places she should visit in Vietnam and how to pronounce Phở.’
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‘Part of me feels like coming out as a trans person has been the easiest part of my whole artistic career.’
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‘I viewed myself more as a leaking receptacle of culture than as an agent shaping and defining it.’
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‘The personal is political, especially for people from marginalised and minoritised groups, and to me, art is personal—so, then, art is political.’
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‘I’ve gone through many phases of being Chinese-Canadian: curiosity, realisation, ignorance, acceptance, and finally a full and forgiving self-embrace.’
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‘Don’t bully yourself by constantly comparing your work and your output to other people; some people work quickly and some more slowly, some have more time, or more access to materials.’
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‘As a person of colour, in the arts it’s an exciting time where for the first time it feels like voices and stories from diverse communities can just ‘be’, rather than curtailing to a white framework as a given.’
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‘I have been thinking a lot of the power imbalance between artists and curators / arts workers. Inequality runs so deep within this power structure. I believe that there is so much to be done, to be changed.’
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