INTERROGATING ARCHIVES: WHERE IS THE BUBBLE TEA?
by Dylan Goh | 10 November 2022
Essay for ‘Unboxed / Lahtipakitud’ - exhibition at Sydney Estonian House
Throughout my tenures at various cultural institutions, I would often be tasked with the interrogation of objects and works for inclusion into an exhibition or collection archive. Without question, I would: spend hours cold calling academics; trawl through yellowed books at the library; and strain my eyes to view 128KB thumbnail images on my laptop. Reflecting on the rigorous curatorial processes behind the archives of our local and national institutions, I could not help but ask: where is the bubble tea?
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In addition to being a quintessential drink from Taiwan[1], bubble tea is deeply embedded into meme culture amongst the Asian diasporic youth community. This is best represented by Subtle Asian Traits (SAT) – a Facebook group of almost 2 million people across over 99 countries[2].
SAT was founded in September 2018 by 9 students from Melbourne to exchange stories about their Asian upbringing and straddling multiple cultural realms. SAT itself has become a digital archive to document the vernacular, memes, thoughts and anxieties of Asian diasporic youth.
Below are some examples of bubble tea memes on Subtle Asian Traits
Figure 1: Paolo Mari Apeles, Bubble tea as a camera lens, 2022, meme; photo: courtesy the artist.
Figure 2: Ally Panda, LGBT = Let’s get bubble tea, 2020, meme; photo: courtesy the artist.
Figure 3: Wong Jul, Take this money, go and buy that Boba that you want so bad, 2019, meme; photo: courtesy the artist.
One explanation for the presence of bubble tea in SAT (led by a collective of Asian youth) and absence of bubble tea in our national archives is the historical link between archives and interpretations of national identity. According to Callahan[3], archives were regarded as repositories of ‘truth’. Authorities would manipulate archives according to racial and criminal typologies, thereby giving themselves ‘legitimacy’ to control colonised populations.
Through this lens, the absence of bubble tea in our museums and cultural institutions potentially belies a darker supposition – that diasporic communities have been (and continue to be) excluded from our national identity.
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Melbourne-based artist Phuong Ngo directly critiques this aspect of Western collecting institutions by appropriating archival methodologies in the The Bull Horn Research Centre. This ongoing project since 2020 involves the collection of Bull Horn Cakes – the Vietnamese version of croissants after they were introduced during French colonisation. Drawn from Vietnamese bakeries in Sydney and Melbourne, each Bull Horn Cake is: dried; washed in varnish; tagged with a date, location and unique identifying number; and packaged into an archival box.[4]
By presenting an archive of Bull Horn Cakes in The Bull Horn Research Centre, Ngo legitimises the labour of migrants within Vietnamese bakeries in discourse about our national identity. Ngo circumvents ‘due process’ of predominantly white curatorial panels[5] to spotlight the significance of Vietnamese bakeries in Australia as ‘one of the businesses that have supported a generation of refugees and seen their children navigate the class and racial barriers of white Australia.’[6]
Figure 4: Phuong Ngo, The Bull Horn Research Centre, 2020 – ongoing, Bull Horn Cakes, archive boxes, varnish, tissue paper, cardboard tags; photo: Matthew Stanton.
Ultimately, Subtle Asian Traits and Ngo highlight how the crafting of archives is contingent on who holds power over strategic goals for their presentation and guidelines for acquisitions. Without cultural leaders in decision-making positions, the experiences of diasporic communities will continue to be excluded from archives in our local and national institutions. However as SAT and Ngo demonstrate, another option exists.
Diasporic communities can decouple themselves from seeking ‘legitimacy’ from institutional archives. They can forge community-led archives and hold agency over its curation and presentation. And that is when we will finally see bubble tea in our archives.
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References
[1] E. Jones, 'Who invented bubble tea?', Taipei Times, 13 November 2018, https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2018/11/13/2003704115, (accessed 10 November 2022).
[2] Subtle Asian Traits, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/1343933772408499, (accessed 10 November 2022).
[3] S. Callahan, ‘Archive Theory’, in S. Callahan, Art + Archive, Manchester, England, Manchester University Press, 2021, pp. 56 - 84.
[4] E. Winata, ‘Phuong Ngo, Nostalgia for a Time That Never Was', Memo Review, 16 July 2022, https://memoreview.net/reviews/nostalgia-for-a-time-that-never-was-at-the-substation-by-amelia-winata (accessed 7 November 2022).
[5] Diversity Arts Australia, BYP Group, and Western Sydney University, Shifting the Balance: Cultural Diversity in Leadership Within the Australian Arts, Screen and Creative Sectors., Sydney, NSW, Diversity Arts Australia, 2019, pp. 1-50.
[6] T. Ngo, Ever Altered: Exploring the French Colonial Impact on Vietnamese Australian Diasporic Identity through Archival Art Practice, PhD diss., Melbourne, RMIT University, 2022, p. 114, https://researchrepository.rmit.edu.au/esploro/outputs/doctoral/Ever-altered-exploring-the-French-colonial/9922156313401341?institution=61RMIT_INST, (accessed 1 November 2022).