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ABOUT
As night falls, neon lights begin to flicker, illuminating the alleyways of Chinatown. The streets become a riotous and chaotic play ground. Monstrous creatures creep out from saccharine candy-coloured purikura sticker booths. Cosplayers attired in anime kaiju costumes emerge from the darkness and battle on building tops. Up a flight of stairs opposite a $1 dollar peep show, karaoke revellers in sequinned balaclavas drink illicit moonshine, and krump to bump and grind videos.
Manhua Wonderlands presents a series of media art works developed by young artists in conjunction with Asian communities exploring and remixing aspects of pop, karaoke, street culture, and national identity. Manhua Wonderlands is the emerging arts component of MAAP: Multimedia Art Asia 2006 festival exhibition: out of the internet (and into the night), and takes an ‘out of the internet (and into the nightclub)’ approach to the presentation and creation of a series of satellite site-specific public exhibitions, and media art initiatives.
Manhua Wonderlands exists as the subterranean doppelganger to MAAP’s globally positioned international exhibition of internet works in museum spaces, and in lieu recoils from the bright glare of the white cube, and unfurls its tentacles into the grimy back-alleys, tunnels, and hidden clubs of Brisbane. The culminating exhibition and production of media works developed through community workshops and artistic collaboration through the support of the State Library of Queensland’s Mobile Multimedia Lab, are channels to immersive worlds of fantasy, escapism, and hyperrealism as it can be experienced in ‘real time’ in urban physical spaces with significant cross-cultural and subcultural presence and identity.
Manhua Wonderlands’ creeping arms extend an open invitation to come out of the internet, follow a menagerie of fantastical beings, and dive down the dark rabbit hole to the urban underground, to be encapsulated by Google Earth, the labyrinth architectures of the street, the pearl tea café, the purikura sticker booth, and the karaoke club.
Presented by MAAP-Multimedia Art Asia Pacific and State Library of Queensland, artists featured as part of the programme include; Jemima Wyman :: Van Sowerwine :: Alice Lang :: Luke Ilett aka Collapsicon :: Alan Nguyen aka 2 Pants Rotation :: Potato Master :: Madeleine King :: Sean Healy aka Jean Poole :: Spat + Loogie :: Produced by Thea Baumann through the Australia Council’s EPIC (Emerging Producers in Community) Initiative.
Producer & Curator: Thea Baumann
Executive Producer: MAAP
Design: Lucas Surtie
DVD Design & Authoring: Corin Edwards