Open Monument, 2015

OPEN MONUMENT, 2015
Permanent architectural monument, Len T Fraser Reserve, Ballarat

Open Monument is a major public artwork acknowledging the history of the Chinese in Ballarat. It consists of a group of lasered stone and marble slabs arranged in a grid, which depicts individuals and stories from the local Chinese community who made Ballarat their home after the gold rush. From the rear, the monument resembles a shovel embedded into a grassy mound, a reference to Ballarat’s history of gold mining. Adjacent to this structure is a 30 odd meter timeline embedded into the ground, in which paved stones list the key events for the local Chinese community for every decade from 1850 to 2010 and folding out to 2170.

Stories and images of pioneer translators; Chinese diasporic networks of gold miners that encompasses Southern China, California, Victoria, Central Otago in New Zealand, and Witwatersrand in South Africa; the walk that Chinese miners made from Robe to Ballarat in the 1800s to avoid the Victorian poll tax; Ballarat’s Joss House and Red Lion Hotel; Australia’s earliest bilingual newspapers; middle class leisure activities; market gardens; Chinese-Australian soldiers bound for WWII; and life on the goldfields, all of these can be seen in the drawings and photographs engraved within Open Monument.

The title Open Monument refers to the values of openness, elasticity and ambiguity that the artist hopes to convey, which stand in opposition to the permanence, finality and monumentality of the conventional public monument. This is most clearly represented in Timeline, which remains incomplete, with space left open for the local Chinese community to inscribe the significant events that have taken place in Ballarat once every decade. This allows the monument to accommodate changes in social values that occur over time, as well as to leave space for alternative, multi-cultural values and knowledges.