In 1905 Englishman Lionel Terry shot dead Joe Kum Yung opposite 10 Haining Street in Wellington as a protest against Chinese immigration into the country.

Kah Bee Chow's one day sculpture Golden Slumbers, at 10 Haining St on August 31, is partly conceived as an imagined narrative of Joe Kum Yung's afterlife.

"Joe was a miner, destitute, alone at the time of his death with long-abandoned dreams of the elusive 'Sum Gum Saan', a new gold mountain, the faded promise of the Otago goldfields," says Chow.In 1905 Englishman Lionel Terry shot dead Joe Kum Yung opposite 10 Haining Street in Wellington as a protest against Chinese immigration into the country.

Kah Bee Chow's one day sculpture Golden Slumbers, at 10 Haining St on August 31, is partly conceived as an imagined narrative of Joe Kum Yung's afterlife.

"Joe was a miner, destitute, alone at the time of his death with long-abandoned dreams of the elusive 'Sum Gum Saan', a new gold mountain, the faded promise of the Otago goldfields," says Chow.The artist is creating both a fanciful wish-fulfilment and antidote to Joe's invisibility as his biography was eclipsed by his murderer Terry's folk-hero notoriety.

Chow draws a common aspirational connection between herself and Joe Kum Yung.

"We are separated by 100 years but Joe and I, as first-generation immigrants to New Zealand, perhaps shared in common the impossible and spectacular projected fantasies onto this land that drew us here."

Chow immigrated to New Zealand at age 12 and her delusions were less gilded but not less imagined, and age-appropriate.

"I held onto the prepubescent persistence that New Zealand would equate to my Southern Hemisphere Sweet Valley, as appropriated from sugar-coated American teen fiction."

This pool/pull of memory of things that never existed in New Zealand link Chow to the strangeness and tragedy of the delusions of grandeur that initially tied her, along with Joe Kum Yung and Lionel Terry to this place.

Project curator Paula Booker notes, "Kah Bee Chow's One Day Sculpture imagines and re-creates the gold miner's Sum Gum Saan but she also spatially and socially engages with the memory and disappearance of the things that actually did exist."

Wellington's Chinatown has disappeared, due to a range of circumstances including urban development and changing views towards immigrants that led to greater acceptance of Chinese migration to the suburbs. Golden Slumbers is built upon conversations with the present Haining Street community, the people who have an investment in its history and the Chinese community.

This is not an exercise of inserting history to a site that no longer remembers its past, but an attempt to study the perseverance of spatial and cultural memory in lieu of, or as a compensation for, its physical disappearance.

"Once regarded at the most notorious slum area in New Zealand," Wellington historian Lynette Shum notes, "Haining Street today is an industrial area that bears little indication of its sensationalist past."*

Image: 10 Haining Street, June 2008. Photo by Maia McDonald.

More information

Kah Bee Chow
Golden Slumbers
9am to 9pm Sunday 31 August 2008
Backyard, 10 Haining Street
Central Wellington

Kah Bee Chow's One Day Sculpture is made possible by support from Asia New Zealand Foundation and the Wellington City Council's Public Art Fund. Many thanks!

Reference
* Lynette Shum Remembering Haining Street: With Both Eyes Open (Accessed 9 July 2008)

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