UNSW Newsroom

Found in Translation: Jewellery Design that tells a Cross-Cultural Narrative
Words by Kay Harrison

The allure of Bic Tieu’s art-objects is self-evident. Working with metals, timber and lacquer, she makes jewellery and vessels inspired by Asian sensibilities. Svelte in form and intricately textured, they speak to the Eastern philosophy that the universe is contained in (sm)all things.

But Ms Tieu’s designs are more than just ornamentation. They are inscribed with narratives of cross-cultural identity. Her work is framed by both her emigrational experience and the contemporary Australian context, she says.

“We largely connect our identities to [our] cultures,” the educator, academic and alumna of UNSW Art & Design says. “I create jewellery and objects to shift [these] intercultural values and perspectives.

“It is a form of translation that is about preserving memory, capturing history, material technology, hand skills and perspective.”

Her approach marries traditional artisan crafts with modern technologies, hand with machine skills. Through this hybrid approach, her visual design language connects “past and present, East and West, and old and new”, she says.

Ms Tieu grew up in Sydney’s Southwest with traditional Chinese values. Her heritage is Australian-Chinese via Vietnam, with generations of her family migrating from mainland China to Vietnam to Australia to escape poverty and the politics of the Vietnam war. Ms Tieu herself was born in an Indonesian refugee camp en route.

Her family home was shaped by Feng Shui and filled with orchids and succulents (a family side-business), and black lacquered decorative panels with mother of pearl inlay. These ornamental pieces were brought back from return trips to Vietnam.

Chinese cultural beliefs prescribed everything from which direction to face when sleeping to what sacrifice to make for an ancestor to carrying Buddhist paper amulets to ward off bad energy, she says.

Her work explores this transnational experience and aesthetic, realising the complexity of cross-cultural identity through her use of diverse forms, techniques and visual language.

“As a migrant woman of [the] Southeast Asian diaspora living in-between eastern and western experiences, I see my work as a continuous dialogue,” she says. “In creating work which draws from my intercultural perspectives, the jewellery and objects I make form common and relatable narratives of a shared [migrant] experience.”

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