ART PRACTISE IN AOTEAROA
Tze Ming Mok, ‘Race You There’ Landfall 208, Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2004 (November)

Tze Ming Mok is a New Zealand political writer of Chinese decent. Her articles and blogs provide thought provoking comment on minority cultures and racial attitudes of mainstream middle New Zealand. In this article written for Landfall in 2004 she draws on personal experience of being an Asian non-Maori in Aotearoa. Mok provides personal anecdotes, relates experiences and incidents that resonated with her. Racial Marches, marriages of convince for politicians, Hikois, National Front protests are used as background. Where are you from? She’s asked time and time again.
Does the bystander effect highlight group prejudice or is it generalising the actions of a few individuals. A National Front member attacks Chi Pung in a violent race motivated attack. Bystanders ignored the Christchurch student for twenty minutes.
An anti-race march is organised as a result. Chi Pung “boycotted the very march she took the fall for (23)”. Pung believed that the root of white aggression was the failure for white s to see themselves as migrants. It seems “anti-racism is not as black and white (23)” as one might expect. “Fake visas are being sold by the leader of a Maori sovereignty group. What do they entitle? The ability to stay in New Zealand because of tribal affiliations. It’s a rip off of course, but the idea is not new. “The key for asserting migrant rights to belong in New Zealand is for all newcomers to see their presence as an entry by treaty”(23). This is why Pung boycotted the march; it seems “Pung had placed her finger on the trigger point (23)”.
New Zealand is ever changing. Whether acknowledged or not these changing elements work to inform the practice in which an artist engages, shaping their concerns in a direct or indirect manner. Mok writes with a certain biased, but she is able to expose larger under laying questions and issues. We are still working within a colonial mindset within middle New Zealand. But as Mok points out this is changing as the country responds to time and place. When something will “rise from the ashes of majorities and minorities (18)” and there will no longer be a dominant white population.