Alice Pung has written poignant memoirs of her life growing up in western Melbourne as the daughter of a Chinese Cambodian refugee family. Unpolished Gem provoked this response from The Australian: “Pung makes everything she writes about shine”. And for the sequel, Her Father’s Daughter, The Monthly wrote, “Pung has an extraordinary story to tell and the finesse to bring it, most movingly to the page.” According to Delia Falconer, Pung is “Happily out of the ordinary”.
In this essay, she trains her literary sights on the Thai-born ceramicist Vipoo Srivilasa. What strikes her particularly about his work is the quality of cuteness, which is readily dismissed in a serious art world. Cuteness is a popular dimension in much Asian art. In this essay Pung explores the phenomenon of cuteness by immersing herself in the world of Vipoo’s ceramics, even trying it herself in one of his workshops.
Her essay is available to Garland subscribers here.
Comments
Any clues as to how I can get this article to open? Am a subscriber.
thanks.
Subscribers can access the article by clicking the link above – http://garlandmag.com/article/the-colonisation-of-cute-exploring-the-work-of-vipoo-srivilasa/.
Clicking that link redirects me back to the Issues page. Goes round in a circle. Have emailed.
All the other articles open except this one, perhaps you could email me a PDF.
Hopefully our email response has resolved that. We’ve also removed the subscriber link as that may have been confusing.
Congrats Alice Pung on a great article…I loved it.Judy Holding