In a darkened gallery space, stunningly illusionistic porcelain lilies and lily litter—stamens, filaments, anthers, buds, bulbs, sepals, petals and leaves—lay on the ground, exquisite and vulnerable and fragile. Tracing a Gilded Trail, an installation by Rotorua-born, Tāmaki Makaurau-based artist Cindy Huang, is an emotive response to the devastating experiences of nineteenth-century Chinese migrants who came to Aotearoa to mine gold in Ōtākou Otago and Murihiku Southland, bringing with them and planting lilies that now grow wild near historic water races in the region. These are barely-there and often invisible histories, and the installation is accordingly quiet, one of the quietest object-based installations I’ve experienced, and yet, there’s a real weight, a thickness, to this kind of noiselessness—a story untold, some- thing left unsaid … a silencing? ...
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