Maria Thaddea

But you’re not really, 2023

Multimedia screenprints

Maria Thaddea is a young Asian-Australian interdisciplinary, creative, ethnically Chinese, culturally Chinese-Indonesian-Australian, currently working on Gadigal Land.

‘But you’re not really’ is a silk-screened body of work that explores feelings of cultural inadequacy, reflecting on the sense of self and belonging within the diasporic community through process philosophy – a framework that emphasises the fluidity of experienced reality opposing traditional Western views of being and permanence. Informed by her cultural upbringing, these works take Indonesian and Chinese imagery and rituals and put an Australian twist to them – Asian, “but not really”. With a diasporic twist to the classic tear-away Chinese calendars and angpaos (red envelopes) mixed with Indonesian street food imagery, Maria Thaddea tries to represent and make sense of the intercultural disapproval present within the diasporic migrant community in hopes of eliciting intercultural and cross-generational understanding.