Poetic Translation
Ziyi Wei, Angie Kilsby
3 Oct–28 Nov 2025
Angie Kilsby, Wai, 2025, moving image work, courtesy of the artist.
Poetic Translation is a moving-image exhibition that explores how identities are re-encountered, re-negotiated, and re-imagined across shifting cultural contexts. Here, translation is understood not simply as a linguistic act, but as a poetic and embodied process—one that unfolds between languages, places, and ways of seeing.
Rather than aiming for resolution or fixed meaning, the exhibition lingers in moments of misalignment, dissonance, and quiet estrangement. These works reflect upon the slipperiness of identity and the instability of belonging—where things don’t quite fit, and meaning is felt more than declared. In these unresolved spaces, translation becomes a method of reflection, intuition, and gentle undoing.
Featuring works by Angie Kilsby and Ziyi Wei, Poetic Translation brings together two practices that engage deeply with questions of return, hybridity, and diasporic experience. Both artists navigate the tensions between cultural inheritance and lived experience, offering distinct perspectives on what it means to inhabit—and translate between—multiple worlds at once.
ผู้สังเกต is a reflective vide work composed of found footage from a recent return to my homeland, Thailand. Through a Luk Khreung (half-Thai) lens, the work moves through the third space—where language, place, and self fracture folds into a quiet negotiation of belonging. Disrupting fixed notions of Thai-ness and the structure of Thai language, the piece meditates on cultural hybridity through moments of dissonance, estrangement, and re-encounter. In drifting between observation and personal archaeology, Observer becomes a lyrical act of looking—both toward home, and from its shifting edges.
ผู้สังเกต, 2025, Angie Kilsby, moving image work, courtesy of the artist.
Qiánniāng’s Journey West: Milan Odyssey / 黔孃西游纪行:米兰奥德赛 is a two-part documented performance filmed in a club in Guiyang. Staging a nail salon setting, pearl-chain constraints, traditional instruments, and red warning lights, it conjures webs of female labor at once seductive snares and inexhaustible engines of desire. The work interrogates hyper-consumption, gendered corporeality, and the attrition of ethnic culture under Western-capitalist regimes. Returning from Australia, the artist reconsiders the politicization of the Asian female body, exposing a dual misrecognition: the East’s estrangement from the West and the West’s fantasmatic Orient, where identity remains suspended in
displacement.
Qiánniāng’s Journey Southwest: Milan Odyssey / 黔孃西游纪行:米兰奥德赛, Act I, 2024, Ziyi Wei, video. Courtesy of the artist.
Qiánniāng’s Journey Southwest: Milan Odyssey / 黔孃西游纪行:米兰奥德赛, Act II, 2024, Ziyi Wei, video. Courtesy of the artist.
OFFSITE PUBLIC PROGRAM
Poetic Translation – An artist in conversation
Date: Friday, 14th November
Time: 6.30pm
Hybrid - online and in person
Location: Composite: Brunswick Mechanics Institute (270 Sydney Rd, Brunswick VIC 3056)
Join exhibiting artists Angie Kilsby and Ziyi Wei in conversation with facilitators Channon Goodwin and Shannon May Powell, as they reflect on their contributions to Poetic Translation and discuss themes of identity, cultural hybridity, and translation across languages and contexts.
Poetic Translation is a moving-image exhibition that explores identity, belonging, and cultural translation as fluid, embodied experiences. Featuring works by Angie Kilsby and Ziyi Wei, the exhibition reflects on moments of misalignment and quiet estrangement—where meaning is felt rather than fixed, and translation becomes a poetic method for navigating the spaces between languages, places, and ways of seeing.
This edition of MOBILE is being presented in collaboration with Composite: Moving Image Agency & Media Bank. Composite: Moving Image Agency & Media Bank is an Artist-Run agency dedicated to supporting artists’ moving image practices in Australia through exhibition, research, education and distribution.
Ziyi Wei is an emerging multidisciplinary artist based in Naarm (Melbourne), originally from Guiyang, Guizhou, China. Her practice spans sculpture, moving image, and installation, probing the fraught interplay between bodily autonomy and material excess. Informed by Anne Anlin Cheng’s theory of Ornamentalism, Wei examines how adornment inscribes desire, cultural memory, and the objectification of Asian women within global capitalism. Through a material language that fuses silversmithing, craft, and reconfigured ready-mades, she transforms jewelry and decoration into semiotic tools that critique commodification and displacement. A graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, she has received the Majlis Travelling Scholarship (2023) and the George Paton Gallery Award (2024).
Angie Kilsby is a writer and director whose work moves between narrative film and visual arts, exploring the fluid intersections of identity,
intimacy, and cultural memory. Angie is based between Bangkok and Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung Country (Melbourne).
Shannon May Powell is a poet, artist and somatic experiencing facilitator based on sovereign Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country. Their practice explores gender, sexuality and impermanence with analogue photography, text, video, somatic practice and performance.
Ming Liew is an Australian photographer and filmmaker based in Melbourne. Born in China and raised in Australia, Ming's practice finds its roots in his bicultural background. Informed by auto-ethnographical research, Ming creates video and photo-based artwork to examine and convey the migrant experience in contemporary Australia. Accentuating the paradoxes between lived experience and socio-cultural expectations, Ming uses his work to advocate for social change through cultural understanding.
Ming holds a Master of Fine Art from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Previously working as an architect, Ming holds a Master in Architecture from Tsinghua University and a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from the University of Canberra. Since 2016 he has participated in group exhibitions and screenings in Australia and China at such as the Bunjil Place outdoor screening program, Melbourne. Ming is the recipient of various Awards including the NAVA Ignition Prize. His work is held in private collections in Australia and China.
Channon Goodwin is an artist and artsworker whose work engages with collective, collaborative, and artist-run practice and forms of artist-led organisation building. Channon is the founding Director of Composite Moving Image Agency & Media Bank, and Convener of All Conference, an organising network comprised of 17 artist-led, experimental and cross-disciplinary arts organisations from around Australia. From 2012–2021, he was Director of Bus Projects, one of Narrm/Melbourne's longest-running Artist-Run Initiatives. He aggregates his various collaborative and independent videography work under Fellow Worker. In 2019, Channon was awarded an Australia Council for the Arts International Residency at ACME in London, where he examined the lineages of artists’ video and filmmaking cooperatives. He also edited Permanent Recession: a Handbook on Art, Labour and Circumstance (2019), published through Onomatopee Projects. This book is an enquiry into the capitals and currencies of experimental, radical and artist-run initiatives in Australia and the labour conditions of working artists.