Born from the rich combined heritages of mainland China and the Ngarrindjeri peoples of South Australia, Damien Shen combines drawing with a wet-plate collodion photographic process to explore traditional imagery through a personal, documentary lens.

For this exhibition, an extensive search through archival images of ancient Chinese paintings led Shen to discover that his family name harkens from China’s Song Dynasty period. To create a self portrait that reconciles forgotten ancestry, known heritage, ancient past and immediate present, Shen has put his own likeness over an image of the Emperor on a horse, before placing the figure onto the Coorong (Ngarrindjeri homelands), alongside his immediate Ngarrindjeri family.