The Sojourners celebrates the rich and vibrant journey and contribution of the Chinese community to Darwin. The project was a partnership program between Territory Craft, Museums and Gallery of Northern Territory and the Darwin City Council. Territory Craft, located in the grounds of MAGNT, provided a residency to the artist Greg Leong, enabling him to work within close proximity of the installation site, and a space to facilitate the community activity programs required to complete the installation. Many of Darwin community groups worked with Greg to make the two thousand flowers needed for the installation.

Leonie McNally, Executive Director of Territory Craft says, "Darwin has had little exposure to the breadth and depth of site-specific installation and the work by Greg Leong has been an important undertaking for both the territory and the partnership organisations."

In the history of Chinese settlement in Australia, Darwin holds a very special position. The Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory exhibition Sweet and Sour (1996) celebrated this fact. As the catalogue states, Darwin has historically been a gateway from Asia, and the relatively large population of Australians of Asian descent has given Darwin its unique identity. The exhibition recognised "the contribution of Chinese Australian families to the history and development of the Northern Territory", and celebrated "the important legacy of Chinese settlement in Darwin and its environs."

A sojourner is one who travels and visits, but whose stay is only temporary. Most of the first Chinese to come to Australia initially had no intention of staying here. In spite of strict immigration laws, brought in after the Federation of Australia in 1901, eventually, some Chinese sojourners did stay on. My artwork for the Museum commemorates the arrival of some of the first Chinese Australians and so combines themes of journeying, arriving and staying; of the eventual metamorphosis of the sojourner into a settler, a traveller who has decided to move on no further.

In designing this work I was influenced by the location of the museum, bordering the coastline where the Chinese arrived many years ago, with the site of a former Chinese market garden only hundreds of metres away. At high tide, my sojourners will seem to rise out of the sea, as though they were wading in to the shore. At low tide, they will have reached the shore as they clamber up the rocks to dry land. Each is 5 metres high, and 3.2 metres across. The designs on the three sculptural works are derived from those on ceremonial fabric banners and canopies at the Darwin Chinese Temple.

Territory Craft, one of the partners in this project with the Museum, provided invaluable infrastructure support, a large workshop space and, importantly, a welcoming and ever-helpful work environment during the seven weeks of my residency. Over 150 people from the community helped to make this work - including the Chung Wah Society, members of the Crafts Council, volunteers from the Museum, students from the Fashion School and the School of Creative Arts at the University and young volunteers from the Darwin High School. The two thousand plus flowers made by them include four of the most important in Chinese symbolism: the plum blossom, peony, lotus and chrysanthemum, representing the four seasons. These hold pride of place in both the central floral wreaths and in the appliquéd iconography.

A final note: what is an ephemeral work?

Ephemeral means short-lived or fleeting. Consequently, ephemeral art is not permanent and suggests that its existence is dependent on the effects of time. Typically, ephemeral art works are constructed for the hours, days or weeks of a particular art show. Longer-lived ephemeral sculptures may include documenting the degradation over time from the effects of weather and other physical impacts. In all ephemeral circumstances, the degenerative processes witnessed over time are acknowledged.

An important aspect of this work is that the brilliant colours of the fabric will immediately start to fade on exposure to the Northern Territory sun. Some will fade faster than others. In designing the work, a series of tests were carried out to discover which type of fabrics and colours deteriorate faster. Consequently certain fabrics were chosen a couple of which would lose most of their original colour within three weeks, while others might retain a brightness throughout the duration of the work's display. In particular the two types of silk chosen for the larger than life peonies and lotus will bleach pale first, while the predominant reds will hold their own for a while. The central wreaths where the lotus and peony are positioned refer to Chinese wreath forms used both on celebratory occasions and at funerals. The wreaths are therefore an auspicious symbol at the height of their colour, yet become funereal fairly quickly, thus at the beginning, loudly heralding the arrival of the Chinese in Darwin while finally quietly bidding farewell to these first Chinese Australians (the three Chinese calligraphic symbols on the wreaths, read from right to left in the traditional Chinese manner, together mean "people of Australia").

Greg Leong

The Sojourners by Gregory Kwok Keung Leong was a site-specific sculptural installation along the foreshore of the Museum & Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. The exhibition ran from 2 May - 30 June 2005.

Related links
The following textile exhibitions and articles were also featured in the July issue of Craft Australia's newsletter.

• Julie Ryder - Art and the bryophyte
• Nobel tapestries commissioned for the Australian National University
• National Handicraft Festival