Lisa Pang (Lisa Sharp) The Crossing, 2020 - July 2020
Image: Tony Twigg
Lisa Pang (Lisa Sharp)’s work Crossing 2020 is an intersection. She describes it as being “emblematic of journeys we take, back and forth between places and positions.” It’s a meditation on hiatus and diversion at the behest of the unexpected, the accidental, and the unintended, which right now is Covid19. It’s also an exclamation mark sitting, with remarkable resonance where polarities leach into each other. Resonant of what you ask? And of course life is the answer Covid19 intervened, isolating Lisa in Sydney with her children and husband Jon, the Sharp part of her name. Her arrival here from Tokyo in March for a show at STACKS projects was but a single event in a life of labyrinthine crossings that began in Jesselton the capital of the British Crown Colony of North Borneo at about the time it became Kota Kinabalu the capital of the Malaysian state, Sabah. Lisa’s father, the Pang part of her name had arrived there from China when the British North Borneo Company ruled it. He travelled on to Australia under the Colombo Plan to study Architecture at Sydney University and returned with an 8th generation first fleeter, Lisa’s mum, Janis in 1966. At 12 Lisa was delivered to Australia as a boarding school student - the antithesis of indigenous - the product of layer upon layer of “journeys” stretching across the era of colonisation that in Northern Borneo dates back to the Castillie War of 1571, half a millennium ago.