Several Ways of Conversations, 2012 As a follow-up to Yarns Between Bubbles, this second collaborative project brings together Asian artists Li Wenmin and Yiwon Park in Seoul, South Korea. The mixed media works on paper explore themes of identity by responding to each other's mark-making, while also providing space for each artist to express their individual voice within the shared composition. Several Ways of Conversations, 2012 As a follow-up to Yarns Between Bubbles, this second collaborative project brings together Asian artists Li Wenmin and Yiwon Park in Seoul, South Korea. The mixed media works on paper explore themes of identity by responding to each other's mark-making, while also providing space for each artist to express their individual voice within the shared composition.

This body of work is an extension of the previous exploration of the solo exhibition, Forms on Edge at AIRspace Projects in 2016. The edges, forms and placements in space were the primary vehicle in image making and in assembling emotive narratives. For this exhibition, the change of material from plywood to paper clay introduces the sense of touch as the predominant form of expression in their making. Constellation in the Cranny AIRSpace Project 2.11.2018 - 16.11.2018 This body of work is an extension of the previous exploration of the solo exhibition, Forms on Edge at AIRspace Projects in 2016. The edges, forms and placements in space were the primary vehicle in image making and in assembling emotive narratives. For this exhibition, the change of material from plywood to paper clay introduces the sense of touch as the predominant form of expression in their making. The touch brought its metaphor into the visual realm. The reflexive nature of touch adds the reading of cause and effect in the constellation of these forms, creating a dynamic simultaneous back-and-forth feel, while the spatial considerations and placements integrate the negative space into the whole. This project aims to 'make sense' embodying the invisible and the affects of body memory and its processes. + These works remain experimental in their making. Air-dried paper clay has been widely used for intricate sculpture and craftwork, it is less common in its use as a painting support. The material introduces the fragile characteristic, dictating their process and handling. This in turn encapsulates the energy and care in their making, which ultimately lends the forms their intrinsic characteristics and identity. Photographed by Joy Lai & John Dennis ^

A record of works on paper submitted for Paper Contemporary, Sydney Contemporary 2023 2023 Paper Contemporary a Sydney Contemporary event

An installation of a charcoal drawing of 2 old trees by a river bank framed in gold coloured bamboo moulding with a lopped tree branch at SLOT's window space. Passing through Installation with charcoal drawing and lopped tree branch SLOT 23.10.2022 - 26.11.2022 Anie Nheu’s piece Passing Through is both an appreciation of nature and a consideration of the appreciation of nature in art. It began during a holiday on a farm at East Gresford beside Allyn River in the upper Hunter. Anie was struck by the beauty of thelandscape and the trees she saw. So much so that she began drawing them, on this occasion a casuarina on the left and a eucalypt on the right. Back in her Sydney studio and faced with the proposition of making something out of her time away for SLOT, Anie focused on her drawing.In a pile of some-one-else’s thrown-out junk she noticed an exquisite Art Nouveau frame, a style that celebrated organic form, in particular trees. It seems to have set the tone of Anie’s piece. Lovingly restored it embellishes the rawness of the Australian bush with an orientalist elegance. Like a giant piece of ikebana, a tree branch cut and re-assembled for the window space offers a counterpoint to the stylised representation of bamboo that frames Anie’s drawing of native trees - incidentally it is drawn in charcoal, the burnt fragments of trees, and is pointing out that the paper is pulped and processed timber taking the metaphor too far? Standing looking at the finished work I found myself thinking how many ways can you say tree in art? Anie commented that she saw it as commodification. She felt that the process of art is to make a commodity out of an experience. In this case the revelry found in nature. Sure, it’s not such a big thing, but in the hands of an artist it becomes that. Tony Twigg

A record of mixed media works on paper submitted for Sydney Contemporary 2019. 2019 Paper Contemporary a Sydney Contemporary event +

A work of installation of mixed materials: plastic serving plate painted in gold colour, abstract geometric painting on 3 panels of hessian used for coffee beans exports, and an Ikea child chair in white. Paean Installation with painting on hessian, plastic serving plate, Ikea chair SLOT 28.04.2019 - 01.16.2019 Like many artists, Anie Nheu sees her life reflected in her art. She feels that because her life went one way rather than another her art has permission to go that way as well. As this idea of representation grows it becomes an exercise in mapping that can chart life across generations. It can stretch to accommodate ancestors and locate the artist with in a pantheon of concerns that artists will often describe as their way of making sense of the world. Anie was born on the road, as she said “moving from place to place with my parents since the civil war in East Timor”. To live a life, as she sees it, in 3 parts, now drawn into a “harmonious whole”. This is the map she has given us. Sketched out on 3 hessian bags stitched together with twine and Anie’s painting that has settled across the surface in a way that does not obscure the origin of her bags - bags,metaphorically that she has lumped since her days in East Timor as an infant. Of course the work is a painting, symbolic of nothing more or less than itself. It gracefully observes the conventions of abstraction and achieves a beauty that is new to the hessian sacks. But Anie has included some jarring elements. The work is improbably placed on the wall, as if she were to continue working on it rather than display it for our considerationThere is a chair, arbitrarily placed that seems to contradict our preconceptions of scale. And far off to the side is a golden oval that might be something venerated. The painting that is a map has been given its own space; its own set of preconditions that is different to ours. It is somewhere else. Tony Twigg

An exhibition of engagement with materials through responding, making and assembling- a way of making sense of experience. Byproducts This body of work showcases a collaboration with materials. This collaboration generally occurred at two levels: the selection of materials whose lives originated for a different purpose, and the artist’s response to their inherent properties. They in turn are informed by a narrative of migration and its intergenerational effects. The plywood offcuts are remnants from previous projects, readapted into new work. Forms shaped by plasters and pumice intimate the byproducts of forced displacement and increased disorder. Cardboard boxes, an ambivalent material, are perceived as a symbol of a system designed to generate profit from cheap labour; here they suggest two readings, one is the drive of aspiration for a better life, and the other is a homage to those who delivered a better life to the coming generation. Working with these materials also demanded a response to the incidentals of their unexpected behaviour. Like gifting another vocabulary to a sentence, these incidentals pointed to the resolution of each work. The sense of these works, engendered through their materials and assemblage is at times contradictory, at others complimentary. It evokes senses of detachment and attachment, presence and absence, contact and separation, abandonment and reclamation, permanent and transient. Ultimately, the process of making is a way of engaging with the byproducts of displacements and emplacements. Working with the repurposed materials, and assigning them with a new identity, suggests a making good– reordering the disorder. Individual Works Installation View

An exhibition of abstract geometric painting on shaped marine ply. Forms on Edge AIRSpace Project 05-20 August 2016 One of the ideas that sustains Nheu’s visual exploration is the relationships the body forms in the space it inhabits. ‘Relationships’ encapsulates the experiences of a body in a myriad of affect and effects, both tangible and intangible. The background narrative is told through the female body of a perpetual migrant with a culture of birth that is predominantly patriarchal. Resettlement and adaptation brought changes in traditionally assigned roles. Negotiations for place and roles in the new community at large, and at a micro level within the family unit, were acutely felt. These ideas form the basis of the visual framework for the exhibition. Visually, the placement of paintings in an enclosed space becomes the metaphor in the process of resettlement. Like fields with no borders, encapsulated experiences are by nature inter-corporeal; identity is socially constructed and defined by borders and forms. The exhibition as a whole attempts to amass these two seemingly contradictory elements and dwell at its meeting points hedging edges to redefine place and space. The paintings are in effect formed by these edges where space and borders meet. The space the paintings inhabit plays an integral role in the composition of the exhibition. It is used literally in the context of the negotiation of space. Paintings are made with implied sustained emotions that define these ‘bodies’. The visual cues for these are surface treatments, shapes, quality of the edges where two spaces meet, and ultimately, how they claim the space they inhabit. Photographed by Joy Lai & John Dennis

Material Thinking & Art Making on the borrowed land of the Gadigal Wangal clans, the Eora people [Australia]. A visual documentation of art exhibitions featuring paintings, mixed media works on paper, and installation pieces. Installation view of Byproducts 2024

An exhibition of works on paper boards at Factory49, Marrickville. The project explores the interrelationship between the occupied and negative space using abstract geometric imageries, focusing on shapes and edges. On Paper Factory49 5.10.2017 - 28.10.2017 On Paper, is a small body of work planned for the Project Space for Factory49. These works continue the artist's interest in developing her visual language in bringing the invisible into the physical realm. The installation focuses on what is presented, and what is perceived, and how the two negotiate their coexistence in our day to day lived experiences. Visually, this is suggested through the feel of the body. This manifests in rendered, evocative forms and their distinct way of inhabiting their assigned space. Surfaces of these works serve as a metaphor for the site of exchange, where the body is simultaneously an active agent and a receptor of external influences. These intermeshed connections are drawn onto the surface with considered mark-making using various media. In the confines of this small space, the forms are arranged to frame the ‘connections’ they have with one another. The space created is intimate and subtly surreal, touching off a sense of wonder and imaginary dialogues that are at once universal and personal. The title, On Paper, relates literally to the use of paper as the material support for these works. At another level, this expression is used here in its usual sense: in theory, in writing, figured at face value. In day-to-day operations, what is on paper is constantly being negotiated with our inner perceptions: our understanding of what is perceived may not be the very understanding that props the spectre of what is perceived. Photographed by Joy Lai & John Dennis

An installation of abstract geometric paintings on shaped marine plywood, exhibited in SLOT’s window space. The work explores the notion of an obvious presence—something visually assertive yet deliberately overlooked to maintain the status quo or preserve a sense of equanimity. The Elephant in the Room Acrylic on marine plywood, soft plastic 355x220x90 cm SLOT 20.12.2015 - 20.01.2016 Anie Nheu’s art is about space. Most literally in this piece, it is the space between 2 pictures. This is the gallery exhibit almost always overlooked, the artefact essential to all museums, it’s the place where something isn’t, as Anie Nheu describes it, the Elephant in the room. In this piece, the gallery-like space around the work has been artfully “sculptured” into a form of equal importance to the objects that make up the exhibit. And it is the art of a dance. A painted colour doesn’t cover an entire surface; it leaves a colour behind that pushes the form back while correspondingly the wall pushes forward. At another moment holes cut in the work offer lagoons of white wall while offshore two islands of colour seem to have been deposited, “Spratley like”. This picture is not presented on a wall, it’s colonising the wall. Gently underlining the fact that it has taken ownership of the space. Gracefully wrapping around a corner in the wall and quietly stepping off the wall onto the floor this work has arrived in our space, subtly merging with our space as we observe its elegant form. In her notes on the piece, Anie Nheu describes her work as “identity formation” a process where the obvious can go unsaid. Here among the morphing relationships of her forms she reads the emotive content of the work that replicates her life as a migrant. Travelling with her parents from Taiwan through the 3rd world to Australia what might have been a firm foundation for most of us was fluid for Anie. Things have never been just one thing for Anie. And if we think for a moment few things are ever just one thing. This elegantly restrained work approaches the edges of most art and fearlessly steps across them. With out hesitation it side steps the self-serving clatter or transactional enterprise and in its place offers us poetry reflection and silences that otherwise would remain unseen, the elephant in the room, perhaps. ctre of what is perceived. Tony Twigg

Links or index to the selected exhibitions and projects. Selected Exhibitions Byproducts 2024 Flotsam jetsam 2024 constellation in the cranny 2018 ON PAPER the elephant in the room paper contemporary 2023 paean Passing Through 2022 paper contemporary 2019 Playbox forms on edge Several ways of conversations