Hauntings, Disappearances, Reappearances: A Conversation with Cathy Linh Che and Nikki Lam

Diasporic memories are always haunted: by distant homelands and by lost futures. In this conversation, New York based writer and filmmaker Cathy Linh Che will speak with Melbourne based artist-filmmaker Nikki Lam about their respective practices. How do you visualise what can’t be seen? How do you bear witness to a spectre? The conversation will be moderated by André Dao, and accompanied by a screening of Cathy Linh Che’s Academy Award shortlisted film We Were the Scenery (2025).

Filmed on location in Vietnam, the Philippines, and Long Beach, California, Cathy Linh Che’s We Were the Scenery is a short documentary based on the experiences of her parents, two Vietnam War refugees who, while in a refugee camp in the Philippines, were utilized as background extras in Apocalypse Now.

This event is presented alongside The Unshakable Destiny, a solo exhibition by Nikki Lam at George Paton Gallery. The Unshakable Destiny is a five-year modular moving image project on the spectres of Hong Kong. An exploration of memory, site and cinema, the trilogy contemplates art-making in the diaspora as a witness to the slippery political context of a homeland from afar, presenting a necessarily incomplete and peripheral story of post-2019 Hong Kong diaspora. 

Biographies:

Cathy Linh Che is a writer and filmmaker. She is the author of the poetry books Becoming Ghost, a finalist for the National Book Award, Split, and co-author of An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History. Her short documentary film We Were the Scenery was shortlisted for an Academy Award and won the Short Film Jury Award: Nonfiction at the Sundance Film Festival. She is Acting Co-Chair and Core Faculty in Poetry at the low residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Antioch University in Los Angeles and Executive Director at Kundiman, a nonprofit organization for Asian American writers. She lives in New York City. 

Nikki Lam is an artist, filmmaker and curator based between Naarm and Hong Kong. Their practice spans moving image, text, performance, curation and publishing—as discursive and fragmented forms to think about the time we live in. They see these forms of multiplicity as anchors for understanding migratory and diasporic experiences. They are co-director for Hyphenated Projects and Slow Burn Books. Following their PhD research in Hong Kong diaspora moving image, Nikki’s current research speculates the diaspora artist as a ghost in multiple worlds. 

André Dao is an author and researcher from Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. His debut novel, Anam, won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Voss Literary Award. In 2024, he was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist.

André was awarded the 2024 Pascall Prize for Cultural Criticism for essays published in The Saturday Paper, Meanjin and Liminal.

Content Warning

We Were the Scenery contains content of war and flashing lights sequences

Presented in partnership with Asian American Literature Festival and Liminal, as part of The Unshakable Destiny exhibition public program at George Paton Gallery, UMSU (University of Melbourne Student Union).