First Car

First Car, curated by Sherry Zheng, is a photographic exhibition that utilises new and archival photography techniques to explore the immigrant experience, in particular the Asian-Australian diaspora.

This group exhibition ran from 12th of July to 17th of August 2025 at Puzzle Gallery (Eora/Sydney), featuring largely archival images contributed by over 15 artists and creatives identifying with the Asian diaspora. Accompanying these images, printed and projected onto the walls of the gallery, was an installation featuring Sherry Zheng’s first car, a 2006 Gold Honda CR-V. Inviting viewers to enter the vehicle to view the slideshow projection like a drive-though cinema, Sherry created an immediately intimate space to celebrate the motif of the immigrant‘first car’.

We’ve encountered many an uncle who moved to Australia and became taxi/Uber drivers, more confident in their memory of roads than language. A means of mobility, income and even anonymity - First Car is a portal of sorts, that commemorates the sentimental value of cars as more than just vehicles in immigrant families.

As newcomers to a country that never belonged to its white settlers, our Asian-Australian predecessors felt the car was a borrowed space they could call their own.

Collecting stories and archival images from the Asian diasporic community that document first generation Asian immgrants’ first cars, I examine the highs and lows of the first-generation immigrant experience through this motif, and what role the car plays in the process of their adaptation and assimilation in a new country.

Like my own dad, many first generation immigrants documented their first ride using photography. These photographs resemble one of the fleeting, evanescent highs in the immigrant experience - and this is what I want to capture and celebrate through this exhibition.