Monkey on Fire Horse

Sinag Fernandez
in response to '馬上封侯' by Audrey Goggin

There are many ways to mark a journey, to figure an identity. For artist Audrey Goggin, an immigrant of mixed heritage raised across multiple countries, identity is never a settled figure. In 馬上封侯, this takes on a child sitting atop a white horse, glowing, golden, monument-like, emerging from the dripping wild dark. Part autofictive, Goggin draws from a photograph of her Pākehā great-aunt Elizabeth on horseback, painting her own childhood face in place of her relative’s. She attempts to locate herself within a lineage, a horse finding footing.

Rendered in sepias, pale powder yellows, and cool ash greys, 馬上封侯 is reminiscent of old photographs long tucked away in a family attic. The artist’s studio feels like a magnified archive: large oil paintings drawn from cropped old photographs and handwritten letters sit alongside preparatory studies and their miniature source materials. In her practice, Goggin often reaches into her family’s archive. A large oil painting of illegible blue cursive, presented at the Eden Arts Art Schools Awards 2025, is taken from correspondence belonging to her great-great-aunt painter Rhona Haszard, a recurring presence in her work. In 馬上封侯, faint linear marks in the background echoes forms present in some of Hazard’s paintings. Deeply engaged with her family’s history, Goggin understands selfhood and family as relational and collective, “quite Chinese in sensibility,” she remarks, as opposed to the individualistic Pākehā worldview.

Where many of her paintings take only a fragment of their source image, an individual star, a point of memory, here Goggin zooms out to encompass the entire scene: the little rider, the horse, the hazy bush, and herself. In doing so, she figures a self from a constellation of images, histories, and stars past. Through zodiac sister constellations, Elizabeth, born in the 1930 year of the Horse, and Goggin, born in the 2005 year of the Monkey, 馬上封侯 forms a literal translation placing Goggin on her ancestor’s horse. In framing her Pākehā ancestors within Chinese cosmology, Goggin asks what it means to navigate a mixed heritage in a multicultural world, and to chart an identity and journey shaped by cycles, destiny, and intergenerational inheritance.

A double entendre, 馬上封侯 is also a Chinese idiom meaning ‘a rise in status’ or ‘swift career advancement.' For the artist, whose current final BFA year at Elam has been nothing short of prosperous and ridden with opportunity, the idiom feels more than apt. Her first solo exhibition and largest work to date, 馬上封侯 signals a swiftness in Goggin’s practice. The painting sees her depart from close-cropped scenes where figure and ground meld into one another, to a full figure rendering centred and stark against a dark receding field. Accustomed to careful and meditated mark making, here the paint is loose and wild, expanding and running as the artist extends her body across the canvas. These shifts mark a turning point in Goggin’s practice. Careers are often thought of as races: there is a jostling for position, a test for endurance. In the Chinese zodiac story, the Jade Emperor held the Great Race to determine the twelve-year lunar cycle. The order of animals crossing the river would determine their placement in the calendar, with their energy prophesying the trajectory of each year. Here, monkey on horse, Goggin reaches for the reins. Yet rather than a triumphant self-mythologising, the work reads as a moment of orientation, a turning towards the self at a moment of acceleration—a horse finding footing.

The horse carries other histories, a lore of conquest and empire. From battle chariots and Trojan horses of antiquity,¹ to the mounted occupations of the Mongols and Mughals,² then to the war horses of colonial Northern Europe that reached the shores of Aotearoa,³ the cavalry enabled expansion and territorial control, embedding the horse within narratives of power and domination. Equine portraiture in Western art is evidence of these histories, such as in Jacques Louis-David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801-1805) series and George Stubbs’s Whistlejacket (1762). Often portrayed mid-leap, domineering and ready to pounce, the visual grammar of the equestrian is that of military prowess, elite consumption, and aristocratic wealth. Goggin’s horse, on the other hand, comes to a halt, on pause and in reflection, vulnerable and haunted by the legacies it bears. Dripping marks and loose washes interrupt the monumental visual language of the heroic equestrian image, undoing the solidity and permanence that empire insists upon. Goggin, part Pākehā, part Chinese, and residing in Aotearoa, paints from within these histories in a nation where these legacies remain present and unresolved.

But the horse also carries less violent stories. In the Han and Tang dynasties, horse mingqi (mortuary objects) were kept in tombs, believed to guide the dead into the afterlife.⁴ By painting herself on the family’s horse, Goggin evokes a similar companionship and transforms the creature into a sort of mingqi, a mediator between lifeworlds: the dead are guided into the afterlife, an ancestor guides their descendant. In 馬上封侯, familial histories ride in tandem with broader collective memory, shaping identity and trajectory alike.

Monkey and horse coalesce into one, becoming both a monument and a relic. Through her practice, Goggin attempts to locate a self inside these entanglements and multiplicities, asking what it means to exist with an equivocal identity in a multicultural world. The work reflects on trajectories of whakapapa and her present moment as an emerging artist. Riding on histories, riding towards futures. The monkey and the horse, monument mid-journey, turn toward us, wishing for a prosperous year ahead.

1. David Chaffetz, “Horses for Heroes,” in Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires (New York City: W.W Norton & Company, 2024), 42–62.
2. David Chaffetz, “As Far as Our Horses’ Hooves Turn,” in Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires (New York City: W.W Norton & Company, 2024), 190–217; David Chaffetz, “Riding the Whirlwind,” in Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires (New York City: W.W Norton & Company, 2024), 220–296.
3. Emma Meyer, ‘Horses | Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand’, Te Ara, 2009, https://teara.govt.nz/en/horses.
4. Yuan Fang, “The Favorite Animal: The Horse As Minqi in Han Tombs” (Masters thesis, Cornell University, 2017), 27-37.