“I was like, ‘Where are all the Asians expressing themselves and creating cool shit?’ So then I thought, why don’t I just create something where I can talk to them?”
It may feel like everyone has a podcast these days – a boom born from its relatively low barrier to entry. All you really need is a mic, a phone, and some self-belief you have something to say. But Asian in Aotearoa, an interview-style podcast hosted by Jenna Wee, arose out of a very personal discoverability problem. With a background primarily in agencies and comms, Wee told me that she was not in any way engaging with the Asian creative space prior to its inaugural episode in 2020, which featured actress Amanda Grace Leo. “In fact, I didn’t really have any Asian friends either.” But, yet, she was craving community. So how does one set out to find Asians doing cool shit? Start a podcast.
Asian in Aotearoa is an interview show: an in-depth, one-on-one excavation of a creative’s life, spirituality, background, romantic relationships and more. The work factors in, sure. But in focusing more on the person, rather than the work, the podcast’s job is to more thoroughly understand how “creatives” in Aotearoa live their day-to-day lives. The episodes pick up interesting anecdotes about financial survival, institutional racism, familial tensions, pathways to sustainable creative careers, and the bigger, more broader themes around happiness, identity and community. It doesn’t purport to assess the output. “I’m more interested in the personal process someone’s going through when they’re creating something than, like, ‘Go see this show’, you know?” As it says on the tin, the interviewees are always Asian and, according to Wee, “young-ish”, though that rule is fast and loose. “Under 40. Maybe. Am I aging out of my own podcast?”
It is an unfortunate reality that in the world of arts coverage, Asian art takes up a fairly small slice of the overall pie (2.1%, according to 2022’s Visibility Matters report). Despite its broad remit, with interviewees ranging anywhere from comedians to dancers to tattoo artists to sculptors to filmmakers to writers, Asian in Aotearoa is offering an alternative platform for artists and creatives to be profiled and, ultimately, be discovered by others.
Despite podcasts frequently appearing as the butt of many an industry joke (“does every white man need a mic”), it is, as a medium, a very legitimate format for reaching audiences. In 2025, according to The Infinite Dial report, about 36% of New Zealanders listen to podcasts at least once a week (up from 31% in 2023), and this increases to 47% in the 16 to 34-year-old age group. NZ On Air’s biannual Where Are The Audiences study revealed in 2024 that podcasts reach up to 17% of people in Aotearoa daily – and, also, that Asians, Māori and Pasifika consumers have a higher than average daily reach for podcasts.
It makes sense, then, that funding for podcasts is also on the rise. In 2024, Creative New Zealand, NZ On Air and RNZ announced a specific arts and culture podcast fund off the back of the New Mirrors report that analysed the current “national deficit” in arts and culture media coverage. The fund backed three podcasts with a grant total of $257,000. The first season of Asian in Aotearoa was a self-funded passion project, with Wee recording in her bedroom, and offering interviewees either 50 bucks, a coaching session or a tarot reading. Later, she received funding for two seasons of Asian in Aotearoa through the Asian Arts Fund, which allowed her to offer koha to interviewees, use a studio for recording, do more marketing, hire a producer, and film video, among other things.
In October, Wee received funding for season four of the podcast through the Asian Arts Fund. “It’s so competitive for funding. Like, I’m literally competing against people who I have on the podcast,” says Wee. “The main question that we’re always trying to answer on this podcast is: how is this going to be sustainable for me? And that question hasn’t really changed.”
The next season of the podcast will be a slightly different format: an “artists on artists” interview, akin to Variety’s “Actors on Actors”. “After four and a half years, it really needed to change, so that I’ll still be interested,” Wee says. “I work full time, and I’m not doing it for the money. At the end of the last season, I almost didn’t apply for the funding. I was like, do I really need to do the same thing? Plus, I was feeling guilty for taking funding away from other people.” The reasons behind the changes were mostly practical: it would be a more social-media friendly video format to clip and share (“that’s just how the algorithm works”); it would allow more people to discover the podcast; and, plus, it means you can platform more creatives. In an eight-episode season, that means 16 rather than eight, and was, most likely, a more appealing proposition on a funding application.
After almost five years of producing a podcast and interviewing creatives, I asked Wee if she would finally call herself a “creative”, that catch-all bucket term we always find ourselves defaulting to. “I probably wouldn’t put that label on me typically. But I would when I’m applying for funding.”
“The podcast is a form of arts coverage, but probably not in a traditional way,” Wee says. Interestingly, when I ask what makes her the most interested in an interview, it always comes back to spirituality. “My favourite episodes are the ones where they’ve done spiritual work. I ask the question, ‘How spiritual would you say you are?’ on every episode, because I see creativity and spirituality as being really, really connected. I especially find it interesting when people are talking about ancestors and ritual from their Asian perspective, and how that helps them ground themselves while all the creative work and mahi is happening around them.” There’s also a lot of discussion around reflection and compassion – and how this ties to the work. “I remember asking Jack Woon [a filmmaker] about what would be different if he had more love and compassion for himself. And he said, ‘Oh, my creative work would be completely different. It would be better’.”
Producing and hosting a podcast more or less by yourself does take some form of discipline, but it helps when the people you’re making it for are talking back. “I think when you’re doing something like a podcast and you’re in a room or in your studio and it’s just you and the other person, it feels quite intimate. But then you start getting feedback and comments and you forget that other people actually do listen to it. I don’t know, at the beginning I was like, okay, so 50 people are listening to this.”
Lewis Tennant, who runs his own long-form interview podcast Verbal Highs and conducted the largest study of New Zealand’s podcasting market, told Emile Donovan on RNZ that, “Most successful podcasts aren’t huge audiences like Joe Rogan. They go an inch wide and a metre deep. Compared to radio, it’s a small audience, but they’ll stick with you – and that’s very powerful.”
Wee recalls that while hosting Asian Diaspora Dialogues, a one-day conference for people in the Asian creative industries, a lot of younger Asian women would come up to her, saying how much they love the podcast. “It struck me then that it was valuable for the people that are emerging – the ones getting started.” This checks out, considering that much of the podcast is dedicated to the anxieties and challenges of trying to “make it” in Aotearoa, the little fish pond where it often feels like you’re constantly having to fight for opportunities.
