Constellations of the Contemporary: Art / Asia / Australia (original) (raw)

Art and its `others': recent Australian-Asian visual exchanges

Australia and Asia: cultural transactions, 1994

1994 / 1997 ‘Art and its `others' - recent Australian-Asian visual exchanges’, 1997 ‘Art and its ‘others’ - recent Australian-Asian visual exchanges’, Dever, Maryanne, ed., Australia and Asia: cultural transactions, Surrey, Curzon Press, 1997, 196-213. There has recently been a great deal of activity in the Australian art world related to exhibitions of Australian art in Asia and of Asian art in Australia, and the publication of other literature. Perhaps the most significant of these exhibitions was the Asia-Pacific Triennale at Brisbane in September-December 1993 which brought together artists from the Asia-Pacific region with their Australasian contemporaries. This paper will analyze some of the explicit objectives of the Triennale activities alongside their implicit assumptions about Australia's place in Asia, and summarize what has structured debates about Australian art and Asia.

Asianing Australia: notes toward a critical transnationalism in cultural studies

Cultural Studies, 1996

Abstract This paper attempts to develop a critical transnationalist perspective in cultural studies from the localized cultural and political context of contemporary 'Australia'. It takes the Australian nation-state's current geo-economic and geo-political preoccupation with a so-called 'push into Asia'as a starting point for a questioning of dominant discourses of international relations and the place of 'Australia'within it.

Claiming Chinatown: Asian Australians, Public Art and the Making of Urban Culture

Journal of Australian Studies , 2017

Chinatowns have traditionally functioned as ethnic enclaves that were despised by the dominant Western culture, while functioning for Chinese immigrants as a refuge from the hostile white society they were surrounded by. In today’s globalised world, the meaning of Chinatowns has been transformed, as they have become more open, hybrid and transnational urban spaces, increasingly interconnected within the broader Asia-Pacific region. For Asian Australians, Chinatown may be a site of conflicting memories of Australia’s racist history and of cultural marginalisation and ethnic survival, but it is also—in today’s multicultural and cosmopolitan age—an area to be claimed for the expression of new Asian Australian identities. In Sydney’s Chinatown, public art projects by Asian Australian artists such as Jason Wing and Lindy Lee articulate some of the complexities and ambiguities of what it means to be Asian in Australia today.

When Modern Became Contemporary Art: The Idea of Australian Art, 1962-1988

When Modern Became Contemporary Art: The Idea of Australian Art, 1962-1988, 2024

This book is a portrait of the period when modern art became contemporary art. It explores how and why writers and artists in Australia argued over the idea of a distinctively Australian modern and then postmodern art from 1962, the date of publication of a foundational book, Australian Painting 1788– 1960, up to 1988, the year of the Australian Bicentennial. Across nine chapters about art, exhibitions, curators and critics, this book describes the shift from modern art to contemporary art through the successive attempts to define a place in the world for Australian art. But by 1988, Australian art looked less and less like a viable tradition inside which to interpret ‘our’ art. Instead, vast gaps appeared, since mostly male and often older White writers had limited their horizons to White Australia alone. National stories by White men, like borders, had less and less explanatory value. Underneath this, a perplexing subject remained: the absence of Aboriginal art in understanding what Australian art was during the period that established the idea of a distinctive Australian modern and then contemporary art. This book reflects on why the embrace of Aboriginal art was so late in art museums and histories of Australian art, arguing that this was because it was not part of a national story dominated by colonial, then neo‑colonial dependency. It is important reading for all scholars of both global and Australian art, and for curators and artists.

But where are you really from?: The ‘crisis’ of multiculturalism examined through the work of four Asian-Australian artists

Humanities Research

The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen a substantial shift in the ways in which issues of immigration, multiculturalism and citizenship have been debated in Australian political and public culture. As we near the end of this decade, 'multiculturalism' seems to be rapidly disappearing from government rhetoric (if not the political agenda altogether), with many analysts signalling a worldwide return to assimilation discourses. 1 In lieu of this, it is timely to unpack some issues related to the current 'retreat' of multiculturalism and proposed 'return' of assimilation.

Pacific artistic communities in Australia: Gaining visibility in the art world

The Australian Journal of Anthropology

This article shows that although Pacific arts began to be largely recognised in Australia in the 1990s, Pacific artists based in Australia remained mostly invisible in the contemporary art scene until the mid-2000s. I aim to demonstrate how Pacific artists and curators-who in some cases collaborated with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and curators-have made visible myriad Pacific identities and social trajectories in Australian cities. Exhibitions reveal and highlight multiple experiences of Pacific people residing in Australia, for whom Pacific cultures are partly mediated by the experiences of their relatives, popularised by museum collections and coloured by the gaze of non-Pacific people. This article is built around two cultural events that have not previously received scholarly attention, a group show curated in Sydney by Māori artist and cultural worker Keren Ruki and a triennial in Brisbane imagined and organised by Bundjalung Yugambeh