Beyond Biennale Time: The Asian Watercolour Confederation and minor Contemporaneities
Art historian Yvonne Low introduces the often overlooked history of society-based, medium-specific exhibition networks, an important parallel to the much-analysed biennale explosion of the 1980s and 1990s.
This case study examines the Asian Watercolour Confederation (AWC), a regional exhibition network that operated across Asia from the mid-1980s through the 1990s, involving societies from Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand. Operating parallel to the much-analysed biennale explosion, the AWC created an alternative exhibition ecology grounded in peer validation, practice-based knowledge circulation, and horizontal regional cooperation.
I argue that the AWC as an artist-led network operated through a quasi corporate-diplomatic organisational model that was underpinned by friendship and art professionalism. The network’s organization around watercolour as medium, rather than nation or curatorial theme further enabled a pan-Asian alliance, operating within what Francoise Lionnet and Shumei Shih call “minor transnationalism” (2005). While existing exhibition typologies identify salon, regionalist, internationalist, and ethnic-based exhibitions in postwar Southeast Asia, medium-based exhibitions remain acknowledged but untheorized as a distinct type.
This case study addresses that gap, exploring how watercolour’s definitional fluidity across Chinese ink painting and Western watercolour traditions provided productive infrastructure for postcolonial Asian cooperation. It foregrounds the overlooked history of society-based, medium-specific exhibition networks that circulated “craft” knowledge rather than critical discourse, complicating canonical narratives of 1980s-90s Asian art dominated by curator-driven biennales and politically-engaged critical exhibitions.
Part of the Art History Seminar Series, convened by Mary Roberts and Nick Croggon, and presented by the Power Institute and the discipline of art history at the University of Sydney.
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Yvonne Low
Yvonne Low is a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney. She specializes in Asian modernities, gender and sexuality in Asian art, and curatorial practice, teaching across undergraduate and postgraduate programs. Her research recovers marginalized histories in Southeast Asian art and Chinese diaspora cultures, with particular focus on women's practices and artist’s networks. She employs decolonial, feminist, and digital methodologies to challenge canonical art histories and develop new frameworks for studying artists excluded from dominant modernist narratives – including watercolourists, left-aligned practitioners, and those working across amateur-professional boundaries from the colonial period to the present. Since co-convening the inaugural 2017 international symposium on Gender in Southeast Asian Art Histories, she has actively built this interdisciplinary field through multiple channels. She has co-organised three exhibitions on women's art and archives, and serve on the editorial committee of Southeast of Now Journal and advisory boards for major regional initiatives including “The Flow of History: Southeast Asian Women Artists” (AWARE/AAA) and “The Womanifesto Way” (Power Institute, DFAT). Current collaborative projects include a special issue on Feminist Writings in Southeast Asian Art and the Artists Trajectories Map (ArTM), a digital tool advancing comparative research methodologies.
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