A panel discussion on how artists and curators today are tackling the medium of history as an ethical project, featuring artists John Young Zerunge and Jenna Lee in conversation with scholars/curators Mikala Tai and Olivier Krischer.
Installation of John Young, OPEN MONUMENT, 2015, Permanent architectural monument, Len T Fraser Reserve, Ballarat.
Between 2005 and 2019, Hong Kong-born Australian artist John Young Zerunge created a body of work called ‘The History Projects’, exploring diasporic memory, transcultural identity, and what Young has described as an ‘ethical responsibility’ towards the past. This panel builds on themes from a major new publication discussing this cycle of works, The History Projects, edited by Olivier Krischer and published by the Power Institute.
John and Olivier will be joined by esteemed curator and writer, Mikala Tai, one of the book’s contributors, alongside artist Jenna Lee, who will participate in “And still I rise”, at the AGNSW later this year. Together they will discuss how artists and curators today are tackling the medium of history as an ethical project, navigating contentious and contending histories, and how art can still foster new forms of subjectivity and community outside the stubbornly narrow narratives of Australia's settler colonial history.
John Young: The History Projects
edited by Olivier Krischer
Between 2005 and 2019, Hong Kong-born Australian artist John Young Zerunge created 11 art series which he called ‘The History Projects’. This book is a critical guide to this expansive body of artworks, which explore diasporic memory, transcultural identity, and what Young describes as an ‘ethical responsibility’ towards the past.
Featuring more than 400 images, and a wide variety of texts—including new essays and interviews, key republished articles, poetry, artist reflections, and diary pages—this book is a definitive reference for Young’s transformative recent practice and its urgent reckoning with history as unfinished business. Contributions by John Young, Olivier Krischer, Carolyn Barnes, John Clark, Venita Poblocki, Caroline Turner, Jen Webb, Sylvia D. Volz, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Wolfgang Huber, Anette Simojoki, Thomas J. Berghuis, Jacqueline Lo, Marc Glöde, Brian Castro, Jennifer Mackenzie, Claire Hielscher, Nadia Rhook, Cyrus Tang, Pei Pei He, Sophie Loy-Wilson, Mikala Tai, Matt Cox, Claire Roberts, Aaron Seeto.
People
Jenna Lee
Gulumerridjin (Larrakia), Wardaman, and KarraJarri woman with Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, and Anglo-Australian (Irish and Scottish) ancestry. Jenna Lee’s practice explores language, materiality, and the transformation of inherited narratives. Deeply intrigued by what is lost in translation, Lee explores the spaces between words—the felt but unseen—capturing the subtleties that surround language. Her work channels these overlooked nuances into immersive installations, works on paper, sculpture, and multimedia. Working primarily with books, viewed as colonial artefacts, Lee interrogates dictionaries that have poorly combined First Peoples languages alongside Larrakia linguistics, using them to describe better the world she sees around her. Through deconstruction and reconstruction, she engages with materials that echo the past, revealing the hidden stories they carry. Her work seeks to uncover the unseen forces shaping our understanding of history and identity, drawing attention to what time has eroded and collective memory has suppressed. Lee’s practice has been recognised through numerous awards, including the 2024 Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize, the 2023 Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award (Emerging Artist), the 2020 Wandjuk Marika 3D Memorial Award (NATSIAA), and the 2019 Dreaming Award (National Indigenous Art Award, Australia Council). Photo: Anna Katsanevas.
Olivier Krischer
Dr Olivier Krischer is a historian and curator of modern and contemporary art in East Asia, as well as Asian Australian diasporas. He is interested in transcultural art, photography and intermedia practices. He was the curator of Assembly (2023) featuring eight Hong Kong-born artists, Wei Leng Tay – Abridge (2021), Wayfaring: Photography in 1970s-80s Taiwan (2021) and Between: Picturing 1950–60s Taiwan (2016). His publications include John Young: The History Projects (2024), Zhang Peili: from Painting to Video (2019) and Asia through Art and Anthropology: Cultural Translation Across Borders (2013, with Fuyubi Nakamura, Morgan Perkins). Krischer is a lecturer at the University of New South Wales School of Art and Design.
Mikala Tai
Mikala Tai is a curator, writer and academic. Most recently she was Head of Visual Arts at Creative Australia where she was the Project Director for Archie Moore's Gold Lion awarded kith and kin. She was previously the Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and before that worked freelance while lecturing both undergraduate and postgraduate at the University of Melbourne, RMIT and Monash University. Her expertise lies in contemporary Australia and Asian art and her work has always been characterised by collaborations with local, national and international organisations to strengthen ties between Australia and Asia. In 2015 she received her PhD from UNSW.
John Young
John Young Zerunge AM is a Hong Kong-born Australian artist known for his discursive and scholarly approach to art practice with an aesthetic and ethical commitment. His work draws on transcultural art history to explore the impacts of technology, migratory dislocation, and plural notions of time, resonance, and melancholia. Over the past two decades, Young has focused on two major bodies of work: The History Projects, which evolved from examining violence and benevolence in world historical events to visually re-imagining Chinese Australian history since 1840; and Abstract Paintings, a reassessment of technology’s devastation to bodily skills. Since his first exhibition in 1982 at Rosroe, Connemara, Ireland, Young has held over 80 solo and four survey exhibitions, including one at the Tarrawarra Museum of Art. His work has been shown at major institutions such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and is substantially held in collections including M+ Museum, Hong Kong. Young has also played a key role in regional cultural development, representing Australia in numerous exhibitions across Northeast and Southeast Asia since 1992. He continues to exhibit regularly in Australia, Berlin, and Hong Kong. This most recent book, John Young: History Projects, is published by the Power Institute, University of Sydney. Photo: Zan Wimberley.