Sydney Asian Art Series 2021

Patrick Flores is Professor of Art Studies at the Department of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines, which he chaired from 1997 to 2003, and Curator of the Vargas Museum in Manila. He is the Director of the Philippine Contemporary Art Network. Among his publications are Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1999); Remarkable Collection: Art, History, and the National Museum (2006); and Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008). He was the Artistic Director of Singapore Biennale 2019 and is the Curator of the Taiwan Pavilion for Venice Biennale in 2022.

Patrick Flores is Professor of Art Studies at the Department of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines, which he chaired from 1997 to 2003, and Curator of the Vargas Museum in Manila. He is the Director of the Philippine Contemporary Art Network. Among his publications are Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1999); Remarkable Collection: Art, History, and the National Museum (2006); and Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008). He was the Artistic Director of Singapore Biennale 2019 and is the Curator of the Taiwan Pavilion for Venice Biennale in 2022.

Phaptawan Suwannakudt (born in Thailand, 1959), trained as a mural painter with her late father Paiboon Suwannakudt and led a team of painters that worked in Buddhist temples throughout Thailand during the 1980s-1990s. She was also involved in the women artists group exhibition Tradisexion in 1995 and in Womanifesto. She relocated to Australia in 1996 and completed MVA degree at Sydney College of the Arts, The Sydney University. She has exhibited extensively in Australia, Thailand and internationally including Traces of Words: Art and Calligraphy from Asia, Museum of Anthropology, UBC, Vancouver, Canada (2017) Retold-Untold Stories, Chiang Mai (2014) and Sydney (2016), Thresholds: Contemporary Thai Art, New York (2013) and the18th Biennale of Sydney: All Our Relations (2012). she is selected to participate in Beyond Bliss the Inaugural Bangkok Art Biennale, Thailand (2018-9) Most recently her work is included in Asia TOPA 2020, Art Centre Melbourne and The National 2021, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Her works are in public collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Bank Sydney, the National Art Gallery of Thailand and the National Gallery Singapore. www.phaptawansuwannakudt.com

Samak Kosem (b 1984) lives and works in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He works in the field of anthropology and is researching in Northern Thailand on transnational sexuality and the remaking of borders-bodies as part of his on-going PhD project at Chiang Mai University. Since 2017, he has merged social sciences and art practice to shape knowledge on queer studies and nonhuman subjects as portrayed through visual ethnography and assemblage art. His project focus on ‘queer Muslim’ in the Deep South border together with socio-cultural context of sheep and sea waves, later this project was part of the first edition of Bangkok Art Biennale in 2018. His art works on queer, nonhuman and migration have been presented internationally in galleries and museums.

Furuhata Yuriko is an Associate Professor at McGill University, Montreal, and has published widely in the field of Japanese film and media, and is author of Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (Duke University Press, 2013) and the forthcoming Atmospheric Control: A Transpacific Genealogy of Climatic Media (2022).

Sugata Ray is Associate Professor of South and Southeast Asian art in the Departments of History of Art and South & Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His research and writing focuses on climate change and the visual arts from the 1500s onwards. Ray is the author of Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850 (2019; winner of the American Academy of Religion’s Religion and the Arts Book Award) and co-editor of Ecologies, Aesthetics, and Histories of Art (forthcoming) and Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence (2020). He is currently writing a book on Indian Ocean art histories in the age of Anthropocene extinction.

Wu Mali is an artist, writer and curator, and is Professor at the National Kaohsiung Normal University in Taiwan.  As artist and curator, she is considered one of the founding figures of socially engaged art in Taiwan, and is the Chinese translator of publications such as Suzanne Lacy’s Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (1995) and Grant Kester’s Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (2004).