Each year, the Sydney Asian Art Series gathers leading international voices on critical issues in early, modern and contemporary Asian art.
In 2020 the series embraced a new virtual format, and explored the intersections of art and visual technologies in the context of Mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan and South Asia.
Convened by Olivier Krischer, and co-presented by the Power Institute, the China Studies Centre, and VisAsia at the Art Gallery of NSW.
If the modern period has been described as that of the ‘mechanical’ or reproducible image, the contemporary is marked by a visual fluidity that saturates our lives in images. When much of our work or play is mediated by haptic screens, can we learn something about the genesis of such media from artistic cultures across Asia, then and now? How have image technologies been fashioned in the visual arts of Asia? With this theme we seek to encourage thinking about the ways in which technologies became visual media, and visual media were also forms of technology. As the production and conception of visual technologies shifted to Asia throughout the twentieth century, it is now important to reflect on how artists in this region used and shaped such technologies, in ways both resonant and distinct from their global peers, in moving images from contemporary Hong Kong to a photographic archive in South Asia; in the ink paintings of a 1960s Chinese coal mine; and right back to Japanese copperplate reproductions of art in 1880s Shanghai.
- Dr Olivier Krischer, Sydney Asian Art Series Convenor, 2019-present.
Series Convenor
The Sydney Asian Art Series has been convened since 2019 by Dr Olivier Krischer.
Olivier is an art historian, editor, and curator, and is currently the Acting Director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. His research focuses on the role of art theory and practice in modern and contemporary China-Japan relations, and more recently networks of artistic activism from Hong Kong and across East Asia. He is the co-editor of Asia through Art and Anthropology (Bloomsbury, 2013), and ‘Asian Art Research in Australia and New Zealand: Past, Present and Future’, a special issue of Australia & New Zealand Journal of Art (Taylor & Francis, 2016), and between 2011-2012 he was based in Hong Kong as managing editor of ArtAsiaPacific.
Since completing his PhD at the University of Tsukuba, Japan, Olivier has been a visiting fellow in the Institute for Modern History, at Academia Sinica, Taiwan, a post-doctoral fellow at the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University (ANU), and assistant professor in art history at the University of Tsukuba. In Australia, Olivier has held positions at the University of Sydney, University of Technology Sydney, and ANU.
In addition to his research and writing, at the Australian National University Olivier was the manager and curator of the CIW Gallery, where he curated exhibitions including “China and ANU: Scholars, Diplomats and Adventures” and “Zhang Peili: from Painting to Video” (co-curated with Kim Machan, Media Art Asia Pacific). He also established and co-programmed the Centre’s “Asia & Pacific Screens” film series (2013–2016), and was a board member and co-curator of the 2016 Canberra International Film Festival.
Series Sponsors
The series is co-presented by the University of Sydney’s China Studies Centre, The Power Institute, and VisAsia, with support from the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Originating in and celebrating the very latest and best scholarship in Asian art from around the world, this initiative complements the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ innovative exhibition program in Asian art, and the University of Sydney’s region-leading programs in the arts and cultures of Asia.
Events
To open the series, we welcome scholar Lisa Claypool, who will lecture on the theme of the “technological sublime” in the 1960s work of Chinese painter Fu Baoshi. In conjunction with this lecture, we will be hosting a special screening of Zhao Liang’s acclaimed 2015 film, Behemoth, with a short introduction by Lisa Claypool.
The Technological Sublime: An Ink Painter and a Coal Mine in 1960s China
The first lecture in the 2020 Sydney Asian Art Series. Delivered on Thursday, 17 September 2020.
Changing Image Practices in South Asia
Archives collectively address our alternating visual expectations and provoke new dialogues on the notion of a stable or authentic discourse.
Yu-chih Lai | Mediating Tradition: Japanese Copperplate Printing and Art Reproduction in 1880s Shanghai
Scholars have long noticed how the ‘Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (Walter Benjamin), following the invention of lithography, revolutionised the practice of art and its consumption in late-Qing China. However, few scholars have paid attention to copperplate printing, which was introduced to Shanghai commercially almost at the same time.
Yung Ma | Reimagining and Conserving the Disappearance of Hong Kong through Moving Image
Join us for our fourth and final Sydney Asian Art Series lecture of 2020 with Yung Ma, Artistic Director of Seoul Mediacity Biennale 2021, for his lecture “Reimagining and Conserving the Disappearance of Hong Kong through Moving Image”.
Roundtable | Revisioning the Present
With an eye to image cultures developing around us, Rahaab Allana (Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, New Delhi) has invited three practitioners to share a work of art, artefact, a poem or inscription – any object that embodies for them a source of knowledge about our past and future, which inscribes a moment that should live on and become a source of inspiration.