Lunar New Year message from AN4AA Coordinators! 🔥🐴
Olivier Krischer
Dear colleagues,
Happy Lunar New Year from the AN4AA Coordinating group!
Reflecting on the year that has just passed, we would like to recap some of the events we held, including recordings now available on the AN4AA Youtube channel, as well as reminding our community of our open Mailing List and pointing to some events in the year ahead.
Looking back at our 2025 AN4AA Talk Events
In 2025 AN4AA organised and co-organised a series of talks, in-person as well as online, with the aim of supporting art research related to Asia and Asian diasporas in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. AN4AA welcomes proposals from network members and colleagues for relevant talks and events, e.g. related to visiting researchers and artists, exhibitions, new publications and more.
See the AN4AA website for past and future events: https://www.an4aa.org/events.
3 April 2025
Art History and Curatorship Seminar: ‘Changing the World’? Soviet Socialist Realism and Art in the Asia-Pacific
By Alison Carroll, Senior Research Fellow, Victoria College of the Arts, Melbourne
Presented with the University of Melbourne
23 April 2025
Art in Hong Kong: Portrait of a City in Flux
By Enid Tsui, author and journalist, South China Morning Post
Presented with the UNSW Judith Neilson Chair of Contemporary Art and School of Art & Design
Friday 23 May 2025
Our Story: Aboriginal-Chinese in Australia
By Zhou Xiaoping, artist and curator
During the ‘Our Story’ exhibition, National Museum of Australia, Canberra
11 June 2025
Urban Playground: Beyond Consumption
By Woopsyang (artist, South Korea)
Presented with RISING, RMIT Urban Play Network, RMIT University, Melbourne
29 August 2025
Art History and Curatorship Seminar “The Poem is a Temple”: Artistic Art Histories (in Southeast Asia)
Roger Nelson (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
With the University of Melbourne
18 November 2025
Approaching Autonomy: Post-socialist Conceptualism in Chinese Art
Dr Yu-Chieh Li (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
2025 AN4AA Postgraduate Symposium & Keynote
AN4AA has an active group of Postgraduate Representatives, who again organised a highly successful AN4AA Postgraduate Symposium in August 2025 titled, “Re-(en)visioning the Past and Present of Asian Art”. The Postgraduate representatives were involved in all aspects of organising the symposium, including publicising a call for papers, programming the schedule, coordinating the keynote speaker, as well as moderating sessions on the day. The full program included four panels of postgraduate Asian art researchers, from across Australasia.
For the first time, a postgraduate hub for the symposium was also held in Aotearoa New Zealand. Fittingly, the 2025 symposium also featured a keynote by Dr Grace Gassin (Curator Asian New Zealand Histories, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa) titled “Cultivating Hope: Art, activism and the memory of Asian protest in Aotearoa” (recording online).
Postgraduate Talk Series & Upcoming event (26 February)
In 2025, based on the success of the postgraduate symposium, our postgrad representative group established the “AN4AA Postgraduate Talks” series to hold occasional talks highlighting postgraduate research. The first was held on 6 June 2025, “Flows and Fragments: Artistic Interventions on Rivers in Indonesia and Singapore”, by artists Dr Aulia Yeru and Fausta Tan. We are also happy to announce that the next Postgraduate Talks event, our first event for 2026, will be on the 26 February:
1pm, 26 February 2026 (AN4AA Postgraduate Talk Series: Session Two)
Mongolian Crosses and China in Chanoyu: Reframing Perceptions of Art and Material Culture
Speakers: Alexander Sutherland and Zixi Chen, University of Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand; moderated by Rusty Kelty (AGSA).
Further information: https://www.an4aa.org/postgraduate-talk-2
AN4AA Mailing List Lastly, we would like to remind members that AN4AA is organised as a platform for colleagues to share their own news with a broader community interested in Asian art research in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.
Once you have registered to the AN4AA Google group, you can use that email to post and share email messages by writing to: an...@googlegroups.com. We strongly encourage colleagues to share news of new exhibitions and publications, upcoming relevant events, as well as opportunities such as grants, fellowships and jobs—as well as research queries!
Our Members
The Australasian Network for Asian Art (an4aa) is a community of researchers including academics, curators and artists from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand working in the field of Asian art and visual culture. The Network and its affiliated mailing list serve as a platform to share research, promote events and exhibitions, foster a scholarly community, cultivate interest, and act as a vehicle for advocacy.
How to join AN4AA?
If you would like to share AN4AA with colleagues or students, they can join on the AN4AA webpage: https://www.an4aa.org/join. This will allow them to send and receive messages from the community mailing list.
You can also follow AN4AA events and announcements on our Instagram: @an4aa_aus
Look out soon for more announcements regarding our talks, the 2026 Postgraduate Symposium, as well as a call for Expressions of Interest to join our Postgrad Representative group.
🔥 Wishing you health and success in your endeavours for this Fire Horse Year! 🐴
AN4AA Coordinating Group
Michelle Antoinette (Monash)
Olivier Krischer (UNSW)
Rusty Kelty (AGSA)
Alex Burchmore (ANU)
Tammy Wong Hulbert (RMIT)