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The Sydney Asian Art Series

The Sydney Asian Art Series presents its third and final year, leading international voices on early, modern and contemporary Asian art. This series of talks and events 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 and Sydney Ideas.

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.

In 2019 four speakers are invited to Sydney to address the annual theme, Art and Urban Cutlures. The images of intense urbanisation that commonly depict contemporary life in China, India or Southeast Asia, for example, easily obscure the fact that most of the largest, most cosmopolitan and prosperous urban centres globally have historically been Asian. From Isfahan to Edo, Kaifeng to Kolkata—cities have been major subjects, patrons and audiences for all fields of art. Indeed, the arts are part of the very fabric of urban life. In 2019, the Sydney Asian Art Series will explore the intersection of art, film and architecture in a range of Asian cities, historical and contemporary, considering urban spaces as sites of taste-making and sensorial plenty, as models for imagined futures, as vessels for us to recognise shared pasts, and as stages for the formation of political identities.

Our first Sydney Asian Art Series lecture, in March, is entitled Seeing Taste: Art, Cuisine and Urbanity in Safavid Persia/Iran. In the context of Isfahan, the capital city of the Safavid dynasty, Sussan Babaie examines the intersection of visual and gustatory experience as a self-aware obsession with ‘taste’, evidenced by works of art and historical cookery.

Time and date: 6-7:30pm, Thursday 28 March 2019
Location: Law School Foyer, University of Sydney Law School, Camperdown NSW 2006

In May, Malini Guha’s lecture Kolkata ‘Rising’: The Politics of Place in Recent Bengali Cinema considers how location shooting in recent films set in the city of Kolkata goes beyond documentation to reveal the aspirations, desires and anxieties concerning the city’s global future.

Time and date: 6-7:30pm, Tuesday 21 May 2019
Location: F23 Administration Building, The University of Sydney, Camperdown NSW 2006

In August, Yasufumi Nakamori will present a lecture at the Art Gallery of New South Wales entitled A History of Japanese Photography: Images of the City after Disaster. Nakamori is Senior Curator, International Art (Photography) at the Tate Modern.

Time and date: 2-3:30pm, Saturday 24 August 2019
Location: Domain Theatre, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney NSW 2000

In October, Cole Roskam will address the 2019 theme Art and Urban Cultures with his lecture Displaying Reform: Exhibitionary Architecture and the Early Reform Era in the People’s Republic of China. In his talk, Roskam will explore how a history of exhibitionary architecture that starts in the 1970s in China and abroad contributed to the Chinese Community Party’s efforts to reposition itself relative to the world at large, through the redefinition of urban spaces.

Time and date: 6-7:30pm, Tuesday 22 October 2019
Location: Law School Foyer, The University of Sydney Law School, Camperdown NSW 2006

Presented by

The Sydney Asian Art Series is 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 and Sydney Ideas.

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