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Keynote Speaker: Simon Soon

Symposium Date: Friday, 15th November 2024, 09.00 am - 04.30 pm AEDT

Location: Conference to be held on Zoom, and physical venues will be provided in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Adelaide.

Please register here for the Zoom link and/or physical venues. 

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2024 marks the seventh year of the establishment of Asian Art Research Now, the annual postgraduate symposium of the Australasian Network for Asian Art (AN4AA). 

 

The postgraduate symposium has become a flagship event for the network, bringing together early-career Asian art researchers from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand to share their research-in-progress among postgraduate peers and experts in the field. 

 

The objective of the day-long symposium is to highlight and share the vitality and diversity of Asian art research being undertaken by current and recent postgraduate students and to foster supportive critique, feedback and conversations across institutions, as well as across the diverse geographies and temporalities of Asian art research.

 

As a platform for connecting with other scholars and emerging academics across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand and for sharing research in progress, we invite submissions from various academic backgrounds, including from MA (coursework or research) students to doctoral candidates, across the disciplines of art history, creative practice, arts management, museums and curatorship, and heritage studies.

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This year, it is our great honour to have Simon Soon, Lecturer in the Art History and Curatorship Program at the University of Melbourne to give us a keynote speech Shore to Shore: Thinking about Art through Distraction. 

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​Simon Soon is a Lecturer in the Art History and Curatorship Program at the University of Melbourne. His research interest spans the 19th- and 20th-century and has curated exhibitions, including Bayangnya Itu Timbul Tenggelam: Photographic Cultures in Malaysia, Ilham Gallery, Kuala Lumpur (2021). Soon is the co-founder and editorial member of SOUTHEAST OF NOW: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, a peer-review journal published by NUS Press and a team member of the Malaysia Design Archive, an archival, research and education platform on visual cultures of the twentieth century. He is also occasionally an artist, working chiefly through collaboration to explore cultural histories of the Malay archipelago. His practice focuses on the adaptive reuse of historical images found in the public domain to explore their myth-making and story-telling potentials.

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Reading art history, developing artistic research, and sustaining curatorial practice are often seen as inter-related but clearly distinct fields in the study of art. Drawing on historian Shigehisa Kuriyama’s concept of an archaeology of distraction, Simon will be reflecting on about how my seemingly disparate parts contribute to a sustained inquiry into the transnational cultural histories of specific forms and ideas. Emphasis is placed on investigating context alongside formal explanatory grids through the making, staging and theorisation of art, to better understand the capacity of sense-perception in distracting us from the commonsense and the complacent reading of art and culture in relation to history.

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Simon Soon, ‘The Tyger and The Navigator’, 2019, installation. Image courtesy of The Back Room.

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Program Schedule

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Opening Remarks: Russell Kelty, Art Gallery of South Australia & Yuexiu Shen, Art Gallery of South Australia / Flinders University

 

Panel one: Curatorial Practice In and Between Australia and Southeast Asia

Convener: Asep Topan, University of Sydney

Alison Eggleton, RMIT University

Madeline Bryne, LASALLE College of the Arts

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Panel two: Perspectives from the Contemporary Asian-Australian Diaspora

Convener: Hasina Chowdhury, RMIT University

Celline Marge Mercado, RMIT University

Yiwon Park, RMIT University

Ming Liew, RMIT University

 

Welcome back: Olivier Krischer, University of New South Wales & Alex Burchmore, Australian National University

 

Keynote Speech: Simon Soon, University of Melbourne

Host: Jennifer Yang, University of Sydney

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Panel three: Mobile Objects: Exchanges and Circulations of Material Culture Across Time

Convener: Ruihan Ma, University of Sydney

Mansoureh Rajabitanha, The University of Adelaide

Xinwei Xu, Edith Cowan University

Yuexiu Shen, Art Gallery of South Australia / Flinders University

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Panel four: (Re)Mapping Visual and Sonic Histories in the Asia-Pacific

Convener: Aulia Yeru, University of New South Wales

Gillian Daniel, The Australian National University

Louise Anne Salas, University of Auckland

Pratyay Raha, RMIT University

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Closing Remarks: Michelle Antoniette, Monash University, Tammy Wong Hulbert, RMIT University, and Akshatha Rangarajan, Monash University

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In-Person Venues

Sydney

Room A101, A Block
UNSW Art & Design
Oxford St & Greens Rd,
Paddington NSW 2021

Adelaide

Collab

Police Barracks Building Level 1

South Australian Museum, North Terrace,

Adelaide, SA 5000

Melbourne

Foresters Hall
Building 24.1.1
RMIT University
124 La Trobe St
Melbourne VIC 3000

Canberra

Australian Centre on China in the World
China in the World Building #188
Fellows Lane
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 2601

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