Lindy Lee, Untitled (2001). Acrylic, ink, wax & photocopy on Stonehenge Paper on board (3 panels)

Article released: Monday, 13 March, 2006

Construction, Connection, Community: Measuring Asian Arts Contribution to Contemporary Culture in Australia is a Linkage project between CCAP, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Asia-Australia Arts Centre and Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai. The project is grounded in the conviction that visual art plays a key role in furthering cultural understanding and is an important site for the negotiation of inter-cultural relations and the construction of a ‘multicultural’ Australia. From this perspective, Asian and Asian-Australian art constitutes a major cultural resource. However, despite increasing public interest in Asian contemporary art, this resource remains under-utilized within our cultural institutions, and insufficiently integrated into the broader academic study of culture.

Construction, Connection, Community will consititute a major study of contemporary Asian and Asian-Australian art, demonstrating how visual art negotiates the way that spaces are constituted, transformed and inhabited under the impact of immigration/migration, displacement, and certain forms of conflict or upheaval. The project, which involves taking a new theoretical approach to the field of visual culture studies, will also result in a PhD in curating Asian art and multicultural programming.

Combining cutting edge visual theory and a very practical focus on the work of community galleries, this project will provide a textured analysis of aesthetic engagement with the themes of community, construction, and the transformation of place and society – one that is more sustained and consolidated than the form of existing anthologies, catalogues or survey texts allows.