This talk will be held online only as part of the Australasian Network for Asian Art program in 2024

ASSEMBLY is an exhibition featuring eight artists from different generations of migration from Hong Kong, in the wake of often transformational events such as the 1967 anti-colonial riots, the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, the 1997 Handover, the 2019 protests and subsequent passing of the national security law in 2020.

This talk will reflect on the exhibition as a form of assemblage, momentarily bringing together individual practices, experiences, and histories around the premise of shared origins. With a concern for the relationship between intergenerational memory and shifting identity, faced by all diasporic communities, the exhibition has embraced the resonance and dissonance between distinct artistic practices to explore the tension between individual and collective experience, in which Hong Kong remains a distant yet central presence, a source of gravity.

Dr Olivier Krischer is a historian and curator of modern and contemporary art and photomedia from East Asia and its diasporas. He is currently a lecturer in the MA Curating and Cultural Leadership at UNSW Art and Design, and lecturer of modern and contemporary Asian art history at the National Art School, Sydney. Previous curatorial projects include Wei Leng Tay – Abridge (2021) and Wayfaring: Photography in 1970s-80s Taiwan (2021, co-curated with Dr. Shuxia Chen); and he is editor and co-editor of John Young: The History Projects (Power Publications, 2024), Zhang Peili: from Painting to Video (ANU Press, 2019) and Asia through Art and Anthropology: Cultural Translation Across Borders (2013, with F. Nakamura, M. Perkins).

Image: Assembly exhibition view, CIW Gallery. Photography by RLDI Photography

The Australasian Network for Asian Art (an4aa) is a group of researchers including academics and curators from Australia and New Zealand working in the field of Asian art and visual culture. The Network and its affiliated listserv serve as a platform to share research, promote events and exhibitions, foster a scholarly community, cultivate interest, and act as a vehicle for advocacy.