In Conversation: John Young and Andy Butler

Join us for a conversation between guest curator Andy Butler and artist John Young, whose work provides a conceptual and historical touchstone for our current exhibition A Moment in Extended Crisis.

A Moment in Extended Crisis brings together artists who track histories and contemporary resonances of movement and migration that occur against the backdrop of large scale political upheaval.

The artists in this exhibition approach and process the intimate and personal worlds that are left in the long shadows of revolution, military interventions, exile, and emigration to the west. The exhibition asks how we carry these legacies across time and space, and how our current political worlds hold the traces of individual and collective experience.

About the speakers

John Young is a Hong Kong born artist who, since 1979, has had more than 80 solo exhibitions, and four survey exhibitions (including Tarrawarra Museum of Art and Drill Hall Gallery, ANU). His works have been shown in major exhibitions both in Australia and abroad, including at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and collected by the M+ Museum, Hong Kong. Young was seminal in establishing the Asian Australian Artists' Association in 1995, now the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. Since 2008, he has dedicated much of his work in developing a visual history of the Chinese in Australia (1840-1967). In 2020 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia for significant service to the Visual Arts as a contemporary artist and painter.

Andy Butler (born 1987) is an artist, writer and curator based in narrm/Melbourne. Recent independent curatorial projects include Always there and all a part (2017) at BLINDSIDE, Those Monuments Don't Know Us (2019) at Bundoora Homestead, and Steven Rhall & Sung Tieu: Statecraft (2024) at Monash University Museum of Art. Previously, he was Program Curator and Artistic Director (Acting) at West Space. His writing on art and politics has been published widely, including in frieze, The Saturday Paper, The Monthly, Art + Australia, Runway, Un Projects, as well as in various exhibition publications and anthologies. As an artist, he works across video and installation. Recent exhibitions include All-in-One Solution for Glowing Fairness (2019) at Bus Projects, Before the Tonsils Stop (2019) at Firstdraft, and Collective Unease (2022) with the Ian Potter Museum of Art. In 2024, he will premiere a major new moving image commission at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. He has undertaken residencies in Manila, Jogjakarta, Auckland, Sydney and Berlin.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.  

Image: John Young (楊子榮), Manchurian Snow Walk, Completed, 1979. Digital prints on rag paper, 68cm x 97.42cm (each). Courtesy the artist.