Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, 2023
“Just as people, things, and ideas have never stayed still, an object’s journey is not complete o... more “Just as people, things, and ideas have never stayed still, an object’s journey is not complete once it enters a museum collection. The ways objects are interpreted, valued, and shown continue to change according to research and display contexts.” These are the values of Melanie Eastburn, Senior Curator of Asian Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), a collecting institution with connections to VisAsia and private benefactors. For similar institutions the act of exhibition has become a transactional exchange between gallery and audience, continuously rotating acquired objects in and out of displays, devising novel approaches to theming and narratives, and attempting to address the perceived divide between historic and contemporary Asian art. Today, curation of Asian art has become a balance between the pervasive orientalist privileging of ‘tradition’ and the introduction of contemporary artists, narratives, and less exhibited cultures. This is a problem familiar to AGNSW, whose challenges in curatorially broadening the narratives associated with Asian art are evident across their programming. Correspondence, one of several exhibitions on display at AGNSW in 2023, is the latest in a series of iconic exhibitions, including Conversations through the Asian Collections (2014–16) and Go East: The Gene & Brian Sherman Contemporary Asian Art Collection (2015), that offer insight into the institutional collecting and exhibiting tensions surrounding Asian art at AGNSW.
Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, 2023
“Just as people, things, and ideas have never stayed still, an object’s journey is not complete o... more “Just as people, things, and ideas have never stayed still, an object’s journey is not complete once it enters a museum collection. The ways objects are interpreted, valued, and shown continue to change according to research and display contexts.” These are the values of Melanie Eastburn, Senior Curator of Asian Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), a collecting institution with connections to VisAsia and private benefactors. For similar institutions the act of exhibition has become a transactional exchange between gallery and audience, continuously rotating acquired objects in and out of displays, devising novel approaches to theming and narratives, and attempting to address the perceived divide between historic and contemporary Asian art. Today, curation of Asian art has become a balance between the pervasive orientalist privileging of ‘tradition’ and the introduction of contemporary artists, narratives, and less exhibited cultures. This is a problem familiar to AGNSW, whose challenges in curatorially broadening the narratives associated with Asian art are evident across their programming. Correspondence, one of several exhibitions on display at AGNSW in 2023, is the latest in a series of iconic exhibitions, including Conversations through the Asian Collections (2014–16) and Go East: The Gene & Brian Sherman Contemporary Asian Art Collection (2015), that offer insight into the institutional collecting and exhibiting tensions surrounding Asian art at AGNSW.
Uploads
Papers by Danielle Brown