In conversation: Melissa Chiu and Maud Page

The Sydney Asian Art Series, established in 2017, invites leading researchers from across the world to share their research on critical issues in early, modern and contemporary Asian art. 

This year’s theme What/where/when is Asian art? was created to foreground scholarship in a field long marginalised within Australian institutions. This ambition has revealed a central tension: how can a single platform encompass the diversity of peoples, geographies and cultural practices grouped under ‘Asian art’? 

To consider these issues, Melissa Chiu, current director of the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and incoming director of the Guggenheim Museum, New York, joins Maud Page, director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, to discuss the shifting landscape of contemporary Australian art. 

Their dialogue is sparked by And Still I Rise, an exhibition at the Art Gallery featuring 20 women artists whose practices draw on diverse cultural heritages and lived experiences. This exhibition is a lens through which to consider the transformations in the art world since the early 1990s, when Gallery 4A (renamed in 2009 the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art) and the Queensland Art Gallery’s Asia Pacific Triennial (APT) first carved out space for Asian and Asian–Australian voices. 

Chiu, who was the founding director of Gallery 4A, and Page, whose early curatorial career was shaped by the APT, will consider how far the field has moved beyond the diasporic and postcolonial frameworks of the 1990s. Their conversation will explore today’s more intersectional understandings of the transcultural, the Indigenous, and the decolonial, while also drawing on Chiu’s international perspective to reflect on the evolving global context. 

The 2026 Sydney Asian Art Series is convened by Yvonne Low and Natalie Seiz, and co-presented by the Power Institute and VisAsia at the Art Gallery of NSW.