Academic collaboration underscores the Schaeffer Library’s growing role in facilitating innovative teaching and learning partnerships, and supporting creative, research-rich learning experiences across the University.
Schaeffer Library is proud to partner with Dr. Yvonne Low and students from the program Master of Art Curating, in unit ARHT6937: Exhibiting and Collecting Asian Art for an exciting, practice-led academic initiative. As part of a student-led research project, students will develop original exhibition proposals grounded in the Schaeffer Library’s unique collections. This hands-on assignment is designed to cultivate curatorial thinking, strengthen independent research skills, and encourage deep engagement with primary resources.
The top five exhibition proposals will be selected for public exhibition at Schaeffer Library from July to November 2025, giving students the opportunity to translate their scholarship into real-world, audience-facing displays.
This collaboration underscores the Schaeffer Library’s growing role in facilitating innovative teaching and learning partnerships, and supporting creative, research-rich learning experiences across the University.
Students showcasing their curated materials for the exhibition pitch.
People
Yvonne Low
Yvonne Low is a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney. She specializes in Asian modernities, gender and sexuality in Asian art, and curatorial practice, teaching across undergraduate and postgraduate programs. Her research recovers marginalized histories in Southeast Asian art and Chinese diaspora cultures, with particular focus on women's practices and artist’s networks. She employs decolonial, feminist, and digital methodologies to challenge canonical art histories and develop new frameworks for studying artists excluded from dominant modernist narratives – including watercolourists, left-aligned practitioners, and those working across amateur-professional boundaries from the colonial period to the present. Since co-convening the inaugural 2017 international symposium on Gender in Southeast Asian Art Histories, she has actively built this interdisciplinary field through multiple channels. She has co-organised three exhibitions on women's art and archives, and serve on the editorial committee of Southeast of Now Journal and advisory boards for major regional initiatives including “The Flow of History: Southeast Asian Women Artists” (AWARE/AAA) and “The Womanifesto Way” (Power Institute, DFAT). Current collaborative projects include a special issue on Feminist Writings in Southeast Asian Art and the Artists Trajectories Map (ArTM), a digital tool advancing comparative research methodologies.