At the 20th Chinese Communist Party (CCP) National Congress, held in October 2022, something caught the world’s attention: there was not a single woman among the Politburo’s 24 members, breaking a tradition of two decades. While the number of women in key political roles globally is steadily improving, female representation in the CCP has worsened over time. There are several factors that have made the absence of women so severe in Chinese politics and in her IAC Culture Talk, Innocent Young Girls, Dr Minglu Chen, Senior Lecturer at Sydney University, will discuss the contributing factors through an examination of the ‘Innocent Young Girls’ assumption about female political leaders in China.

The Institute for Australian and Chinese Arts and Culture (IAC) at Western Sydney University is proud to present this new exhibition featuring two Australian artists of Chinese heritage, Dongwang Fan and Susan Chen. Every artist has a different relationship with traditions and takes a different approach to them. Artists of migrant backgrounds are bound to take a conscious path towards their cultural heritage, which in turn has a fundamental impact on their artistic creation. The artists in this exhibition are from different generations and had different childhood experiences. But their unique and surprising reconfiguration and transformation of traditions in their artworks both contrast and connect them in their creative depiction of tradition and contemporaneity.