2021 Annual Address - Culture Fever: The Importance of the Arts by Professor Nicholas Jose
The Australia-China Institute for Arts and Culture at Western Sydney University hosted the 2021 Annual Address in person on our Parramatta South campus on 27 May 2021. We were very privileged and greatly honoured to have Professor Nicholas Jose to deliver the Annual Address entitled Culture Fever: The Importance of the Arts.
Vice-Chancellor's Opening Speech PDF, 465.35 KB (opens in new window)
Professor Jose's Annual Address PDF, 340.59 KB (opens in new window)
Professor Nicholas Jose
Professor Nicholas Jose has made tremendous contributions over the last three decades to cultural interactions between Australia and China, particularly in contemporary art and literature. He was Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy Beijing from 1987-1990. His recent publications include, as co-editor, Everything Changes: Australian Writers and China - A transcultural anthology (2020) and Antipodean China: Reflections on Literary Exchange (2021). He was pivotal in establishing the influential China Australia Literary Forum (CALF) in 2011, a biannual ongoing program between the China Writers Association and Western Sydney University, where he is now an adjunct professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre. He was Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University in 2009-10 and has taught at universities around the world, including Beijing Foreign Studies University and East China Normal University. He is now Emeritus Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide.
Professor Jose is also a highly esteemed writer, best known for his fiction and cultural essays. He has published seven novels. Avenue of Eternal Peace was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Prize in 1990 and adapted for television. The Custodians was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, South-East Asia, in 1997. A collection of his short fiction, Bapo, appeared in 2014. He was general editor of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (2010). His research interests include Australian literature, literary translation, cross-cultural writing and contemporary Chinese art.
Book Launch
The book
Antipodean China is a collection of essays based on a series of encounters between Australian and Chinese writers, which took place in China and Australia over a ten-year period from 2011. In the current climate, this collection presents what may be seen, in retrospect, as an idyllic moment of communication and trust. As the writers spoke about the places important to them, their influences and their work, resemblances emerged, and their different perspectives contributed to a sense of common understanding, about literature and about the role of the writer in society. This is seen particularly in the encounters between Tibetan author Alai and Indigenous author Alexis Wright, and the two winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Mo Yan and J.M. Coetzee.
The collection, edited by Nicholas Jose and Benjamin Madden, features writing by important Chinese and Australian authors, including Brian Castro, Gail Jones, Julia Leigh, Yu Hua, Sheng Keyi, Xi Chuan and Zheng Xiaoqiong, and translators Eric Abrahamsen, Li Yao, Natascha Bruce and John Minford.
For this event, we have also invited six special guest speakers to celebrate the importance of the arts and Professor Jose’s outstanding contributions to the arts and cultural exchanges between Australia and China.
Guest Speakers
Guan Wei graduated from the Department of Fine Arts at Beijing Capital University in 1986. From 1989 to1992, he completed art residencies at the University of Tasmania, Australian National University and Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. In 1993, he immigrated to Australia. Guan Wei is known for his distinctive style that combines Australian and Chinese influences and his symbolic visual language that maps the outlines of an imaginary world, merging eras and empires, and eastern and western philosophies. Guan Wei has held more than 70 solo exhibitions, including Guan Wei: A Case Study, Museum of Art & Culture Lake Macquarie (2020); Guan Wei: MCA Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2019); Cosmotheoria, White Box Art Centre, Beijing (2017); Salvation, ARC ONE Gallery (2014); The Journey to Australia, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2013); Spellbound, He Xiang Ning Art Museum, Shenzhen, China (2011); Other Histories: Guan Wei’s Fable for a Contemporary World, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney (2006–2007); Looking, Greene St Studio, New York (2003); Zen Garden, Sherman Contemporary, Sydney (2000); and Nesting, or the Art of Idleness, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (1999).
Liu Xiao Xian is a Sydney-based contemporary artist. He was born in Beijing and received a Bachelor of Science in Optical Engineering at Beijing
Professor Ivor Indyk is founding editor and publisher of HEAT magazine and the award-winning Giramondo book imprint, and Whitlam Professor in the
