Visual-Music Energies 2025

Joshua Hill is a highly regarded Australian percussionist who trained in traditional Korean Gugak drumming at the National Gugak Centre in Seoul and the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. He is a core member of Australia's leading new music percussion ensemble, Synergy Percussion. He has performed and recorded with many of Australia’s high-profile ensembles, including Ensemble Offspring, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra and Sydney Symphony, and the Melbourne Symphony. He is noted for his innovative cross-cultural collaborations within Synergy Percussion and Korea’s Noreum Machi.

Ying Liu is a Sydney-based erhu virtuoso, composer, songwriter, educator and researcher. She has established an international reputation for her compelling erhu performances and artistic individualism. She performed in many cities such as Beijing, Vienna, Dunedin, Auckland, Melbourne, Canberra, Wollongong, Gold Coast, and Sydney. Ying being featured on ABC, SBS, Channel 7, and CCTV. Her current research with the Western Sydney University is looking at “Exploring Quantum Entanglement in Erhu Voice and Its Relationship to Buddhist Philosophical Concepts, Aesthetics of Chinese Opera, Song Dynasty Style and Contemporary Australian Visual Art.”

Yuyan (Moncia) Tang is an accomplished musician and educator with a strong academic and professional music background. She graduated from Sichuan Conservatory in 2011, earned a Master of Education from Victoria University in 2018, and completed a Bachelor of Music (Honors) in Ethnomusicology from the University of Melbourne in 2020. Currently, she is pursuing a PhD in Creative Music/Ethnomusicology at Western Sydney University. Tang has won numerous international awards, including recognition as an Excellent Instructor at prestigious music competitions in Malaysia, Paris, and Macau. Her research explores the “‘voice’ of Chinese guzheng…integrating the interconnectedness of visual-music practice into Australian music performance.”

Chuqiao Zhao is a PhD candidate in the School of Humanities & Communication Arts at Western Sydney University. Chuqiao holds a Bachelor of Music Performance and a Master of Arts from the Shenyang Conservatory of Music. She is also a member of the Guzheng Society within the Chinese Musicians Association.

Mai Nguyễn-Long is an artist, academic and storyteller whose transient upbringing informs the tapestry of narratives that live through her work. Born in Tasmania to a Vietnamese father from Sa Đéc in Đồng Tháp province and a 4th generation Australian mother of Irish-Samoan descent, Nguyễn-Long’s formative years were spent living in Papua New Guinea and the Philippines.

Nguyễn-Long’s early academic commitments included Asian Studies, Art History, and Museum Studies. These experiences led to her work with an international health organization, becoming a 1999 Australian Youth Ambassador for Development with the Ministry of Health in Fiji. Since 1996 Mai has exhibited across a range of mediums including painting, drawing, media, mixed media sculptures and installation. In 2006 Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre commissioned ‘Phở Dog’, a work which would later have seminal impact on the development of her future creative practice.

As an adult, Nguyễn-Long lived in Australia and China. However, it was her reconnection with Vietnam that has had the most profound influence on the aesthetic and theoretical direction of her art. In 2015 a Copyright Agency Cultural Fund residency in the Hanoi ceramics village of Bát Tràng introduced Mai to clay. In 2023 she completed a practice-based doctoral program with her PhD thesis titled Vomit Girl Beyond Diasporic Trauma: Interconnecting Contemporary Art and Folkloric Practices in Vietnam at the University of Wollongong.

In 2022 she received much acclaim for her work in the 12^th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, with her newly commissioned ‘Specimen (Permeate)’ and ‘Vomit Girl (Berlin)’ clay sculptures. Curated by Kader Attia, the curatorial focus was decolonisation and repair. The 11^th Asia Pacific Triennial for Contemporary Art at QAGOMA is currently exhibiting Nguyễn-Long’s most ambitious installation to date, titled ‘The Vomit Girl Project 2024’. The artist now lives and works in Dharawal country, Bulli, and is represented by Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin.

Cheolyu Kim was born in South Korea. He received his Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Brooklyn College in New York and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Chung-Ang University in Seoul.

Since childhood, Kim has been deeply fascinated by the concept of flight, whether through seeds, leaves, insects, birds, balloons, planes, or even UFOs. Early experiences included hours spent following colourful balloons from the North, which carried political leaflets, and chasing various airborne objects. These formative encounters have significantly shaped Kim's dreams and artistic practice. In dreams, Kim often grappled with transparent flying dishes attacking their village or imagined navigating the skies. Despite an awareness of lacking wings, Kim simulated flight with his arms, symbolising a yearning to transcend physical limitations. This pursuit of transcendence led Kim to invest considerable effort in establishing personal parameters and interpretations through visual imagery. Kim's artwork emerges from the interplay between memory, imagination, and dreams, effectively dissolving the boundaries between the real and the fantastical. This process allows Kim to explore and articulate life’s complexities, providing a means for personal reflection and understanding. By navigating the intersection of the familiar and the unfamiliar, Kim’s work creates a dialogue between these realms, facilitating a deeper engagement with both.

Cheolyu Kim’s artworks have been widely exhibited in Korea, Australia, Indonesia, New Zealand and the United States. Cheolyu Kim is represented by Redbase Gallery.

Louise Zhang 张露茜 is a Chinese Australian multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the dynamics of aesthetics, contrasting the attractive and repulsive in order to navigate the senses of fear, anxiety and a sense of otherness reflecting her identity.

Zhang's work is inspired by horror cinema, Chinese mythology and botany, adopting and placing symbols and motifs in compositions of harmonic dissonance. Her practice explores Chinese mythology – paintings, sculptures and scroll-like banners that incorporate demons, dismembered body parts and organs drawn from anatomy books – overlaid with illustrations of flowers, bones, scholar rocks and auspicious imagery presented in a sugary palette. The aim is to create a visual cacophony, a disjointed and disorientating mash-up of symbols and imagery in an attempt to in part reconcile and make sense of the fissures and contradictions that define her own identity.

As a ‘third culture kid’ with a strict Chinese-Christian upbringing, engaging with or learning about the superstitions that form such an inherent part of Chinese mythology and culture was, and at times still is, understandably, discouraged. Likewise, her teenage love of western horror films and gothic subculture, and her art making practice in general, were derided by her Chinese-Christian community as being sources of anxiety and depression at the time. By researching and integrating these seemingly disparate sources of artistic inspiration into her works, Zhang documents her attempts at both constructing and deconstructing her own personal and cultural identity. Louise Zhang is represented by N.Smith Gallery.

Jin Sha is a Chinese-born Australian artist who lives and works in Beijing and Sydney. A graduate from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), China, Jin is an internationally renowned artist in contemporary Chinese ink painting. His paintings showcase his signature style: a perfection of realistic painting techniques of linear perspective and three-dimensional modelling often found in Renaissance oil and tempera painting. He has a superb command of traditional Chinese painting technique: gongbi (工筆), applying precise brushstrokes to create detailed images. Jin uses ink and watercolour on silk, combining fine lines with multiple layers of both ink-shadings and colours to achieve the three-dimensional effect. By blending traditional techniques with a contemporary twist, Jin boldly reimagines art history. This innovative fusion of Eastern and Western art challenges our notions of identity, power and temptation. With a unique approach, Jin Sha initiates a conversation between tradition and innovation by skillfully delving into canonical Western art through gongbi, the known meets the unknown in a thought-provoking blend.

Jin has exhibited extensively in China, Australia, the United States and Japan. Jin Sha is represented by Redbase Gallery.

Lucy Pulvers was born in Kyoto, Japan and grew up in both Tokyo and Kyoto with her two elder sisters, also artists, and her elder brother. She was educated in Japanese schools until she moved to Sydney in 2001 and is bilingual and bicultural in Japanese and English. In 2014 Lucy was awarded the Thea Proctor Scholarship by the Julian Ashton Art School. Lucy paints in both oil and watercolour. When Lucy was living and working in London in 2019, she began exhibiting her watercolour paintings in the annual Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours exhibition in London. Lucy has exhibited with the institute every year since then and in 2020 she was awarded the ‘President’s Choice Award’ for a self-portrait. In 2024 she won the ‘Anthony J Lester Art Critic Award’.

Lucy exhibits regularly and has been a finalist twice in the Portia Geach Portraiture Prize, a finalist in the Mosman Art Prize, a semi-finalist in the BP Portraiture Prize in London and a finalist in the Blake Prize.

Lucy is essentially a figure painter. All her artistic work is rooted in her relationship to line and drawing as the foundation of her works, both in watercolour and oils.  Japanese aesthetic culture has had a major impact on Lucy's work, where she spent her childhood, and began to develop as an artist. Lucy Pulvers is represented by Rochford Gallery.

Dr Richard Wu is a practising psychiatrist in Sydney and a Chinese ink painter. His research interests include the commonalities between principles of Chinese xieyi (writing mind) painting, creativity, and western psychotherapy. Dr Wu has published and presented extensively on this topic at psychotherapy forums including World Congress of Psychotherapy, Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, and International Federation of Psychotherapists.

He has also presented topics on xieyi painting at international and Australian art forums including the Central Academy of Fine Art, (Beijing), the University of Sydney, the National Art School (Sydney), and Art Gallery of NSW.

Dr Wu is himself an artist of contemporary Chinese ink painting, and his work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions at venues including the Art Gallery of NSW (Dobell Prize finalist), Art Asia Expo (Beijing), Art Space 204 (Melbourne), and TWT Art Centre (Sydney).

Andy Milne researches cross-cultural music cognition and develops music software to facilitate musical engagement (e.g., Dynamic Tonality, XronoMorph, and RelayerForAll). His musical output frequently uses unusual meters and tonalities (including microtonalities) in both improvised and composed settings.

Creative Note
His piece explores a melding of traditional Chinese and synthetic “Western" timbres emerging from a microtonal and metrical context foreign to both.

Dr Oli O’Reilly is an improvising multi-instrumentalist, music therapist, composer and educator with an interest in semi-structured musical interaction across diverse musical traditions.

Creative Note
In this work, Oli explores harmonic interactions between jazz piano and the guzheng by intertwining the chromaticism of jazz piano with the pentatonic qualities of the guzheng.

John Encarnação is a musician and scholar based in Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Ed Kuepper’s Honey Steel’s Gold (2023, for 33 1/3 Oceania) and Punk Aesthetics and New Folk (2013). His albums of improvised music include Giraffe Solos (2014) for prepared acoustic guitar, the soundtrack to the play Tinderbox (2018, with trio Espadrille) and Giraffe Quartet and Duets (2021). He is also part of the trio W.E.S.T., with Felicity Wilcox and Lloyd Swanton. His most recent album as singer-songwriter-guitarist is Domesticated Beast (2024, with The Nature Strip). He lectures in music at Western Sydney University.

Creative Note
The piece I am being asked to write a program note for does not yet exist. There is a poem I look forward to hearing. There will be visual art which will no doubt be a revelation. I embrace the opportunity to work with the poet, Kim Pham, the visual artist, Mai Nguyễn-Long and Yuyan Tang  playing guzheng, none of whom I have met. Brendan and I have a long history of making improvised music together, though our equipment will vary from previous encounters; so even this is new. I move towards this artistic happening with an open mind, open ears, and an awareness that music is a negotiation between sound and silence.

Dr Noel Burgess is a composer, producer, engineer, and performer with a distinguished career at the intersection of music and technology—a focus that also drives his research. His creative approach is rooted in co-integrated practice, where the studio itself becomes an instrument, and musicians operate within a broader creative media ecosystem rather than in isolation. Similarly, he views performance as an immersive experience, using the stage as an instrument to shape the entire venue as part of the artistic expression. He is passionate about bridging industry, community, and education and sees these domains as inseparable elements of a vibrant and sustainable creative practice career.

Creative Note
Inspired by Jin Sha’s work Homage to the Master Magritte’s Room, the piece being developed, Duet for touch and light – Guzheng,  explores the presence and removal of the physical in creating an auditory experience. Simply put, the physical actions of the acoustic performer touching their instrument are transformed through bending invisible light as a mechanism for shaping the sounding of the instrument, to yield the sonic world which is determined in general but not specifics. The performance is a combination of pre-determined touch and improvised light, which is unique to each instance.

Shufang Zhang is a renowned Chinese-Australian pianist celebrated for her expressive artistry and dynamic versatility as a soloist, chamber musician, and educator. With over two decades of international experience, she has performed widely across Europe, China, and Australia, including recitals at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, Hong Kong Music Hall, and Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Having worked for over 15 years at the Shenyang Conservatory of Music, Zhang has mentored generations of award-winning pianists, many of whom have been admitted to top music institutions around the world. She has served as a jury member for major competitions including the Schumann International Youth Piano Competition and the Hong Kong International Music and Arts Competition. She has received multiple Gold Awards for Outstanding Teaching and continues to inspire through her performance, teaching, and collaborative projects across cultures and disciplines. Now based in Sydney, she remains active as a performer, educator, and advocate for cross-cultural artistic exchange.

Creative Note
Music, for me, is a space of deep listening and spontaneous connection. In this creative encounter, I approach the piano not only as an instrument, but as a voice in conversation—with poetry, with visual language, with breath and silence. I am particularly drawn to the energy that arises in real-time collaboration, where culture, intuition, and sound converge. It is wihtin this shared space of curiosity and trust that something truly new can emerge.

Kate Fagan is a poet, musician and scholar whose most recent book is Song in the Grass (Giramondo, 2024). Her third volume, First Light, was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and the Age Book of the Year Award. She directs The Writing Zone, a mentoring program for emerging writers and arts workers from Western Sydney, and is a former Editor of How2 magazine (US). Kate is also an internationally esteemed songwriter whose album Diamond Wheel won the National Film and Sound Archive Award for Folk Recording. She is Director of the WSU Writing and Society Research Centre and Chair of the Sydney Review of Books Advisory Board.

Creative Note
Work Title: Amplifier Birch Coil (after Cheolyu Kim)

Cheolyu Kim has spoken about his childhood fascination with flight – ‘whether through seeds, leaves, insects, birds, balloons, planes, or even UFOs’ – and the abiding influence, upon his drawing practice, of growing up on the South Korean border and experimenting with a Spirograph set. This poem echoes Kim’s moiré spirals and dream-like architectures, which he often renders directly onto birch wood. Anchored in the Fibonacci sequence, my poem links spiral forms with the transduction coils fundamental to amplifiers; and to the inner ear, in which tiny cochlear bones also work to amplify sound. I reimagine the heartwood of a birch tree as a coil that conducts the earth’s music, while responding to philosophies of sonic and spatial perception embodied in the work of South Korean artist Lee Ufan and Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoschenko.

Joshua Mostafa is a writer living in Bulanaming / Marrickville. His work explores possibilities of form across poetry, drama and prose fiction.

Creative Note
Work Title: A Child Is Born

Jin posits his work as an invitation to 'join the conversation' across time and space between Renaissance classics, traditional gongbi painting technique and the contemporary world. In my response to Jin's work, I have sought to make equivalent moves in the literary medium. The poem's form adapts the tonal patterns of classical shi poetry to the rhythmic stress of English verse and to the structure of the Petrarchan sonnet. Following Jin's conversations with Botticelli and Baldovinetti, I depict the background of a religious scene, the absent subjects leaving 'negative space' onto which I draw connections with the contemporary world.

Kim Pham is a poet, playwright and novelist from Parramatta. Her poetry has been exhibited in galleries, earning her an award for the National Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize. She received scholarships from HarperCollins and Faber Academy to complete her debut novel. Her play I Lychee You will be staged in 2026 with Q Theatre in Penrith. Kim is an alumna of both Western Sydney University and The Writing Zone.

Creative Note
Work Title: Tran Sends Ants

‘Tran Sends Ants’ explores the ephemeral nature of childhood, diasporic identity, and the enduring echoes of generational trauma rooted in the Vietnam War, drawing urgent parallels to the ongoing genocide in Palestine.

Bruce Crossman is an Australian composer who has achieved international recognition with performances in Australasia, Asia (China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Philippines), Europe (England, Holland, Germany), South America (Chile), and the USA. Highlights of his career include working with the Kanagawa Philharmonic (Japan), Korean Symphony Orchestra, New Asia String Quartet at the Pacific Rim Music Festival in the USA, and with Kawamura Taizan (shakuhachi) at the Asian Music Festival. His music has been performed at the ISCM World New Music Days in Beijing and Asian Composers League Festival and Conference in Taiwan in 2018, and in collaborations with Korean Gugak performers, gayageum master Yi Jiyoung (Seoul) and taegŭm virtuoso Hyelim Kim (London). He contributes to the Asia-Pacific region through invitations as a Collaborator, Aichi University of the Arts, Japan in 2015, Composer, National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan in 2019, Scholar/Artist-in-Residence, Seoul National University, South Korea in 2022, and advisory work for the Rockefeller Foundation in New York (USA).

Creative NoteFire-Huǒ-Afi is about fire (huǒ in Mandarin and afi in Samoan) and its presence as energy (qiyun) across sound, city-landscape, and spirit. It takes its points of departure from Vincent Tay’s film Fire. Its flickering red and reciprocal graduated black charcoals resonate with the subtle two-tone colourings in Korean artist Cheolyu Kim’s “Journey to Nowhere” which seems to encompass heaven and earth energy interplays in its sonic rings. In response, his music works as a series of organic energies within the A section (lightening arpeggios/Peking Opera gongs suddenness with guzheng bending notes and chords, barré-held harmonics and tremolo melody) and its variations (raucous kkwaenggwari and skin drums in climaxes), interspersed with repose through quiet B breath sections. The arc of the piece begins frenetically and stilly with extreme slowness, moving through variation techniques to several raucous climaxes growing in intensity at speed, before falling back to a burst of energy with stillness at its slowest pace, to linger gently upwards.

Diana Blom is one of Australia’s leading music educationalists and an internationally established composer, keyboard player (piano, harpsichord, toy piano), and has made a long-term contribution academically as an Associate Professor in the Music Area at Western Sydney University. She has co-curated several composition/performance/CD projects with Australian and international performers and composers and is currently working on ‘Piano Toy Piano’ with Italian contemporary keyboardist, Antonietta Loffredo and WSU colleague Noel Burgess. Her music scores are published in Australia and New Zealand, and recordings are available internationally. Blom’s research focuses on how music has meaning and a range of music education topics. She is active internationally as a composer and has just completed a micro-opera on the life of convict Esther Abrahams which will be performed later in 2025.

Creative Note
Spin for erhu and piano, explores the experience of spinning and the sonic world associated with it. The work draws on several erhu playing techniques. There is a musical spinning of ancient Chinese erhu and contemporary art music awards as a ‘quantum entanglement’ which relates to her collaborator’s “Exploring Quantum Entanglement in Erhu Voice” research.

Clare Maclean is a leading Australian Choral composer and was formerly the Director of Academic Program, Music at Western Sydney University. She is well-established don the international scene, representing Australia in ISCM World Music Days and Asian Composers League festivals as well as winning the prestigious Australian Art Music Award for vocal music. She was born in New Zealand in 1958. She studied composition with Gillian Bibby in Wellington, New Zealand, and with Peter Sculthorpe and Bruce Crossman in Sydney. As a student she began singing with the Sydney Chamber Choir, and this experience, particularly with the Renaissance repertoire, influenced her writing style, which often uses modal tonalities and contrapuntal textures.

Creative Note Blackbird incorporates a Scottish lament and the song of the Blackbird (turdus merula and turdus mandarinus). The pentatonic tuning of the guzheng reflects a tonality that is shared by the traditional musics of China and Scotland and the song of the Blackbird. The incorporation of a lament reflects a sense of loss that might relate to alienation as part of Louise's exploration of identity and cultures. A mixture of positive and negative thoughts and emotions. Blackbirds are migratory and relate to the ‘cultural migration’ of song; Eurasian blackbirds now belong to Scotland, China, and Australia/NZ, the place where Louise and my ancestors migrated to. The colours of the music have a relationship with the colours in the paintings in that they are often either soft or bright, and clear, with a defined colour palette – not using all the colours. Both music and paintings have delicate, fluid lines and shapes, some fragmentary, which float in the space. Nature motifs in the paintings – flowers (chrysanthemum), fruit (peach), butterflies, clouds (traditional shapes)—in the music, blackbird. Beauty – layers of meaning, light and dark, but aiming for beauty. Intersections of realities, 'worlds' – different planes in the paintings overlap or appear ambiguously as either a superimposed shape or (as it looks to me) as a window to another world behind. My version of this is the intersection of human and avian melody, different timbres, which cloud or reveal the note, with harmonics being like another world shining through. The idea of two worlds—different cultures; and the spiritual and material.

Vincent Tay is an Associate Lecturer in Media Arts Production (WSU) and Company Director, Filigree Films and won Best Experimental Film, LA Shorts Fest 2011. His work is distinguished by its strong social justice concerns for cultural visibility of Diaspora cultures in Western Sydney and rich sense of light with sumptuousness colours and light plays as a cinematographer. Tay’s extensive list of international awards includes: Light (dir. Kosta Nikas) winner Best Experimental Film, LA Shorts Fest 2011,Why Do you Want to See My Face (dir. Iqbal Barkat) screened at New York  African Diaspora Film Festival and Brisbane International Film Festival; and 30ó (dir. Phoenix Liu) winner of the best Foreign Romantic-Drama, 17th Indie Gathering International Film Festival, USA and Nominee for Best Cinematography.

Behrad Rezaei is a design academic and interactive media artist based in Sydney. His practice explores the intersection of digital culture, interface aesthetics, and participatory design.

Creative Note
https://www.insomniart.art/ (“Insomnia: The Affordance of Hybrid Media in Visualising a Sleep Disorder”)

Insomnia is a hybrid-media installation that visualises the lived experience of insomnia using real-time brainwave data, and ambient sound. By mapping cognitive states captured through a Muse headband into generative visuals and soundscapes via TouchDesigner, the work translates disrupted sleep into immersive, poetic form.

Abubakr Sajid completed his Bachelor of Screen Media at Western Sydney University under the mentorship of award winner cinematographer, Vincent Tay. He works for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as a camera operator and has recently undertaken a short film made in Indonesia based on the extraordinary Javanese dhalang (puppet master), Pak Eko Sunyoto and his community at the arts studio Kinnara Kinnari.

Lucy Wang, also known as Ru Xi, is a celebrated Australian-Chinese contemporary oriental brush artist, designer, art director and academic within the Design, School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University. Her artistry explores the integration of traditional and digital art practices, blending time-honoured techniques with contemporary themes, motifs and storytelling. By redefining classics through a transformative lens, Lucy's artworks connect with diverse audiences while harmonising cultural heritage and creative innovation.​ She has worked with local and international clients and studios, such as the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths & Marriages, Burwood City Council, BVLGARI, Cartier, IWC Schaffhausen and Crown Melbourne.

Billy Moar is a photographer, cinematographer and filmmaker from the Blue Mountains, Australia. Bill specialises in visual storytelling with an emphasis on the natural world.

Creative Note
This film explores elemental aspects of energy within scenic landscapes, utilising the concepts of Air, Earth, Fire and Water to compliment the creative works of my colleagues.