ACIAC Emerging Scholars' Forum 2019

Venue Conference Rooms 3 and 4, Level 9, Western Sydney University Parramatta City Campus, 169 Macquarie Street, Parramatta, NSW 2150

Date & Time Sat, 22 June 2019: 9.00am - 7.00pm Sun, 23 June 2019: 9.00am - 7.00pm

For more information, please visit westernsydney.edu.au/ACIAC

I write with great pleasure to welcome you to the 2019 Emerging Scholars’ Forum of the Australia-China Institute for Arts and Culture at Western Sydney University!

The Australia-China Institute for Arts and Culture was founded in 2016 at Western Sydney University for the purpose of promoting teaching and research in arts and culture between Australia and the Chinese speaking countries and regions in Asia. As it is, the Institute stands as the only organization in Australia that is committed to the mission of bringing, through arts and culture exchange and research, different peoples together for friendship, education, and collaboration. This Forum epitomizes our faith, commitment and determination.

The 2019 Forum is of course taking place in a historic year. One hundred years ago, a generation of educated youth launched a movement that triggered China’s modernization process. A century later, the Chinese May Fourth Movement has become the common heritage of all countries. We hope that the Forum affords us an opportunity to rethink our roles in the cultural evolutions of our own respective countries today. The May Fourth Movement was a movement of the young people. It is, therefore, hoped that the young people at this Forum and beyond continue to bear the dynamic and forge forward with their own aspirations for a global culture. If you also end up making a lot of friends during the Forum, we would be genuinely pleased.

On behalf of the Australia-China Institute for Arts and Culture, once again, I welcome you to the Forum, to the city of Sydney and to this country!

Professor Labao Wang Director, Australia-China Institute for Arts and Culture Western Sydney University

Sat, 22 Jun 2019

9.00am - 9:30am

Registration/ Reception

9.30am - 10.00am Opening Prof. Yi-Chen Lan

Pro Vice-Chancellor, Global Development Western Sydney University

Prof. Labao Wang

Director, Australia-China Institute for Arts and Culture Western Sydney University

10.00am - 11.00am

Keynote Lecture 1

Prof. Paul Gladston University of New South Wales “Getting Over the Border: Contemporaneity and its Implications for Cultural Studies’”

11.00am - 11.15am

Tea Break

11.15am - 1.00pm

Panel 1 Multicultural Arts: Visual, Theatrical, Culinary

1. Ru Yang, Chinese University of Hong Kong “The Communication of Printmaking between China and Australia” 2. Wah Guan Lim, University of New South Wales/ National Taiwan University “Articulating Alternative Cultural Identities: Kuo Pao Kun’s Multilingual Theatre Praxis in Singapore” 3. Cecilia Leong-Salobir, University of Wollongong “Flavours from China: A historical sketch of Chinese food practices in Sydney from the nineteenth century”

1.00pm - 2.15pm

Lunch + Book Launch

Book Launch of Urban Food Culture: Sydney, Shanghai and Singapore in the Twentieth Century (2019) by Dr. Cecilia Leong-Salobir, University of Wollongong The book will be launched by Prof. Jocelyn Chey AM, Western Sydney University.

2.15pm - 4.00pm

Panel 2A Female Agency and Gender Relations Room 3

1. Tingting Liu, Western Sydney University “Female homosexual relationships emerging from the low-end globalization: an Ethnographic Exploration of Chinese Rural Migrant lalas” 2. Zhuoling Tian, University of Wollongong “Feminism or Marketability: The ‘Beauty Writer’ and ‘Body Writing’ Phenomenon in Shanghai Baby and ‘Mistaken Love’” 3. Yinghua Yu, Western Sydney University “On Being Chinese Women Professionals at Australian Workplaces: Strategic Approaches towards Issues around Gender Relations” Panel 2B Digital Media and Online Culture Room 4 1. Eric Jun Fu, University of Melbourne “From angry youth to realistic idealist: Political subjectivity of Chinese young people in online participation” 2. Beili Liu, Macquarie University “Continuance of Chinese social media conversation: Cohesion in Weibo conversation on Women’s role ” 3. Rui Zhang, Western Sydney University “Risk-taking performances in Chinese video streaming: A study on streamerviewer interactions” 4.00pm - 4.15pm

Tea Break

4.15pm - 6.15pm

Panel 3 Filming China and Australia

1. Thomas Moran, University of Melbourne “To Live and Die in the Feed: On Jia Zhangke’s Tian Zhuding (A Touch of Sin) (2013)” 2. Kiu-wai Chu, Western Sydney University "Refugee Boat, Red Crabs and Hungry Ghosts: Displacement and Subjectivity of Refugees in Global Documentary Films" 3. Johnson Leow, Chinese University of Hong Kong/ Utrecht University “Soundfirm and the Reshaping of Hong Kong and Chinese Film Sound” 4. Kai Ruo Soh, University of Wollongong “Enhancing Chinese Cinema with Australian Movie Magic” 6.30pm - late

Conference Dinner

Sun, 23 Jun 2019 9.00am - 9.30am

Morning Tea

9.30am - 11.00am Panel 4 Diaspora Now and Then 1. Aliza Alpha Chin, Independent Scholar “Chinese Shipbuilding in Australia: 1870-1910” 2. Christopher Cheng, Western Sydney University “Beacons of enlightenment: On modern diaspora-funded schools in the Canton Delta” 3. Zhuqin Feng, University of Wollongong “Few favours, no facework, too many school fetes!: Misunderstandings in Chinese migrants’ attempted to span guanxi and ‘western’ social capital networks.”

11.00am - 11.15am Tea Break 11.15am - 12.15pm Keynote Lecture 2 Prof. Wanning Sun, FAHA Professor of Media and Communication Studies, University of Technology Sydney “Learning to be Cosmopolitan: Challenges and Opportunities for Emerging Scholars in Humanities” 12.15pm - 1.15pm Lunch 1.15pm - 3.15pm

Panel 5A Chinese Art in Transitions

Room 3

1. Minerva Inwald, University of Sydney "‘The So-called ‘Art’ of Western Capitalists’: Reporting on Avant-garde Art in the Mao Era” 2. Shuxia Chen, Australian National University “Malleable Identities: Li Xiaobin’s Photographs and reform era China, 1976-1989” 3. Luise Guest, White Rabbit Collection Sydney/ University of New South Wales “Tianshu and Nüshu: Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky and Tao Aimin’s The Secret Language of Women through a lens of gender” 4. Yu-chieh Li, University of New South Wales “Identities in Transition: Rethinking the ‘Local’ in Sinophone Media Art”

Panel 5B Australian Literature: Transcultural Perspectives

Room 4

1. Zhoupin Bi, Hainan University “On Judith Wright’s Changing Attitudes to Australian National Parks” 2. Hangbin Bu, Soochow University /University of New South Wales “’Dancing to the Stars’: The Nietzschean Metamorphoses of the Spirit in J. M. Coetzee’s The Schooldays of Jesus” 3. Yingjie M. Cheng, University of New South Wales “Antipodean Modernism: The “Fourth Dimension” in the Writings of Robin Hyde and Ethel Anderson” 4. Xiang Li, Australian National University “Black is the True Colour”: Gender, Race and Violence in Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife

3.15pm - 3.30pm

Tea Break

3.30pm - 5.30pm

Panel 6 Transnational Literature: The Australia-China/EastWest Connections

1. Hu Liu, University of Sydney “An Exploration of the Poetological Manipulation on Howard Goldblatt’s Translation of Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out” 2. Kelly Tse Yin Nga, University of Oxford “Betwixt and Between: Ouyang Yu and Chinese-Australian Writing” 3. Hangping Xu, University of California, Santa Barbara “Yang Lian as Exile Writer and His Australian Experience” 4. Lily Zhang, Soochow University/ University of New South Wales “To Translate the Untranslatable: Traditional Chinese Painting in Nicholas Jose’s Avenue of Eternal Peace”

5.30pm - 5.45pm

Tea Break

5.45pm - 6.55pm

Panel 7 Postgraduate Students’ Panel

Chair and Respondent: Dr Xiang Ren, Western Sydney University 1. Tian Zhang “Home and Belonging: A Comparison of Works of Wenxuan Cao and Sonya Hartnett” 2. Wenqian Xia “Representations of LGBTQ issues in Australian media and Australian Chinese media: a case study of same-sex marriage” 3. Chuanqian Zhao “Sports diplomacy and Australia-China Cultural Exchanges: Case study of Li Na as sports diplomat of Australian Open” 4. Rui Dou "Creating emotional resonances: Guidelines for programming Chinese-orientated and Chinese-Australian hybridities within concerts in Sydney" 5. Yan Xiong “The role of Chinese art exhibitions in China's cultural diplomacy in an Australian context”

6.55pm - 7.00pm Closing Remarks

DAY 1

Getting Over the Border: Contemporaneity and its Implications for Cultural Studies

Professor Paul Gladston Judith Neilson Chair of Contemporary Art, University of New South Wales In recent years, poststructuralist postmodernism’s persistent situating of cultural identity in relation to the supposedly uncertain interstitial spaces of borderlands has been significantly overwritten by debates related to the concept of contemporaneity: an envisioning of present times as being marked by a seemingly intractable plurality of mutually resistant sociopolitical and cultural outlooks comprising, at its perhaps intellectually starkest, a critically becalming stand-off between western(ized) neo-liberal poststructuralist postmodernism’s projection of a deconstructively immanent Third Space and assertions of essential cultural differences implacably resistant to the paradoxical universalism of postmodernist uncertainty. As such, contemporaneity can be understood to encompass at one and the same time not only a diversifying post-postmodernist extension of decolonizing interventions in the international hegemony of Euro-American post-Enlightenment discourses, but also resurgent exceptionalisms world-wide that seek to (re)affirm socio-economic, political and identarian distinctions given definition by the drawing up of geographical borders – including Donald Trump’s repeated call to build a wall separating the US and Mexico, Brexit, Australia’s construction of offshore illegal immigration detention centres, the failed attempt to establish an Islamic State across Syria and Iraq, and China’s militarized reinforcement of its national and on-line boundaries. The paper presented here will meditate critically on the complex and problematic factionalism of contemporaneity and its implications for cultural studies in the twenty-first century.

Paul Gladston is the inaugural Judith Neilson Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of New South Wales and was previously Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham. His recent book-length publications include Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History (2014), which received ‘publication of the year’ at the Award of Art China 2015. He was founding principal editor of the peerreviewed Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art from 2014 to 2017 and an academic adviser to the internationally acclaimed exhibition Art of Change: New Directions from China staged at the Hayward Gallery-South Bank Centre London in 2012.

Paul’s forthcoming monograph, Contemporary Chinese Art, Aesthetic Modernity and Zhang Peili: Towards a Critical Contemporaneity will be published by Bloomsbury in October this year.

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DAY 2

Learning to be Cosmopolitan: Challenges and Opportunities for Emerging Scholars in Humanities Professor Wanning Sun FAHA Professor of Media and Communication Studies, University of Technology Sydney This talk discusses some issues, challenges and opportunities facing young and emerging Humanities scholars whose research is set in a cross-cultural, transnational, and increasingly global context. In particular, it argues for the importance of a cosmopolitan sensibility, and outlines a number of ways – methodological, ethical and empirical – in which this sensibility can guide and shape one’s learning and research.

Wanning Sun is best known for her research in a number of areas, including Chinese media and cultural studies; rural to urban migration and social change in contemporary China; soft power, public diplomacy and diasporic Chinese media. She is the author of a number of research monographs including Leaving China (2002), Maid in China (2009), Subaltern China (2014), and Telemodernities: Television and Transforming Lives in Asia (2016, with T. Lewis and F. Martin). Wanning has authored a number of major reports and policy briefs, including Chinese -Language Media in Australia: Developments, Challenges and Opportunities (2016) and Is There a Problem with WeChat? (2019). She is currently leading an Australian Research Council Discovery Project “Chinese-Language Digital/Social Media in Australia: Rethinking Soft Power (2018-2020). Wanning is also co-hosting (with Peter Fray) The Middle, a weekly radio program on Sydney 2ser on Australia-China relations.

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Book Launch of Urban Food Culture: Sydney, Shanghai and Singapore in the Twentieth Century (2019, Palgrave Macmillan US) by Dr. Cecilia LeongSalobir, University of Wollongong “This book explores the food history of twentieth-century Sydney, Shanghai and Singapore within an Asian Pacific network of flux and flows. It engages with a range of historical perspectives on each city’s food and culinary histories, including colonial culinary legacies, restaurants, cafes, street food, market gardens, supermarkets and cookbooks, examining the exchange of goods and services and how the migration of people to the urban centres informed the social histories of the cities’ foodways in the contexts of culinary nationalism, ethnic identities and globalization. Considering the recent food history of the three cities and its complex narrative of empire, trade networks and migration patterns, this book discusses key aspects of each city’s cuisine in the twentieth century, examining the interwoven threads of colonialism and globalization.”

Palgrave Macmillan

Cecilia Leong-Salobir is a food historian affiliated with the University of Wollongong and University of Western Australia. Her research area is in food history (Asia and Australia) and British colonial history. Her publications are Urban Food Culture: Sydney, Shanghai and Singapore in the Twentieth Century, New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2019; Routledge Handbook of Food in Asia (editor) London: Routledge; Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire.

London: Routledge 2011; and numerous book chapters and articles. Cecilia serves on editorial advisory boards for Food, Culture & Society and Global Food History.

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Panel 1

Multicultural Arts: Visual, Theatrical, Culinary

The Communication of Printmaking between China and Australia Ru Yang Even though China and Australia, two countries in different spheres of the earth, have different histories and cultural backgrounds, they do have a history of communication by visual arts, like printmaking - an international artform. China has its profound tradition of woodcuts, while Australia also has it aboriginal printmaking. This paper will take Australian printmakers Margaret Preston, Ian Fairweather, Ruth Burgess, and Michael Kempson as example, to explore how their printmaking works are influenced by Chinese art. For example, Ruth Burgess who travelled to China several times to make woodcuts said, “Learning from the Chinese.” Chinese Chan Philosophy influences her eyes on landscape, so, she underscores it in her works. Her works Mountain, Beyond the Mountain, Mantra for Winter, and the Temple in the Forest, which show her interest in Chinese Buddhism. I also discuss the communication between printmaking artists of Australia and China, such as Ruth Burgess and Xu Bing. Another example, Kempson, his Cicada Press gives opportunities for artistic exchanges. For him, “openness with empathy towards the other is crucial in the collaborative project at Cicada Press.”

Kempson’s series work of animals, using animals to represent different nations, panda presenting China. It is interesting to discuss meanings behind the images. Nowadays, Fang Limin’s portrait printmaking work is exhibited in Australia, which presents another look of contemporary Chinese printmaking to Australian audiences. In this paper, I will discuss different views on nature, nation, cultural identity, globalization through printmaking works by using theories of anthropocene, postcolonialism, postmodernism, ideology, cross cultural communication, etc.

Ru Yang, PhD candidate in Cultural Studies, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Yang obtained her M.Phil Degree in Nanjing University, China. She mainly researches on literature and image, art and society in China. Her thesis for M.Phil Degree is The Research of Word-Image Relationship between Ten Odes Poems and Ten Odes-Themed Picture in Song Dynasty. Her PhD research is on Modern Woodcut: As a medium of Modernity in 1930s and 1940s China. Her paper includes: The Research of the Sculptural Pair in the Square of The National Agriculture Exhibition Centre with the View of Public Art (2016).

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Articulating Alternative Cultural Identities: Kuo Pao Kun’s Multilingual Theatre Praxis in Singapore Wah Guan Lim The many strictures and structures that define modern and contemporary Chinese politics, society and ideology extend well into the Chinese diaspora. This paper attempts to contextualize the work of Kuo Pao Kun (1939 – 2002), widely regarded as Singapore’s most important dramatist. After a series of educational reforms, personnel arrests and suppression of artistic and social groups by the Singaporean state, the tradition of open critique and debate on these issues inherited from the Chinese May Fourth intellectualism basically vanished by the mid-1970s. An avid theatre practitioner originally only active among the Chinese community, Kuo was to emerge from this low point in Singapore Chinese-language theatre history in the 1980s to conduct workshops and write plays in the English language, as well as develop a multilingual theatre praxis that henceforth became the definitive model of Singaporean theatre. Having graduated from in Sydney’s National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), Kuo was perhaps then the only local Chinese-language theatre practitioner to be professionally trained in the West. All the major artists in both the current local Chinese- and English-language theatre circles, as a result, have been nurtured under his influence. In crossing the linguistic divide that governed Singaporean ethnic groups prior to the 1980s, Kuo was not only responding to the government's suppression of Chinese-language education, he was at the same time lending a voice to the Chinese-educated Singaporeans who had been disenfranchised by the 1979 language policy that favored English-language speakers. Subsequently his magisterial play, Mama Looking for Her Cat (1988), having actors of different ethnicities perform in their native tongues – English, Tamil, Malay, Mandarin, Hokkien, Teochew and Cantonese – encapsulated a holistic Singaporean experience that revolutionized the hitherto monolingual tradition of drama in the city-state. Transcending linguistic and ethnic borders, his work drew audiences from across the spectrum of the country’s multicultural population, positing dramatically new possibilities for rethinking Singaporean Chineseness.

Wah Guan Lim (B.A. Hons 1 UNSW, M.St. Oxon, M.A. Princeton, Ph.D. Cornell) is a Research Fellow at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the National Taiwan University and Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of New South Wales. He has previously taught at Bard College, New York. A scholar of transnational Chinese literature and performance, his research examines the social, political, and artistic implications of theatre and performance in a comparative framework across the stages of Hong Kong, Taiwan, China and Singapore. He is currently completing his book manuscript tentatively titled Denationalizing Identities: The Politics of Performance in the Chinese Diaspora.

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Flavours from China: A historical sketch of Chinese food practices in Sydney from the nineteenth century Cecilia Leong-Salobir Early Chinese immigrants to Australia came looking for riches in gold and many of them ended up feeding Australians from their market gardens, their market stalls and from selling fruit and vegetables door to door. Sydney, one of several nodal points in the Asia Pacific within the global urban network, was a centre of exchanges in goods and services, and along the way, food practices were transplanted and took root. This paper discusses the ways in which the Chinese contributed to foodways in three areas: market gardens, eating outlets and Chinatown. From the early years of their arrival, the Chinese were seen as primary producers, growing vegetables and reared pigs in the goldfields.

Just as they faced racial discrimination in the gold fields, both verbally and physically, growing and selling vegetables were also seen as stealing the livelihood of Australians.

Chinese food outlets, from the humble family-run cafÊ, to fine dining, to street stalls were and are permanent fixtures in Sydney. One of the attractions of Sydney’s Chinatown, like other Chinatowns is its Chinese food in the restaurants, cafes and grocery stores. With its recognisable ceremonial red archways and pagoda-like rooftops, the enclave has become one of the ways in which Australians perform meanings of Asian-ness by eating Chinese food and buying Chinese ingredients. Do mainstream Australians imagine themselves to be multicultural with the act of eating Chinese food in Chinatown?

The historical approach adopted for this paper includes colonial and postcolonial newspapers, magazines, government archives, memoirs, cookbooks, travelogues and diaries.

Cecilia Leong-Salobir is a food historian affiliated with the University of Wollongong and University of Western Australia. Her research area is in food history (Asia and Australia) and British colonial history. Her publications are Urban Food Culture: Sydney, Shanghai and Singapore in the Twentieth Century, New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2019; Routledge Handbook of Food in Asia (editor) London: Routledge; Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire.

London: Routledge 2011; and numerous book chapters and articles. Cecilia serves on editorial advisory boards for Food, Culture & Society and Global Food History.

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Panel 2A

Female Agency and Gender Relations

Female homosexual relationships emerging from the low-end globalization: an Ethnographic Exploration of Chinese Rural Migrant lalas Tingting Liu In today’s China, women’s social roles continue to be rigidly associated with genderbased responsibilities that include defending the integrity of their family, entering into heteronormative marriage, and showing reproductive capabilities. Most of those who selfidentify as lalas (lesbians) struggle with such issues as self-shaming emotions, disclosing their homosexuality to family members, friends, or colleagues, and dealing with family and social pressures. Within this context, I investigate the queerness in a group of young Chinese rural migrant lalas, working and living in the industrial area of the Pearl River Delta economic zone in South China. I draw two conclusions. First, rural-to-urban labor migration, empowers rural female lalas by providing a measure of economic independence, an escape from patriarchal and homophobic family relations. Second, the integration of traditional (offline and face-to-face) socializing locations and emerging virtual communicative spaces plays important roles in the process through which possibilities of living a queer life are carved out.

Tingting Liu received her PhD in Anthropology at the University of Queensland in October 2018.

She is now an ARC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University and a casual lecturer at the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. Her research interests include media anthropology, digital culture, and popular entertainment with regional expertise in China and Australia. Recent publications include peer-review journal articles on China Information, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Television & New Media and Feminist Media Studies.

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Feminism or Marketability: The “Beauty Writer” and “Body Writing” Phenomenon in Shanghai Baby and “Mistaken Love” Zhuoling Tian The “beauty writer” (meinǚ zuojia) phenomenon refers to a literary trend led by young female writers who were born in the 1970s in China. Their writing style is also known as “body writing” (shenti xiezuo), featuring an unabashed, unprecedented foregrounding of the female body and sexuality, women’s agency and personal autonomy. This paper examines the controversial discussion on “beauty writers” and “body writing” in Chinese (including diasporic Chinese) literature at the turn of the 21st century. Wei Hui’s Shanghai Baby (1999) is the best-known as well as the most contentious novel of this genre in China due to its explicit description of sex, drugs and homosexuality. Another text “Mistaken Love” is a self-declared autobiographical short story written by Shi Guoying, who is a Chinese Australian writer based in Sydney. Her story, as well as her previous article stating that Chinese men are inferior to Western men in bed provoked great controversy within the Chinese Australian community. Both texts contain a common theme relating to Chinese women’s sexuality and their differing attitudes towards Eastern and Western men. Although the authors claim themselves as feminists, their books are packaged as sexually alluring for the male gaze and their marketing strategy caused controversy among Chinese intellectuals who assert that feminism is not only about the emancipation of the female body and sexuality. The relationship between feminism and sexuality has become the focal point in the debate over how body writing contributes to the feminist movement in China.

Zhuoling Tian is a Ph.D. candidate at University of Wollongong under the supervision of Prof. Wenche Ommundsen and Dr. Michael Griffiths. Her doctoral research centers on Asian diasporic writing in Australia, with an emphasis on the works written by authors of Chinese descent. She takes an intersectional approach that encompasses the fields of migration and identity, multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, gender, race, feminist and postcolonial theories.

She is currently completing her Ph.D. thesis titled Feminism or Femininity: Representation of Chinese Women in Chinese Australian Literature. She is a member of ASSRN (Asian Australian Studies Research Network).

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On Being Chinese Women Professionals at Australian Workplaces: Strategic Approaches towards Issues around Gender Relations Yinghua Yu

This paper explores how ten Chinese professional women take accounts of their lived experiences in terms of gender relations within their culturally diverse workplaces in Sydney. The research employed a qualitative approach through in-depth interviews, cross-examining the ways in which ethnic identity and organisational values and practices intersecting with gender order and gender equality shape those Chinese women professionals’ lived experiences. The discussion was set around whether it was more equal in Australian workplaces in comparison with those in China in terms of gender relations. The analysis reveals that those participants’ experiences and perceptions of gender relations are contingent, complex and contextually fluctuating, and were largely shaped by their cultural orientation, the length of their working experiences and their organisational culture. Gender relations at their workplaces are associated with phenomena, such as “masculine managers” and “accent ceiling”, which tend to be more subtle and difficult to challenge. This paper therefore fits in the theme of contrasting and commingling Australian-Chinese Diaspora studies, and contributes to the subfield of the broader Chinese Diaspora studies in Australia.

Yinghua Yu is a PhD candidate and HDR Representative at the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS), Western Sydney University. She has previously completed a BA (English) at Ocean University of China, and a Master of Research degree at ICS, Western Sydney University.

Her thesis titled ‘How Gender Relations and Culture Shape Chinese Female Expatriates’ Lived Experiences at Their Workplaces in Sydney’. Since April 2017, she has been working at the institute on several projects investigating Chinese migrants in Australia, assisting with planning and organising research seminars and interdisciplinary conferences. Her main research interests are Asian migration, race/ethnicity, Chinese diaspora, and work/family regimes.

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Panel 2B

Digital Media and Online Culture

From angry youth to realistic idealist: Political subjectivity of Chinese young people in online participation Eric Jun Fu It is widely argued in western literature that young people’s political engagement has transformed from participation in ‘conventional’ forms of politics to individualized, local, and action oriented forms of political activities. The adoption of digital media in this transformation has made online space a main venue for young people to practice these new forms of politics. However this general description is unable to illuminate young people’s highly diversified online political participation which is underpinned by their political subjectivities.

This study intends to examine the political subjectivities of Chinese young people manifested in their everyday social and political participation on the internet. Drawing on a qualitative research project with data collected from the Weibo posts and internetmediated interviews with 31 young Chinese citizens, three types of subjectivities namely angry youth, powerless cynics, and realistic idealist were identified. These subjectivities are embodied in young people’s civics and political participation on the internet and also largely shaped by these activities through which they understand their relationship with Chinese society and the potential power of internet-mediated social and political participation in changing the society. Although described by some participants’ in the interview as a developmental process, these subjectivities do not necessarily form a succession. They co-exist in participants’ everyday online social and political participation, and present fluidly in young people’s online activities on different platforms and expressions about different topics. The significance of participation in online discussions for young peoples’ citizenship learning were also discussed.

Eric Jun Fu has a PhD in Sociology of Education from the University of Melbourne. He is now a research fellow at the Youth Research Centre, Melbourne Graduate School of Education.

He is interested in research about young people and digital media, citizenship studies, and media and digital literacy. He can be contacted by email: eric.fu@unimelb.edu.au.

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Continuance of Chinese social media conversation: Cohesion in Weibo conversation on Women’s role Beili Liu Chinese social media platforms such as Sina Weibo (hereafter Weibo) play an influential role in the everyday life of Chinese people. More and more non-Chinese users have participated in Weibo activities for various reasons. It can be seen that using social media is not a regional practice, but a global phenomenon. The popularity of social media has driven people to move their social, cultural and professional activities to those platforms, making the offline and online worlds increasingly interpenetrating. Therefore, social media provides a new window for researchers to investigate a variety of phenomena in human society. For instance, conversation takes place on social media has attracted the attention of researchers of a range of disciplines, for a growing number of people engage in online interactions in the form of languages, multimodal resources or the combination of the two. Language used in social media allows us to examine conversations in the online environment through empirically grounded evidences, since a large number of social media conversations can be available for public access. This paper aims to cover on the topic of continuance of social media conversation, focusing one initiated by a Weibo double hashtag topic. Collecting linguistic data from message exchanges between two Weibo interlocutors discussing women’s role in contemporary China, this paper investigates the part that cohesion plays in keeping the Weibo conversation going.

Cohesive elements reflecting women’s role have been found not only in one interlocutor’s messages but also across the two. These elements form cohesion ties in the Weibo conversation by maintaining and developing the topic on women’s role through the conversation, and as a result contribute to the continuance of it.

Beili Liu is a Master of Research graduate of Department of International Studies of Macquarie University. She is a sessional tutor of the Department, teaching History of Chinese Art. In previous appointments with the Department, she also tutored undergraduate EnglishChinese translation units. Beili’s research interests include discourse analysis, social media and culture, where she investigates a range of social and cultural phenomena with linguistic data.

Some of her current research focuses on revealing the organisation and development of social media texts, Sina Weibo texts in particular, using a variety of linguistic tools.

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Risk-taking performances in Chinese video streaming: A study on streamer-viewer interactions Rui Zhang Live streaming is rapidly growing in China, and it has a tremendous cultural, social and political impact. In the past couple of decades, mobile live streaming has become a common use video sharing platform, allowing users to stream anything they want to a massive number of viewers. Viewers on live streaming often share their thoughts while they are watching live streams, and this has turned into a participatory virtual community.

In China alone, live streaming market revenues reached up to $3.3 billion in 2015.

However, given the rise in the number of live streaming platforms, only a few studies have been conducted to deeply understand streamers and viewers involved in the emergent cultural practices. This paper focuses on viewer-streamer interactions in the Chinese live streaming industry, more specifically for risk-taking content. An interesting part of this risk-taking performance in live streaming is that it is about content engagement - video performances are traditionally passive, but interactive streaming service brings an element of activity. This paper aims to investigate the users’ motivation and engagement relating to risk-taking performances in live streaming.

The key question driving this work is whether streamers do live streaming mainly for their own economic interests (i.e. money-driven) or whether there is a strong sense of community belonging among the risk-taking streamers and viewers. This work employs mixed methods to collect original data, including analysis of recorded live stream sessions and semi-constructed interviews with two viewers and two streamers. In this paper, I present some preliminary findings and discuss how risk taking live streaming influences and reflects Chinese digital/ internet culture.

Rui Zhang is a master of research student in Western Sydney University, in both School of Humanities and Communication Arts and Australia-China Institute for Arts and Culture. She completed her bachelor in Media, Culture and Communication at Macquarie University and Master of coursework in Strategic Public Relations in University of Sydney. Her research interest lies in the area of video streaming in new media and Chinese culture.

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Panel 3

Filming China and Australia

To Live and Die in the Feed: On Jia Zhangke’s Tian Zhuding (A Touch of Sin) (2013) Thomas Moran Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s 2013 film A Touch of Sin presents a powerful critique of the violence of technocapitalism through an aesthetic investigation of the digital image. In the following paper I will argue that Jia transforms the cinematic form by incorporating the social media news feed into the structure of his film. Sin is comprised of four narratives, all adapted from stories which circulated online on Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging website reminiscent of Twitter in which users uploaded and shared news. These stories all present the lives of everyday people driven to acts of violence by their experiences of alienation and exploitation. There is a tension within the film between replicating the experience of stories received on the online news feed and a desire to create new relationships between these stories. I will argue that Jia’s cinema is transformed by the feed while at the same time suggesting that cinema is capable of creating a time in which these stories transcend their status as a series of chaotic disasters by their insertion into a totality, in which the protagonists’ struggle between fate and freedom is politicised, albeit through the aesthetic paradigm of the cinema. In this way Jia critiques the violent processes which underscore the supposedly immaterial digital economy while simultaneously formally reinventing his own cinematic practise. Jia describes the film as having a ‘digital texture’ which draws on the smooth high definition images of advertising and genre cinema to create a surreal sensibility which permeates the entire film. By adopting this overtly digital aesthetic the film places its critique of the violence of production processes within the very same aesthetic regimes which are otherwise used to conceal it. Sin is a powerful example of the potential of cinema to explore the surreal landscape of 21st century China and remain a critical art form capable of addressing the complexities of the present.

Thomas Moran is currently a PhD candidate at Monash University completing a thesis on the idea of the end of cinema as reflected in the work the directors Pedro Costa, Lav Diaz and Jia Zhangke. He completed his MPhil at the University of Adelaide in 2018 with a thesis entitled ‘The Surreal Realist Cinema of Jia Zhangke’ which was supervised by Professor Nicholas Jose.

Thomas’s research interests include 21st century cinema, the aesthetics of the avant-garde and contemporary world literature.

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Refugee Boat, Red Crabs and Hungry Ghosts: Displacement and Subjectivity of Refugees in Global Documentary Films Kiu-wai Chu

Adopting approaches of “relational comparison” ”(Glissant 1997; 2013, 2019), and Critical Refugee Studies (Espiritu 2014) which questions and challenges the general assumptions and notions of “refugee” being predominantly associated with “otherness” and “images of Third World poverty, foreignness and stateless”, thus a lack in subjectivity, this presentation will examine representations of refugees and asylum seekers in recent documentary films and art installations, by placing particular focuses on the representations of displaced human and nonhuman subjectivities; trans-scalar perspectives and interconnectedness; and the shared notion of solastalgia.

This presentation will examine how environmental conditions shape the refugees’ lives, focusing on the affective dimension of human and nonhuman refugees, and the shared sense of nostalgia and solastalgia (Albrecht 2006) that brings together the displaced subjects as an imagined community at the time of global refugee crises. By assessing Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s Sydney-Biennale-commissioned artwork Law of the Journey (2017, Australia); his documentary Human Flow (2017, Germany), and Australian filmmaker Gabrielle Brady Island of the Hungry Ghosts (2018, Germany, UK, Australia), this project discusses their aesthetic and cinematic conventions that show the significance of recent Australian/Chinese/global documentary films and artworks in depicting the cultural and ecological interconnectedness of human and nonhuman beings; and the displaced agencies of these subaltern subjects; as well as the collective sense of solastalgia experienced in the Anthropocene epoch.

Kiu-wai Chu is Postdoctoral Fellow in Australia-China Institute for Arts and Culture, Western Sydney University. He was previously SNSF Postdoctoral Fellow in University of Zurich. He earned his PhD in Comparative Literature in University of Hong Kong, and his previous degrees from SOAS, University of London, and University of Cambridge. His research focuses on contemporary cinema and art in Asia, Ecocriticism and environmental humanities. His work has appeared in Transnational Ecocinema; Oxford Bibliographies, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, The Palgrave Handbook of Asian Cinema and elsewhere. In July 2019, he will be Assistant Professor in Green Humanities at Nanyang Technological University.

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Soundfirm and the Reshaping of Hong Kong and Chinese Film Sound Johnson Leow

Soundfirm is one of the largest and most successful sound post-production studios in Australia. Since its establishment in 1983, the studio has worked on acclaimed films such as Crocodile Dundee (1986), Babe (1995), Romeo + Julliet (1996), and Moulin Rouge!

(2001). Besides a strong domestic base, the studio has also developed a strong presence in Hong Kong and Mainland China since the 1990s. Being one of the first Australian (and foreign) post-production companies to enter these markets, Soundfirm has made a name for itself through its post-production work on films such as Hero (2002), Kung Fu Hustle (2004), House of Flying Daggers (2004), and Red Cliff (2008).

The establishment of a Beijing branch in 2003 further underscored their commitment to the Chinese market.

Through interviews with several of its sound designers, this paper traces the early years of Soundfirm’s journey into the Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese film industries, and describes its impact on the sound aesthetics of these cinemas. It also discusses the studio’s difficulties of entering these markets and the challenges of working with local filmmakers. The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, recognising the importance of Australian post-production companies in pushing the boundaries of international collaboration, this paper aims to bring under attention the pioneering role of Soundfirm in establishing the Chinese-Australian collaborative relationship. Secondly, through the story of Soundfirm, this paper tries to uncover bits and pieces of the development of the film sound of Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese cinema.

Johnson Leow is a PhD student ethnomusicology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

His dissertation research focuses on the sound aesthetic development of Hong Kong martial arts films from the 1990s to the present.

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Enhancing Chinese Cinema with Australian Movie Magic Kai Ruo Soh

Zhang Yimou has always stated that he intended to create Hero (2002) as a global (commercial) blockbuster with the global audience in mind. As Zhang aspires to emulate Hollywood’s visual quality with Hero, the production involved creative practitioners who have previously worked on Hollywood productions. This included the Australian visual effects (VFX) company Animal Logic. But what is Australia’s role and impact on the Chinese film industry, in particular within the post-production section? The paper examines comments made by Chinese cinema audiences on the Chinese social networking site, Douban, from 2005 to 2016, exploring their reception of the film’s visual qualities. In addition, I will address the impact of competition Australia is currently facing in China with the shift of China’s geopolitics and emergence as a vanguard of globalisation, and the potential effect it could have on the Australian VFX industry. With this paper, I will demonstrate the potential of the contemporary transnational partnership in tandem with Chinese audiences’ reception, government documents, participant observation and an examination of the current climate of the Chinese film industry, in particular within the VFX industry.

Kai Ruo Soh (Kai) is a PhD candidate at the University of Wollongong. Her research explores international co-productions (joint production) and foreign collaborations within the Chinese film industry and the reception of Chinse cinema audiences utilising Chinese Social Networking Sites. She mainly examines the Chinese film industry and their partnership (creatively and financially) with the Sinosphere, Australia, Hollywood, and Korea. Twitter: @kaiRsoh 16

Panel 4 Diaspora Now and Then Chinese Shipbuilding in Australia: 1870-1910 Aliza Alpha Chin This paper will examine the history of Chinese boat and shipbuilding, and the Chinese shipbuilding community in Australia during the period of 1870-1910. It is not widely known that Chinese watercraft were during this period the predominant vessel in northern Australia, with hundreds of sampans and a fleet of junks operating in coastal trade and bech-de-mer fishing and other industries. All these vessels were built in places such as Cooktown in Northern Queensland, and Darwin. The paper will explore this oftenforgotten era of Chinese-Australian and Chinese migration history and the ways in which this community influenced the economic and social lives of the areas in which they were prominent. Significant Chinese shipbuilding traditions were transported with and maintained in Chinese diaspora communities. This paper will look at how these traditions influenced the lives of Chinese communities in Australia, and those of wider Australian society.

Based on my research conducted for the Australian National Maritime Museum, at the Hong Kong Maritime Museum, and through interviews with Hong Kong shipbuilders, a clear link emerges between shipbuilders in Hong Kong and Chinese in Australia. My research has revealed new photographic evidence of junks and sampans that share similar designs to those in 19th century Hong Kong, signifying a direct transfer of Chinese shipbuilding traditions and techniques between China and Australia in the late 19th century. Furthermore, evidence is emerging of Chinese shipbuilding communities’ important contributions to local communities both economically and socially in Australia, as well a great deal of interest in Chinese shipbuilding traditions and techniques by nonChinese Australians. The Australian fascination with sampans even led to a period of ‘Sampan races’ on Albert Lake in Melbourne in the late 19th century.

From my interviews with contemporary shipbuilding communities in Hong Kong it is evident that the tradition of Chinese shipbuilding still resonates strongly, and this paper will explore the transnational elements of these traditions.

Aliza Alpha Chin is a proud graduate of the University of Sydney, having completed her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in History there in 2017. Her thesis, which examined the short-term and long-term effects of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Incident on the Sydney Chinese Community, was the first of its kind, and lead to the creation of a mini-archive. Since then, she has worked as a research assistant for a variety of institutions and individuals, including but not limited to: Parramatta Heritage Centre, Dr. Stephen Gapps at the Australian National Maritime Museum, and Dr. Sophie Loy-Wilson at the University of Sydney.

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Beacons of enlightenment: On modern diaspora-funded schools in the Canton Delta Christopher Cheng The study of Overseas Chinese migration often focuses on livelihoods with research on homeland philanthropy of peripheral interest. This article explores schools built by migrants within the China-Australia heritage corridor based on ethnographic research in the emigrant hometowns and villages of the Canton Delta. Since the intersection of migration and modern education provides a fruitful context for studying the circulation of new goods and ideas, this research adopts a new materialist approach and shows how modern schools introduced a repertoire of new construction materials and technology as well as cultivated a new way of life. By piecing together their socio-material assemblage, schools materialized not only beacons of enlightenment in rural China but also served to define a segment of 20th century transnational migration history.

Christopher Cheng is a PhD candidate affiliated with the Institute for Culture and Society, and the Australia-Chinese Institute for Arts and Culture, at Western Sydney University. His current research on transnational migrant heritage is based on his long-term interest in the study of Overseas Chinese, migrant heritage and people-place relations. See ORCID: http:// orcid.org/0000-0002-2003-8052.

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Few favours, no facework, too many school fetes!: Misunderstandings in Chinese migrants’ attempted to span guanxi and ‘western’ social capital networks Zhuqin Feng Social network dynamics are particularly complex in the context of Chinese overseas migration to ‘western’ countries, because of the unique dynamics of Chinese guanxi (interpersonal relation), which are seen as distinctly different from ‘western’ social capital.

Although guanxi has attracted considerable attention from ‘western’ scholars over the past few years, no known empirical research has employed comparative methods and focused on exploring the challenge of Chinese migrant’s attempted to span guanxi and ‘western’ social capital networks. This study seeks to understand overseas Chinese networks and to examine the perceived ‘success’ and ‘failure’ of guanxi in Chinese migrant’s integration into Australia. This research utilised a qualitative and comparative methodological approach. A semi-structured and in-depth interview method was used to obtain primary data from forty participants. These individuals consisted of twenty Australian-Chinese migrants (ACM) and twenty Australian non-migration population (ANMP). The findings show that: 1.) influenced by the unique network structure, ACMs tend to utilize strong ties to gather information and acquire resources (in the form of favours) than weak ties, though they are more likely to do so through such weak ties than ANMPs, which indicates a relatively more important role for weak ties in ACMs’ guanxi networks than previous studies suggest; 2.) ACMs’ typical guanxi practices in Australia are shaped by renqing (long-term reciprocity) and face (social/moral face). Since the face rules are more fluid and flexible in late modern Western societies and ANMPs have a poor understanding of renqing, guanxi is seldom turned into ‘western’ social capital, even by acts of brokerage; 3.) there are some dark sides of guanxi networks in the integration of ACMs, as guanxi networks restrict women’s involvement in public social activities; do not contribute to civil society; and promote more ethnocentric networks.

Zhuqin Feng is a PhD candidate at the University of Wollongong. Her research project explores the dynamics of Chinese guanxi networks in the context of Chinese oversea migration and examines the impact of structural, normative and practice differences between guanxi and social capital on Chinese migrant’s building and using networks. Her main research interests include social networks, migration, inter-cultural research, and Chinese guanxi.

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Panel 5A

Chinese Art in Transitions

“The So-called ‘Art’ of Western Capitalists”: Reporting on Avant-garde Art in the Mao Era Minerva Inwald In 1962, the most prestigious fine arts journal in the People’s Republic of China, Meishu, published an article reporting on the recent phenomenon of “junk art” in the United States, describing the artistic experiments of John Chamberlain and Robert Rauschenberg as they used rubbish to create sculptures and paintings. In the early 1960s, a handful of similar reports on avant-garde art in the United States and western Europe appeared in Meishu and the Party’s newspaper People’s Daily, covering topics such as the 1960 Venice Biennale and Yves Klein’s use of women’s naked bodies as “living brushes.” Often based on contemptuous articles originally published in American magazines such as Life and Time, articles in Meishu and People’s Daily adopted a denunciatory tone, mocking artists and using their work to demonstrate the cultural degradation of the capitalist West. But these articles were also informative, providing relatively detailed descriptions of selected artworks and explaining how there were created, with illustrations.

This paper examines how, in the relatively liberal atmosphere of the early 1960s, information about recent artistic experiments in the United States and western Europe entered and circulated within Mao’s China, considering the ways in which the denunciation of these artistic practices provided a framework for limited reporting on contemporary avant-garde art in the People’s Republic. Investigating how the party-state used examples of contemporary avant-garde art to justify the superiority of socialist artistic culture, this paper aims to contribute to our historical understanding of the culture of the Mao era by exploring how the party-state positioned its own artistic project in relation to contemporary developments in art internationally.

Minerva Inwald is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Sydney researching the cultural history of the People’s Republic of China during the Mao era. In 2018 she held a Teaching Fellowship in the Department of History at the University of Sydney.

She is co-author of the exhibition catalogue Floating Time: Chinese Prints, 1954-2002 (Sydney: Power Publications, 2016). She has co-curated two exhibitions at the University of Sydney: Provocations: Avant-garde Art in China in the 1980s (Fisher Library, 2017) and Floating Time: Chinese Prints, 1954-2002 (University Art Gallery, 2016).

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Malleable Identities: Li Xiaobin’s Photographs and reform era China, 1976-1989 Shuxia Chen

Despite being one of the most noted photographers to document the cultural and social changes during the first decade of economic reform and opening-up in China, Li Xiaobin’s photographs were absent from the China: 40 Years through the Lens photography exhibition—a national exhibition celebrating 40 years of reform, organized by the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles and the China Photographers Association, held at the National Museum of China in 2018. Li’s candid snap-shots of China have never been appealing to mainstream official Chinese photography institutions that promote the great achievements of the reform era. This paper investigates Li Xiaobin’s so called “grey photography” practice between 1976 and 1989, as an example of the complex and understudied artistic space between state and society.

Through a comparative study of images made by Li as a professional photographer for the relatively liberal state magazine Xin Guancha (New Observation), and those personal work, this paper examines the impact of multiple photographic identities on the rhetoric of Li Xiaobin’s image-making. Was Socialist Realism lingering in his official photographs due to subject matter stipulations from the state? Were his more personal works consciously independent of Socialist Realist aesthetics? How did the style of Li’s professional and personal photographs and those outside of work inform each other?

Exploring such questions, this paper scrutinizes the artistic language used by Li Xiaobin, as he was negotiating between his official role and new social identities. An understanding of this process raises significant questions regarding the traffic between ostensibly official and informal spaces of cultural production in the reform era China.

Shuxia Chen is a PhD scholar at the Australian National University, with a research focus on Chinese photography and artist groups in China. She is the grantee of the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Greater China Curatorial Residency Programme 2014. Her essays have been published in academic journals and art magazines such as Trans Asia Photography Review, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Made In China Year Book 2017, and artforum.com.cn. As an independent curator, she has curated exhibitions in Australia and China, such as “A Home for Photography Learning: the Friday Salon, 1977-1980” in Beijing in 2018. She is editing a bilingual publication for this exhibition, which will be published in late 2019.

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Tianshu and Nüshu: Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky and Tao Aimin’s The Secret Language of Women through a lens of gender Luise Guest

This paper, developed from a broader investigation of gender and national identity in Chinese contemporary art, is focused on two works in which the scholarly object of the book is disassembled, reassembled and subverted. Xu Bing’s canonical Book from the Sky (c. 1987–91) contained 4000 invented characters presented as an installation of traditionally bound, printed books, ceiling and wall scrolls. An early example from Xu’s oeuvre, this work was understood as a provocation, but is also an examination of the power (and permeability) of language. In contrast, Tao Aimin’s application of the ancient Nüshu script in painting, print and installation works such as The Secret Language of Women (2008), presents unreadable texts as feminist interventions into the post-1985 genre of deconstructed calligraphy better known in the works of Xu Bing and his peers, Gu Wenda, Wu Shanzhuan, Qiu Zhijie and others. Tao’s use of washing boards once owned by elderly rural women as found objects from which to make prints and rubbings reveals the unrecorded stories of unlettered women: she describes them as ‘a kind of book’. Her application of the invented female Nüshu script form discovered in Jiangyong County, Hunan Province, in the 1980s subverts a gendered history – and challenges the patriarchal nature of the Chinese art world. Inserting female histories into the genres of contemporary ink painting and calligraphy, her works memorialise otherwise invisible women and communicate hidden aspects of female experience. In a Chinese art history in which imagery of ‘labour’ in the twentieth century took the form of heroic depictions of soldiers, farmers and factory workers, Tao’s work examines the hitherto private sphere of domestic labour, a quotidian reality rarely seen in contemporary Chinese art.

Luise Guest is the Manager of Research for the White Rabbit Collection of contemporary Chinese art, Sydney and a current PhD candidate at UNSW Art & Design where her research examines the work of four female artists who subvert the conventions of ink painting and calligraphy. Her writing has been published in a range of online and print journals including The Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Art Monthly Australasia, The Art Life, Daily Serving, Randian and Artist Profile. Her book, ‘Half the Sky: Conversations with Women Artists in China’ was published by Piper Press in 2016.

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Identities in Transition: On Early Sinophone Media Art Yu-Chieh Li

The state of contemporaneity in Sinosphere requires critical elucidation of the “local,” which is shaped by resistance to the national subject formation and the cultural and political identities in transition. Both Hong Kong and Taiwan can be described as “community in the present,” which Etienne Balibar describes as a false feeling of having always existed, which turns the local into a state of perpetual reconstruction. The transitional identities are reflected in the multiple-temporalities marked in time-based media.

This paper examines the early intermedia art in Sinosphere as “postmedia,” drawing from works by Yan Chi Choi, Ellen Pau, and Chen Chieh-Jen. To be more precise, I discuss how artists challenge the media centrality and respond to the transitional identities through resisting a unified narrative. The non-linear movements as opposed to modern dance, can be observed in environmental theatre and performative videos, particularly the phenomena od repeat, rewind, slow-motion, and de-centered body movements. The multiple temporalities inscribed in the ruin and the non-linear movements embrace the picture of the land as a periphery that also gradually emerges as an autonomous entity.

Yu-Chieh Li is Judith Neilson Postdoctoral Fellow of Contemporary Art at UNSW Art & Design, Sydney. Her current research concerns performativity, artistic networks, and diaspora from the Greater China region from the 1970s to the 1980s. Her broader research interests include conceptualism, time-based media, and aesthetic forms of postsocialism. Before joining UNSW Art & Design, she was an Andrew W. Mellon C-MAP Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and an adjunct researcher at Tate Research Centre: Asia. Li is co-editor of the book Xu Bing: Beyond the Book from the Sky (Springer, forthcoming). She is working on a book on issues of audience participation, appropriation, and performativity during the ’85 New Wave in mainland China.

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Panel 5B

Australian Literature: Transcultural Perspectives

On Judith Wright’s Changing Attitudes to Australian National Parks Zhoupin Bi Cognitive ecologist Nancy Easterlin argues that the knowledge of human psychology and evolution establishes the basis for dynamic, coherent accounts of human relationships with nonhuman entities. As a white environmentalist and activist, Judith Wright (19152000) was a founder of WPSQ (Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland, 1962) and one of the earliest members of Australian Conservation Foundation (1966). However, her ideas about national parks and conservation gradually change and diverge from many other white environmentalists since she made friendship with the Aboriginal poet Kath Walker who visited China in September and October 1984. Their 30-year relationship (1963-1993) influenced greatly Judith Wright’s perception of the land and cognition of the environment.

Taking Kakadu National Park and the Great Barrier Reef as cases in point, this paper aims to demonstrate how psychology, human relationships and cultural factors profoundly influence Judith Wright’s attitude towards Australian national parks. Her growing concern about Aboriginals’ land right involves politics of access to open space, and challenged misconception of Australia as a wasteland. Her ecological vision not only includes harmony between man and nature but also the existence of Aboriginal people who have strong spiritual, social, physical and cultural bond with the land. Consideration of the indigenous people is also significant to National Park System Construction in China.

Zhoupin Bi, who got her Ph.D degree from Suzhou University, is now an associate Professor and chair of English department in Hainan University, China. Her research interests include Ecocriticism, Australian poetry, and women writing. Sponsored by ACC, she visited the University of Queensland in 2008. She was also a visiting scholar in the University of NebraskaLincoln. She has published 14 papers and completed three research projects, one of which is sponsored by the Chinese Ministry of Education. Her representative papers include “Judith Wright's Turn to Eastern Poetics in Her Late Poems” and “A Study of Judith Wright’s Ecopoetics”.

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“Dancing to the Stars”: The Nietzschean Metamorphoses of the Spirit in J. M. Coetzee’s The Schooldays of Jesus Hangbin Bu

J.M. Coetzee’s 2016 novel The Schooldays of Jesus has since its publication stirred up quite a controversy for its minimalist style and the all too arcane theme, with some going so far as to disparage it as an unimportant bore. Building upon the many signs of interconnectedness between Nietzsche’s Lebensphilosophie and Coetzee’s literary practice, this paper provides a detailed examination of the metamorphoses of the spirit and redemptive imagination that under-gird the Coetzeean mode of literary vision in The Schooldays of Jesus. The first section delves into the bearings of the Nietzschean “last man” on the nature of Coetzee’s disenchanted fictional world of Estrella populated by splintered subjectivities without noble ideals or higher aspirations. The section section zooms in on the camel and lion spirits represented respectively by Simón and Dmitri, illustrating the two adult characters’ unrepresentable psychological and emotional plights bowed by sanctioned rules of slave morality and mediocre rationalism. My main focus shall be on Coetzee’s celebration of the child spirit in the third section, where I approach Coetzee’s boy dancer Davíd as a paradigm of unbounded freedom, miraculous imagination and redemptive potentials. It is argued that Coetzee re-envisages the diminishing contact with our embodied childhood and its relevance to our spiritual transformation through his trenchant commitment to the novel’s possibility of “imagining the unimaginable”, capturing in this latest oeuvre “a transcendental imperative” that sustains mankind’s quest for self-salvation in a Post-Christian world.

Hangbin Bu is a PhD candidate at Soochow University, China, where he graduated with a master’s degree in literature in 2016. He is writing a doctoral dissertation on the South Africa born and Adelaide based writer J. M Coetzee’s Australian novels. He has published several Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI) journal articles and has two papers forthcoming this year.

His research interests include 20th century British literature, contemporary Australian literature and theories of the postmodern. He is currently enrolled in the Study Abroad Research Practicum at the University of New South Wales.

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Antipodean Modernism:The “Fourth Dimension” in the Writings of Robin Hyde and Ethel Anderson Yingjie M. Cheng The idea of the “fourth dimension” in geometrical, aesthetic, and Einsteinian theories indicates new forms of human perception, offering an important new perspective on the emergence of modernism. Juxtaposing two Antipodean writers, Robin Hyde and Ethel Anderson, this paper takes “the fourth dimension” as a creative dimension combining the physical, aesthetic and literary features of their modernist interventions. The “fourth” creative dimension physically evolves from both writers’ travelling experience and aligns with “aesthetic manifestations of a shifting and traveling modernity” which literary modernism is usually associated with. The spatial implications of the “fourth dimension” are reflected in both Hyde and Anderson’s outbound-cum-inbound creative routes directed by their encounters with places and cultures situated in-between the Asian and metropolitan north and the Antipodean south. Their contact with places away from home feeds into their writings where “a space of shifting meaning” is constantly presented. The current work looks in particular at both Hyde and Anderson’s representation of the intercultural space and at the way they comingle different locational points to present an otherwise flat memory and reality. Their delineation of the trans-Tasman space is also important here. Robin Hyde relies substantially upon her trans-Tasman travelling experience to demonstrate a mobile sense of place and identity. Ethel Anderson similarly presents an en route, formative sense of place and identity as she elaborates over a space of interaction between the metropolitan north and the Antipodean south. The underlined trans-Tasman intimacy in Hyde’s writings and the evocative bond among the southern island countries in Anderson’s works allow their representation of the Antipodean home grounds to take on a new light. Hyde and Anderson’s creative sensibility, closely related to their travelling routes, brings in a different way of looking at the “colonial tag” attached to the Antipodean south. The writerly and creative scopes developed from home and from abroad add to their literary bents the merit of writing through a different dimension and with openness, giving direct shape to their literary modernism.

Yingjie M. Cheng is currently in the final year of her PhD at the University of New South Wales. Her research focuses on Antipodean literary modernism and reads mainly six Australian and New Zealand women writers and their engagements in literary modernism. Yingjie intends to reveal the separate but coeval emergence of literary modernism in the Antipodes. This paper is from a chapter of Yingjie’s thesis.

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“Black is the True Colour”: Gender, Race and Violence in Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife Xiang Li (PhD candidate, Australian National University) Henry Lawson’s short story “The Drover’s Wife” has fascinated generations of Australians since its publication in the Bulletin in 1892. Many fellow artists have been inspired to yield their versions of the story, and the continual reimagination of the “wife” has created a unique phenomenon in Australian artistic sphere, which Frank Moorhouse refers to as “a great Australian love affair”. In 2016, Indigenous actress and writer Leah Purcell adapted Lawson’s short story into a play and took on the role of the drover’s wife herself on stage.

Purcell infuses Indigeneity into the classic bush tale with her own family histories and gives the “wife” a new identity, an Australian woman who has to face more dangers and carries a different sense of duty than her “sisters”. The play unapologetically reenacts the cruel treatment of both white women and Indigenous people by white men in 19th century Australia. In this postcolonial reimagination of “The Drover’s Wife” Purcell manages to tackle the themes of both Indigeneity and feminism by rewriting the story from the perspective of an Indigenous woman. Although it has very positive reviews, Purcell’s play has not received much scholarly attention, and it is high time to do so. This paper argues that Purcell’s play enables a reconsideration of both race and gender in Australian literature through her treatment of colonial violence. The play deals with Indigenous sovereignty and female agency at the same time, which are present issues that demand our attention in today’s society. Aileen Moreton-Robinson points out that Indigenous women have constantly remained unrepresented in Australian (white) feminist discourse (Moreton-Robinson, 2000), and the play echoes the need to shape a politics of difference within Australian feminist discourse (Gunew, 1994) that many have been discussing since the 1990s. The paper also argues that Purcell’s “the drover’s wife” expresses Indigenous feminist thinking and works as a point of departure where a discussion of national literature, gender, race and identity is made possible.

Xiang Li is a first-year PhD candidate at the Australian National University. She completed her BA in English from Soochow University in China. Her research interests include Australian literature, Indigenous drama, feminism and gender. Her current PhD project looks at gender in “The Drover’s Wife” stories from Henry Lawson’s 1892 original tale to Leah Purcell’s 2016 stage adaption and Ryan O’Neill’s 2018 book 99 Reinterpretations of The Drover’s Wives, hoping to include as many texts as possible and use them as a way to examine the changing conceptualisation of gender embodied in Australian literature.

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Panel 6 Transnational and Translational: The Australia-China/ EastWest Connections An Exploration of the Poetological Manipulation on Howard Goldblatt’s Translation of Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out Hu Liu Drawing on Andrew Lefevere’s rewriting theory, this paper aims to delve into how Goldblatt rewrites Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out under the manipulation of the target poetics. To be specific, the various literary means used in the novel, including its unique linguistic, stylistic and narrative means, constitute the novel’s major poetological features. The paper will investigate how the translator rewrites these poetological features under the influence of the target poetics to produce a translation readily acceptable to the intended audience. On the basis of the above analysis, the paper also summarizes three characteristics of Goldblatt’s poetological rewriting: i) macro stylistic consistency with the ST, ii) simplification principle, and iii) distinct feature of the original English writing.

Hu Liu is a lecturer at the School of Foreign Studies, West Anhui University, China. He is now studying for the PhD in literary translation at the Chinese Studies department, the University of Sydney, Australia. His research interest include translation studies, linguistics and intercultural communication. The current paper is based upon his doctoral project Translator as Rewriter: An In-depth Analysis on Howard Goldblatt’s Translation of Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. 28

Betwixt and Between: Ouyang Yu and Chinese-Australian Writing Kelly Yin Nga Tse

This paper attends to the critical and literary oeuvre of Ouyang Yu (b. 1955), a contemporary Chinese-Australian author and critic. It begins with outlining both the critical and creative personas of Ouyang Yu who has published Chinese views on Australia and Australian views on China. It then identifies Chinese-Australian relations, whether symbolic or actual, as a thematic preoccupation of the author. Thereafter, it turns to examine the recent novel, Billy Sing (2017), and engages the figure of the bi-racial protagonist as a fictional allegory for the cultural entanglement between China and Australia. Drawing upon theoretical formulations of hybridity, this paper construes the bicultural protagonist as a critical figure inhabiting the space of liminality and possessing a form of “double consciousness” vis-à-vis China and Australia. Instead of being an outcast, Ouyang Yu’s novel re-defines the bi-racial protagonist as an active agent of history. Through the novel’s complex negotiation of Chineseness and Australian-ness, the paper illustrates that Ouyang Yu’s novelistic discourse re-constitutes subjectivity as necessarily contingent upon and subject to the dynamics of history and politics. Putting Ouyang Yu’s novelistic representation of the Other in dialogue with his critical volume, Chinese in Australian Fiction, 1888-1988 (2008), my paper argues that the novel is reflective of a multicultural text that not only problematises the grand narrative of multiculturalism but also seeks to envisage alternative possibilities of racial and cultural reconciliation through the fictional medium. In a global epoch marked by international distrust, Ouyang Yu’s novelistic intervention stakes out a space for the historically marginalised Chinese-Australian subject and invests it with the power of critique. It offers a timely reflection on the future of cultural convergence and commingling between China and Australia, a future that also, one might argue, speaks to the future of our conflicted world at large.

Kelly Yin Nga Tse is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Oxford. She is working on the representation of conflicts and resolutions in Anglophone Asian literature. Her research and teaching interests include world literature, global modernity, postcolonial Asia, gender studies, the novel, and critical theories. She has taught at undergraduate and graduate levels at the University of Hong Kong and the University of Oxford. She has published her work in peer-reviewed journals such as The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.

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Yang Lian as Exile Writer and His Australian Experience Hangping Xu

Yang Lian began to write poetry in 1976, and three years later his works started to be published in the independent poetry magazine Jingtian (Today). He has been associated with the menglong, ‘misty’, poets. In 1989 he was invited to Australia as a visiting writer when the Tiananmen Massacre happened. Ever since then he has been an exile writer, and continues to write Chinese poetry while living abroad. He believes that his exile status, ironically, renders him greater freedom and autonomy with which to look at China more clearly. This paper offers a critical and close reading of his long poem titled “Where the Ocean Ceases” (Dahai tingzhi zhichu), which was written in Australia and set in Australia. This poem places his exile experience up and front. First, this paper offers a brief account of his cross-cultural experience in Australia in 1989; it looks at how his Australian sojourn and the political context of the Tiananmen Massacre shaped his political subjectivity and poetic sensitivity. Next, the paper discusses Yang Lian’s place within the school of misty poets, and tracks the stylistic and thematic shifts that took place since he became an exile writer. Above all, the paper’s reading of “Where the Ocean Ceases” helps theorize the ontological and political exile as a trope of reimagining cosmopolitan identities beyond the framework of the nation-state. Finally, it explores the trans-Pacific imaginary, that is, Australian-Chinese dynamic, of Sinophone writers such as Yang Lian.

Hangping Xu, Ph.D. from Stanford University, is Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature at Middlebury College, and will become Assistant Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara in the fall of 2019. He specializes in transnational and comparative studies of modern Chinese literature and film. His publications have appeared in such venues as Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, Critical Multilingualism Studies, A Global History of Literature and the Environment (Cambridge University Press), and Chinese Poets Since 1949in Dictionary of Literary. His co-edited a special issue on disability and internet literature for Chinese Literature Today. He is completing his book entitled Broken Bodies as Agents: Disability Aesthetics and Politics in Modern Chinese Culture.

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To Translate the Untranslatable: Traditional Chinese Painting in Nicholas Jose’s Avenue of Eternal Peace Lili Zhang Nicholas Jose has never stopped exploring various ways to include China in Australian writing: the history of the Southern Ming prompts him to write a fable entitled The Rose Crossing (1994); a creative misreading of Six Chapters of a Floating Life leads to a transcultural novel The Red Thread (2000) and an unusual kind of Chinese painting ‘eight broken’ inspires his short story collection Bapo (2014). Jose names his method of ‘translating China’ as ‘transcultural writing’ and regards his cultural representation as a form of world literature. ‘Travelers Among Mountains and Streams’ is a chapter title in Avenue of Eternal Peace (1989) , but just like ‘The Way’ and ‘Encountering Trouble’, they are not just chapter titles, the symbolic meanings under are the Taoist philosophy, traditional Chinese painting and literature. These are the untranslatable high culture for there is no hypothetical equivalence, but Jose wants to make them known to his Australian readers. The transformation from a visual art to a fictional narrative can be classified into ‘inter-semiotic translation’ by Roman Jakobson. Inspired by Lydia H. Liu’s study of translingual practice, this paper investigates the intertextual signification of Fan Kuan’s ‘Travelers Among Mountains and Streams’ in Jose’s Avenue of Eternal Peace.

From the perspective of world literature, the author also offers a reader’s response to see whether or not Jose has achieved his purpose of finding literary affinity to bridge cultural barriers.

Lili Zhang is a PhD candidate in 20th century English literature at Soochow University and lecturer at Nantong University. Her recent publications include: “A Semiotic Reading of Nicholas Jose’s Avenue of Eternal Peace” (2019）; “Including China: An Interview with Bill Ashcroft”(2018); “Cultural Misreading and Literary Variation: From Six Chapters of a Floating Life to The Red Thread’”(2018); “Transcultural Writing in Avenue of Eternal Peace (2016)” (Co-author with Professor Wang Labao). Her recent research projects include “Cultural Representation in Australian Postwar Fiction” (2017SJB1222) funded by Jiangsu Province Office of Education and “A Study of Transcultural Narratives by Nicholas Jose”, sponsored by China Ministry of Education (18YJC752048).

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Studying Cultural Exchange Chair: Dr Xiang Ren

Western Sydney University

This workshop gathers together and showcases student projects in ACIAC’s Master of Chinese Cultural Relations and invites feedback and discussion from emerging scholars on the theoretical, practical, and ethical issues of studying cultural exchange and Chinese arts and culture in a global context. It consists of five presentations by current students in the Master program and a panel Q&A: 

Home and Belonging: A Comparison of Works of Wenxuan Cao and Sonya Hartnett Tian Zhang

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Representations of LGBTQ issues in Australian media and Australian Chinese media: a case study of same-sex marriage Wenqian Xia

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Sports diplomacy and Australia-China Cultural Exchanges: Case study of Li Na as sports diplomat of Australian Open Chuanqian Zhao

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"Creating emotional resonances: Guidelines for programming Chinese-orientated and Chinese-Australian hybridities within concerts in Sydney" Rui Dou

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The role of Chinese art exhibitions in China's cultural diplomacy in an Australian context Yan Xiong

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Convenor Dr. Kiu-wai Chu

Advisory Committee Prof. Labao Wang Dr. Xiang Ren Prof. Jocelyn Chey A/Prof. Denis Byrne

Administrative Committee Ms Lindsay Liu Ms Tianyu Li Ms Shirley Wong

Administrative Assistants Mr Xuehai Cui Ms Rui Dou Ms Ting Li Ms Wenqian Xia Ms Xian Xu Ms Tian Zhang Mr Chuanqian Zhao Ms Yaqian Zhou

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The Forum is on Level 9, Conference Room 3 & 4, Parramatta City Campus, 169 Macquarie Street, Parramatta NSW 2150.

If you are travelling by trains, please take Exit 5 at Parramatta Station to get on to the Station St towards Darcy St. Then continue onto Smith St and you will see Parramatta City Campus on your left hand side in about 3-minute walk.

On Saturday 22 Jun, please speak to the Concierge at the lobby to get access to Level 9.

On Sunday 23 Jun, please use the Intercom on both entrance to get access to the building.

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The Australia-China Institute for Arts and Culture (ACIAC) at Western Sydney University was founded for the purpose of facilitating collaboration and engagement between Australia and China in a culturally smart way.

Building on the research strengths of Western Sydney University and on existing exchange programs in the University, ACIAC will stay committed to the enhancement of bilateral understanding between members of Australian and Chinese cultures and to the development of deeper ties through an open, intellectual and dynamic engagement.

ACIAC positions itself as a hub and national resource centre for cultural exchange between Australia and the entire Sinosphere, and for cross-cultural collaborative research in the arts and other cultural fields.

For more information, please visit westernsydney.edu.au/aciac/about

ACIAC promotes exchanges between Western Sydney University and its partner universities overseas in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. Each year, it engages with the local community in Western Sydney and particularly with ethnic Chinese groups, businesses and individuals and launches significant new research programs of relevance to the Australia-China relationship.

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Contact Information +61 2 9685 9944 ACIAC@westernsydney.edu.au Australia-China Institute for Arts and Culture Ground Floor, Building EA, Parramatta South Campus Western Sydney University Locked Bag 1979 Penrith NSW 2751 Australia

WESTERNSYDNEY.EDU.AU/ACIAC