Perspectives on a collection: why you should explore New Asian Art at the National Gallery of Australia
- Written by The Conversation
Displays of artworks from the permanent collections of state and national galleries are often overlooked. Critics tend to flock to a crowded calendar of blockbusters and temporary shows. These may offer greater novelty and relevance for current events. But this isn’t always true.
New Asian Art at the National Gallery of Australia is a case in point. Tucked away on the second floor, it would be easy to miss this showcase for new acquisitions and collection highlights.
But the culturally, stylistically and materially diverse display is a welcome treat for those who take the time to wander this far into the building.
The weight of moving images
Two groups of related works bracket the space, distinct in aesthetic but mirrored in concept.
A suite of new acquisitions created between 2012 and 2016 by Thai-born contemporary artist Korakrit Arunanondchai takes up one end of the gallery.
Visitors are invited to lay back on denim cushions to watch his 25-minute video. Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 (2014-15) is a multilingual reflection on globalisation, myth and identity.
Arunanondchai uses sculptural elements to lend weight to moving images. I found similarities with fellow Bangkok-based film director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose meditative video installation A Conversation with the Sun (Afterimage) featured earlier this year at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Arunanondchai’s mannequins in painted denim embody themes of self-creation and costumed performance. They are avatars for a global culture that transforms all it touches – at least at face value.
The mirrored acrylic surfaces of Untitled (2557–2558) (Mirror 3) (2012) and Untitled (Ground) (2016) invite viewers to consider their own place in this cultural tide. Reflected faces are adorned with cast-off tech, scraps of denim and scattered twigs and soil. It is a bowerbird-like collage of trophies and scraps.
Weerasethakul transformed the algorithmic flow of a social media feed into a dream-like stream of half-seen images. Arunanondchai mimics the aerial viewpoint and slick editing of tourism promos and music videos. His work is just as captivating, but much more maximalist in tone.
Exploring cultural exports
At the opposite end of the gallery, a second group of mannequins showcase Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake’s Pleats Please Guest Artist Series (1996–98).
Designed in collaboration with contemporary artists Yasumasa Morimura, Nobuyoshi Araki, Tim Hawkinson and Cai Guo Qiang, these also exemplify the global flow of cultural forms.
Here, the Americanisation implied by acid-wash denim comes into contact with Japanese “soft power” narratives of design innovation and technological ingenuity.
Similar narratives can be read into Tokyo-based artist collective teamLab’s four-channel video Black waves (2016) and Yoshitomo Nara’s painting No War (2019).
Nara’s large-headed girl in acrylics on wood combines the child-like “cuteness” of kawaii culture with the graphic appeal of Takashi Murakami’s “superflat” aesthetic. Both are lucrative cultural exports.
TeamLab have found global fame as “ultra-technologists”. They are committed to a digital metamorphosis of Japanese artistic traditions. Black waves transforms the linear style of ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world”, into an ocean of living pixels.
Samples of these traditions appear throughout the space. Miyake, Nara and teamLab are tied to a longer lineage of cultural exchange.
A selection of nihonga, “Japanese-style paintings”, of Mt Fuji document an earlier era of soft power. They were presented to Australia by the International Cultural Appreciation Society of Japan in 1977.
Installation view, New Asian Art, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, 2025, featuring: (left to right) Okumura Togyu, Mt Fuji, 1976, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, gift from the International Culture Appreciation and Interchange Society ICAIS, Japan, Fukuoji Horin, Mt Fuji in the glory of morning, 1976, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, gift from the International Culture Appreciation and Interchange Society ICAIS, Japan and Kato Toichi, Mt Fuji after snow, 1976, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, gift from the International Culture Appreciation and Interchange Society ICAIS, Japan.
Kato Shinmei’s Maiko, apprentice geisha (1976) is another nihonga work. It implies a connection between the Yoshiwara pleasure district at the centre of ukiyo-e and the contemporary “floating worlds” of global fashion and politics.
Kabuki actor portraits dating to the 1920s and 1930s exemplify the renewal of ukiyo-e as part of the shin-hanga or “new prints” movement.
This reinforces the exhibition’s overarching themes of performance, impersonation and surface appeal masking hidden realities.
Much more than a highlight reel
These themes are evident, too, in a stellar display of mostly Chinese photographic works lining the gallery walls.
Featuring iconic images by Hong Hao, Song Dong, Wang Qingsong and Yang Fudong newly acquired for the collection, this is a real stand-out.
Their conceptually complex, technically daring and aesthetically polished visions of consumerist excess, urban squalor and the fragile boundaries of self-identity illustrate the burst of Chinese photographic artistry during the 1990s and 2000s.
Hong Hao, My things no. 5, 2002, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, purchased 2024, © Hong Hao.
Contemporary art photography is one of several core collection strengths of the gallery celebrated in New Asian Art. They sit alongside contemporary Southeast Asian art, Japanese prints and Indonesian textiles (in a stunning display of contemporary batik shoulder slings and skirts).
The exhibition offers much more than a highlight reel. Curators Carol Cains and Shaune Lakin have carefully selected both new and more familiar works to draw out the fluidity of contemporary Asian identities, fusing past and present, myth and technology and local and global cultural currents.
New Asian Art is at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, until April 18 2027.
