Zhang Peili: from Painting to Video
张培力：从绘画到录像
27 August–15 December 2016

Recognised as the father of Chinese video art, Zhang Peili established himself as an avant-garde painter in the mid-1980s, while experimenting with installation and other new media. In 1988, he became the first Chinese artist to seriously explore video as a medium, switching permanently from painting in 1994. This project presents one of his last paintings—recently gifted to the Centre on China in the World, newly restored and never before exhibited—alongside a selection of Zhang’s earliest, seminal video works.

Wei Leng Tay—The Other Shore
鄭瑋玲—彼岸
31 March–15 July 2016

Young Mainland Chinese are moving to Hong Kong from all over China, leaving their homes because of family interests or in search of better education and career prospects. Such migrants fi­nd themselves in majority Chinese yet increasingly tense environments, often confronting entrenched ideas regarding ‘Mainlanders’. While often presented as a single group, the photographic portraits and interviews in ‘The Other Shore’ reveal individual lives, with diverse aspirations and attitudes towards Hong Kong. ‘The Other Shore’ asks how one’s sense of self is entwined with national identity, and how a host environment affects our outlook and everyday lives. Tay’s project also reflects on similar experiences of young educated Chinese elsewhere, negotiating a new place in the world.

Photographs of 1930s China by Stanley O. Gregory
史丹利·奥·格雷戈里拍摄的30年代中国
14 January–20 March 2016

To coincide with the exhibition 'Celestial Empire' at the National Library of Australia, the Australian Centre on China in the World (ANU) presents a selection of rarely seen photographs of 1930s China taken by Stanley O. Gregory, printed in large-format for the first time, from the original negatives now in the NLA Collection.

China & ANU – Diplomats, Adventurers, Scholars
29 May–9 October 2015

Based on extensive original research, and featuring rare archival documents, photographs and films, 'China & ANU' introduces the diplomats, adventurers and scholars who forged a new relationship with China and our region as a vital part of Australia’s postwar reconstruction.

Between – Picturing 1950-1960s Taiwan
間：臺灣五六十年代面影
6 January - 3 April 2015

Politics has had complex effects on the cultural life of Taiwan in the twentieth century. These forty-four works, curated from the collection of the National Museum of History (Taipei), offer subtle observations of Taiwan in the 1950s and 1960s, from the perspectives of fifteen artists and photographers, as fresh and curious witnesses to lives in flux.

Beijing: Unfurling the Landscape
2 May 2014 - 29 August 2014

In her thirty years of work in China, photographer Lois Conner's vision and creative method bring to sites both modern and ancient the sense of an eternity captured in a moment. Her work illuminates a Chinese world in which the living past pulses through a vibrant contemporary reality.