Rehearsed Beyond Rupture
IN A RENEWED COMMITMENT to reconciliation and inclusive recognition, Asia TOPA, Australia’s triennial focused on performance from across the Asia-Pacific, grounded itself for the third time in Melbourne, on the traditional land of the Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung and Boonwurrung people. Emerging from a five-year, pandemic-induced pause, the festival adopted a new direction, moving away from framing regional relationships as thematic gestures and toward embedding them in its curatorial and procedural fabric. For the first time, it was driven by a cohort of Asian Australian creatives, with Jeff Khan, an Indian Australian curator and long-standing presence in the regional arts scene, serving as its creative director. Under Khan’s guidance, the festival not only repositioned itself within the local arts ecology, but stepped up in its role as an active coproducing force with venue partners across the region.
An Australian “regional” imaginary—as invoked by Asia TOPA—is hardly new: It has been in rehearsal since the 1980s, when institutional efforts to diversify Australia’s cultural policy began calling for closer engagement with Asia. In 1993, Brisbane opened the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, which now appears as a kind of museum counterpart to the comparatively young Asia TOPA. The framing conditions for such projects, however, have shifted. Living in what feels like a protracted aftershock of Cold War logic—reignited by rising nationalisms, hardening borders, and the return of imperialist posturing—the idea of an Asia-Pacific regionalism, framed from an Australian perspective no less, begins to sound like a utopian remix of its earlier postcolonial diplomacy. Compared with the recent past’s curatorial endeavors of a “global contemporaneity,” today’s alter-contemporaries are supposed to navigate the slow implosion of that very framework. So what becomes of “regionalism” under this condition, where once-promising infrastructures are being distorted by tightening nationalist agendas across much of Asia? Having emerged in 2017 from the Kenneth Myer Asian Theatre Series—which, under the stewardship of Carrillo Gantner and Rosemary Hinde, was committed to opening up the Arts Centre’s stages to the region in the first place—Asia TOPA now forms a larger, boldly marketed platform across Naarm (Melbourne’s traditional place-name). Its demonstratively bright presence has felt like an attempt to summon a still-possible zone—an intermediary space of cumulative awareness and concern.
Arriving at the main venue, the Arts Centre Melbourne, easily identifiable by its towering spire, festivalgoers were greeted by a sprawling installation across the forecourt, impossible to miss. Like a counter-monument emerging from the concrete, the durational installation Home Bound offered an alternative spire—not forged in steel and ambition, but knotted in care, labor, and collective presence. Collaborators Daniel Kok and Luke George, known for their sustained cross-regional practice, reimagined its architecture as something to be entangled with. Through workshops led by textile artists, members of the Handweavers and Spinners Guild of Victoria, and local community leaders, a reticulated, open dialogue was spun into motion, and the public invited to join. Over the course of the festival, Home Bound choreographed a civic slow burn: thread by thread, story by story, a luminous web of social complexity unfolding in public space. Compared with earlier works by George and Kok, which often staged rope and bondage practices through registers of risk and consensual precarity, Home Bound shifted emphasis toward a quieter, more absorptive form of relational politics. In that sense, it echoed the festival’s broader programmatic tone: less a space of struggle than one of invitation. At the core of its vibrant interactions were eighteen new commissions with artists from seventeen Asia-Pacific countries, and synchronized collaboration with partners such as the Taipei Performing Arts Center and Esplanade—Theatres on the Bay, signifying deepened integration with a maturing curatorial network. A notable addition to the program—beyond the showcases, exhibitions, and social events—was the “Knowledge” section and “Process Labs,” which provided space for artistic research and development to challenge extractive models of production and to focus on artist- and community-led forms of knowledge-making.
Framed through an intergenerational lens, the program sought to honor some of the cultural Elders and artistic path-makers whose work has shaped Australia’s Asia-Pacific imaginary, including Indigenous artists, locally based artists of the Asian diaspora, and invited collaborators from across the region. The opening weekend set the tone with Milestone, a collaboration with legendary Chinese Australian queer artist William Yang. His intimate photo-essays, which chronicle decades of social change, were set to an operatic score by Elena Kats-Chernin and performed live by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra—an offering both monumental and deeply personal in its excavation of memory and belonging. The festival’s ability to scale works to orchestral proportions is emblematic of how it is positioned within the production capacities of the Arts Centre, reworking it from the inside while expanding the institution’s attempt to develop a more equity-focused structural framework—a shift underscored by the recent appointment of Troy Walsh as its first-ever executive director of First Nations and Equity & Inclusion.
Asia TOPA’s ethos of honoring lineage continued in Bunyi Bunyi Bumi, a searing local dance commission codirected by raymond d. blanco and Priya Srinivasan. In this meeting of Aboriginal, Tamil, Torres Strait Islander, and Indonesian artists, the choreography delved into the potentials of shared precolonial histories. Other commissions—from Yumi Umiumare’s genre-defying butoh cabaret to Rakini Devi’s intimate one-on-one performance as a “female pope,” drawing on Catholic and Hindu iconography—underscored the program’s regional imaginary as a space for dynamic, embodied world-making. As in its previous two editions, the festival offered a decentralized approach, partnering up with more than twenty venues across the city and extending its reach well beyond the central spine. Exhibition formats played a key role in sustaining this durational rhythm beyond the event-form. To draw on Claire Bishop, “structures of experience”and “structures of spectatorship”1 intertwined in exhibition settings that were performatively activated, ranging from the retrospective energy of the Pacific Sisters’ FROCK A WHANAUNGATANGA showcase to Chronotopia, Singaporean photographer Sim Chi Yin’s first Australian solo exhibition. Presented at Footscray Community Arts, Sim’s reexamination of the Malayan Emergency (1948–60) mobilized remembrance as both method and critique. Through the appropriation of magic lantern slides, she traced the life of her grandfather—a Cold War political activist executed in British Malaya. Gloomy projections exposed the aesthetic machinery of empire, an investigation deepened in Sim’s Australian performance debut, One Day We’ll Understand, wherein the artist, accompanied by percussionist Cheryl Ong, wove image, sound, and historical rupture into a live meditation on the instability of archives and the politics of inherited memory. Additionally, her participation in A Silence That Sits, a roundtable conversation moderated by Nikki Lam at the Immigration Museum, extended this work into a more local register, opening a shared space for the region’s many buried migration histories.
Not all parts of the festival embodied this kind of accessible complexity, however. When Khan joined Asia TOPA in mid-2022, he inherited elements shaped by the vision of founding creative director Stephen Armstrong, whose influence remained visible in parts of the program. Among these legacy projects was Gapu Nupan (Chasing the Rainbow), a five-year collaboration between Yolŋu artists from North-Eastern Arnhem Land and Paiwan and Amis artists from Taiwan. While sonically powerful, the work’s reliance on ethnic signifiers and its aestheticized ageless mysticism positioned it somewhat apart from the festival’s evolving curatorial approach.
Its name brushes up against a near homonym: Asiatopia, the long-running Chiang Mai performance art gathering primarily dedicated to Southeast Asian independent performance practices. Asia TOPA, by contrast, is an infrastructural heavyweight, where commissioning functions as a critical lever—determining not only who is invited, but also what kinds of outward movement and transnational entanglements the festival sets in motion. This came into vivid focus through the curatorial echo chamber surrounding Yayoi Kusama’s work in Australia. Simultaneous to Asia TOPA, the National Gallery of Victoria staged her retrospective blockbuster just next door to the Arts Centre, and while not officially part of the Asia TOPA program, the show was still, in a blurred fashion, folded into the festival’s public materials. Kusama’s trajectory offers a case study in regional reception history. Having first made her mark via New York’s avant-garde scene, her work debuted in Australia in 1989 at the Queensland Art Gallery’s Japanese Ways, Western Means exhibition, and later featured at the Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial in 2002. The Ascension of Polkadots on the Trees, first developed for Japan, also in 2002, has now been reinstalled along St Kilda Road, turning Melbourne’s Euro-boulevard of London plane trees into a kawaii zone of globalized Asianness. The seemingly inclusive gesture of the show in giving high visibility to certain artists, as in this case, deflects critical attention from the deeper structural imbalances in artist mobility across the region—exacerbated by Australia’s historically inconsistent engagement with Southeast Asia—which has long hindered the development of sustainable pathways for collaboration beyond partnerships with well-resourced countries like Singapore and Japan. Asia TOPA’s presentation of Indonesian artist Melati Suryodarmo is a case in point: Performances (Unpacked No. 2: Political, BORROW + Exergie—Butter Dance, and Lapse) garnered attention and critical acclaim, but were made possible through the support of partners in Taipei (initiated by River Lin) and Singapore (via Faith Tan)—once again highlighting the charged responsibility curators bear in mobilizing alternative networks across the so-called region.
Amid Asia TOPA’s many fierce artistic works and great audience interest, a significant rupture in the national arts landscape that occurred midway through should not go unmentioned. During the EXCHANGE series, which hosted visiting professionals and was the only segment funded by Creative Australia, guests found themselves unexpectedly free for an evening. The 2025 Asia Pacific Arts Awards, slated to take place at the Arts Centre, were abruptly canceled, following Creative Australia’s snap decision to withdraw support for Khaled Sabsabi as the country’s representative at the Sixy-First Venice Biennale. While the awards weren’t officially part of Asia TOPA’s program, and their Creative Australia–appointed jury was separate from the Venice selection committee, the proximity—spatial and symbolic—was impossible to ignore. With the possibility of proceeding in good faith compromised, the event was called off. While the festival was not directly involved in the controversy, the timing of the incident nonetheless reverberated, highlighting the structural fragility faced by artistic voices advocating for more inclusive and accountable cultural narratives. Clearly, its commitment to programming in the plurals, foregrounding Indigenous leadership, diasporic thinking, and cross-border collaboration, was not merely a curatorial approach, but a proposal for how art might move differently—across the region, and throughout this regionalized world. With future funding uncertain, one can only hope that this generous and necessary platform will be able to continue its commitment to the unfinished work well underway.
1. Claire Bishop, “Unhappy Days in the Art World? Deskilling Theater, Reskilling Performance,” Al Held Essays, Brooklyn Rail, December 2011, 39–40.
