This year’s theme What/where/when is Asian art? tackles a central tension: how can a single idea (Asian art) encompass such a diversity of peoples, geographies and cultural practices?

Over the past 30 years, artists and scholars have proposed various answers to this question, from the diasporic and postcolonial frameworks of the 1990s to today’s distinct yet intersectional concepts of the transcultural, culturally hybrid, Indigenous and decolonial. This series examines why the question of Asian art continues to provoke debate and how the stakes of defining it shift across nations and contexts.

Convened by art historian Dr Yvonne Low, University of Sydney, and the Art Gallery’s curator of Asian art, Dr Natalie Seiz, this year’s Sydney Asian Art Series engages with ideas explored in the Art Gallery of NSW's exhibition And Still I Rise.

Below are our first two events of the Series, featuring our 2026 Scholar in Residence, Kajri Jain.

The series is presented by VisAsia at the Art Gallery of NSW and the Power Institute at the University of Sydney.

Wednesday, 18 March 2026
6:00 - 7:00pm
Art Gallery of NSW
Centenary Auditorium, Naala Nura Building

A lecture by our 2026 Sydney Asian Series Scholar in Residence, on the sensory infrastructures of collage in a religious souvenir from Nathdwara, and a work by modernist Bhupen Khakhar.

Kajri Jain (PhD University of Sydney) is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Toronto. Her work sits at the interface between art, religion, politics, caste, and vernacular business cultures in modern and contemporary India. Her publications include Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art, on popular prints (Duke University Press, 2007), and Gods in the Time of Democracy, on the emergence of monumental statues alongside economic liberalisation (Duke University Press, 2021). She also writes on contemporary art and on the discipline of art history, including in The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History (2023) and How Secular Is Art? On The Politics of Art, History, and Religion in South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

A conversation between artist Kirtika Kain and art historian Kajri Jain on the occasion of Unkept, Kirtika's new exhibition at the University of Sydney's Chau Chak Wing Museum. 

Kirtika Kain is an artist and educator working on Dharug land. Combining elements of sculpture, experimental printmaking and painting. Kain’s practice draws from her Dalit lineage and investigates material histories, ancestral memory and the complexities of caste in the diaspora. Her materials are those of ritual and labour, including pigments, wax, gold and tar, challenging notions of sanctity, touch, stigma and purity while acknowledging the culture of Dalit people. She is a current recipient of the Parramatta Artist Studio Program, and has undertaken residencies at the British School at Rome (2019), the Cité Internationale des arts, Paris (2023), and Creative Australia’s Acme London Residency (2025).  

The Power Institute is a Foundation based at the University of Sydney dedicated to understanding the visual world, through art and visual culture. We support research, publish texts, and organise public programs.

The Power Institute would like to acknowledge and pay respect to the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional owners of the land upon which the University of Sydney, and the Power Institute, is built. As we share our own knowledge, teaching, learning and research practices, may we also pay respect to the knowledge embedded forever within the Aboriginal Custodianship of Country.