Visual-Music Energies 2025 brings the work of six leading Asian-Australian artists of Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean heritage into a live, multi-artform program. Their works are reinterpreted as a series of short films curated by award-winning filmmaker Vincent Tay, with new music and poetry written in response. The program draws on qiyun, the Chinese aesthetic idea of energies that move between breath, splashed ink and the vibration of strings.

South Korean artist Cheolyu Kim, trained as a sculptor, builds dense pen drawings on birchwood from a childhood fascination with flight; his Journey to Nowhere series inspired both a new composition and a poem by Kate Fagan. Jin Sha stages imagined conversations with the masters of European painting, and his homage to Magritte became the basis of a new piece for guzheng. Mai Nguyễn-Long works across ceramics, painting and installation, building playful, unsettling figures from personal and collective histories. Louise Zhang uses colour, texture and ideas of transformation drawn from Chinese mythology. Lucy Pulvers paints dreamlike, stylised figures in quiet, colourful scenes. Richard Wu, a psychiatrist and ink painter, brings the brush traditions of Chinese ink into the program.

Seen through film, sound and word, the works take on new life beyond the gallery wall.