When looking at various objects, including fish in a glass fish tank, what do you “see”? Westerners tend to see the foreground fish and Easterners tend to see the whole tank—the fish, large and small, the water, sand, glass and air. In other words, they see the various aspects arranged in relationship to each other.
Alison Carroll has been an academic, critic, writer, curator and administrator of art exhibitions and artist exchanges with Asia for over 30 years. She has curated over 40 exhibitions, including Out of Asia, the first exhibition to include Australian artists’ attitudes to Asia, in 1989, and the first significant inclusion of contemporary Asian art at an Adelaide Festival, in 1994. In 1990 she established and was Director (until June 2010) of the Arts Program at Asialink, University of Melbourne, the main program for arts exchange between Asia and Australia for visual arts, performing arts, literature and arts management practice. She published a major book on 20th century Asian art The Revolutionary Century; Art in Asia 1900-2000 (Macmillan Australia) in 2010.
She received the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council’s Emeritus Medal 2006 and was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 2010 for her work at Asialink.
