OzAsia 2025: A Global Celebration of Arts and Culture
OzAsia 2025, Australia's premier multi-arts festival, once again showcased its ability to bring together diverse talents from across the globe. Despite South Australia's relatively small Asian population, the festival has grown into a significant platform, integrating music, literature, dance, comedy, and visual arts.
This year's edition, with an additional weekend, was described as 'bigger than ever' by festival organizers, aiming to unite Asian and Asian-Australian artists with the art-loving audience of South Australia.
One of the headline acts was Japanese jazz pianist Hiromi Uehara, who performed The Piano Quintet with PUBLIQuartet at Adelaide Town Hall. Her technical brilliance was awe-inspiring, as if two pianists were in one body, each hand playing its own rhythm, melody, and sound. Hiromi's expressiveness reflected the essence of East Asian music, where the first character means sound, and the second means joy.
She also presented Silver Lining Suite, a composition born during the COVID-19 isolation, exploring emotions of uncertainty, solitude, and dignity. The work was 'completed' with the audience, as Hiromi noted, though she had previously shared the same sentiment in Perth.
During the encore, Hiromi almost played Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee, a nod to Adelaide audiences and its use in the 1996 film Shine. However, she played Gershwin's I Got Rhythm, a staple of her repertoire, which didn't specifically cater to Adelaide's tastes.
Hiromi's artistic identity is shaped internationally, influenced by New York's jazz scene as much as her hometown of Hamamatsu, where Yamaha pianos are made.
The festival also showcased the personal narratives of artists like Ryuichi Fujimura, who performed a moving autobiographical piece, HERE NOW, articulating the physical and emotional struggles of a dancer. Kultar Ahluwalia's The Mixed-Race Tape drew on his Punjabi and Irish Catholic heritage, fusing hip-hop and spoken word with visual projections to explore identity, family, and belonging in suburban Adelaide.
Omar Musa's The Offering intertwined poetry and music to contemplate ancestry and colonization, connecting his ancestors' experiences in colonial Borneo and Australia. LauZone, a multilingual musical project by Rich Lau and Anna Lo, reflected on Hong Kong's migrant histories and linguistic diversity, exploring the tension between heritage and modern identity.
The festival also addressed the challenges of cultural translation, with Lau and Lo acknowledging the limitations of their initial ChatGPT-drafted English translations. Despite the festival's growing scale, it continues to struggle with translation funding, as evidenced by the need for theater companies to contribute part of the translation fee.
In terms of audience engagement, Opera for the Dead, created by Mindy Meng Wang and Monica Lim, drew from Chinese funeral traditions, merging live instrumentation, operatic singing, and ritual costuming. While the absence of subtitles may have alienated non-Chinese speakers, it mirrored the acceptance of untranslated lyrics in Western music concerts.
Elsewhere in India, by Murthovic and Thiruda, showcased technical virtuosity with its seamless fusion of electronic music and visual projections, exploring India's future. However, the performance at The Lab at ILA, an underground nightclub venue, missed the mark due to its lack of seating and an audience unprepared for the environment.
In contrast, AnimeGo attracted young people with amateur song and dance acts, fan-made merchandise stalls, and video game corners, creating a warm and welcoming space. OzAsia's initiative to attract younger audiences with a $30 under 30 ticket scheme is commendable, but effective programming depends on aligning the right work with the right audience and venue.
Ultimately, OzAsia serves two purposes: bringing leading Asian artists to Adelaide and supporting local creative talent. The curatorial challenge for next year lies in balancing the global and the local, ensuring international guests understand the festival's ethos and resonate with Adelaide's creative communities.
