In the Flow: Text within Artistic Practice

Hear from five multidisciplinary artists and designers as they reflect on relationships between text, language, and ephemerality.

'In the Flow / Menelusuri Arus / 흐름을 타고 / 引流行思' gathers five multidisciplinary artists and designers to reflect on relationships between text, language, and ephemerality within contemporary practice. Through a series of short readings, each artist shares paratextual writing—notes, poetry extracts, and narrative sketches—developed alongside their projects.

Taking its title from Boris Groys’ book of essays ‘In the Flow’, this program considers how these relational texts might transcend the temporality of time-based practice or flow within it. Working across sound, performance, speculative typography, digital processes, and slow methods of documentation, these artists explore how time can become malleable and cyclical.

The program offers insight into how language can hold memory, shift perspectives, or complicate understandings of the truth. Texts are vessels—like a boat carrying its passenger, they carry an artwork’s meaning. In the flow, each work meets and diverges, drifting towards new and unexpected resonances.

—

Curated by Lige Qiao, Lizzie Marali, Soomin Jeong, and Anqi Qi

—

SPEAKERS

Milla Āniwaniwa

Milla Āniwaniwa’s practice explores the preservation of culture and language through photography, video, and sound, enriching connections to her Māori heritage. Grounded in a decolonial perspective, her work highlights aural histories and the power of sound as a vessel for memory, healing, reclamation, and sovereignty.

Michelle Tsang

Michelle Tsang is a designer reimagining the visual legacy of Chinese writing through a feminist, diasporic lens. Drawing from traditional rhetoric and embodied knowledge, her project ‘Wen 妏’ translates the unseen textures of history into a speculative typographic system. Michelle treats written language as a tactile landscape, rewriting what could have been and what might still become.

Wen Pei Low

Wen Pei Low is a visual artist, writer, singer-songwriter, and event producer based between stolen Gadigal Land and Singapore. She works across performance, poetry, textiles, and vocalisation. Her recent projects are interested in creating impacts at the intersection of artistic and medical research, exploring art therapeutic methods through making processes.

Cleo Ding

Cleo Ding uses glitch aesthetics to explore self-identification and diasporic identity in the post-digital era, drawing from her experiences as a second-generation Chinese immigrant born in Australia. By abstracting 3D body scans made via smartphone into ‘digital skin’, Cleo investigates how othering and objectification might contextualise preconceived understandings of the self, and a strategic sense of self-representation.

Izzy Page

Izzy Page works in photography and moving image, using slow methods of documentation to investigate and capture quiet and overlooked moments. Through slow, durational, and archival approaches, Izzy’s practice considers how stillness and banal non-moments can offer an alternative to urgency and constant change, inviting a reflection on time, place, and shared experience.

—

This program is presented in conjunction with The Annual 2025, UNSW School of Art & Design Graduate Exhibition. Hear from the next generation of creative practitioners in this dynamic program curated by the Master of Curating & Cultural Leadership cohort.

—

Image: Milla Āniwaniwa, 'Dear Waimarie' (video still) 2025.