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As a platform committed to supporting artists in the early stages of their professional development, Emerging Art Beat provides a structured and professionally curated environment in which new practices can be presented with clarity and purpose.

As a platform committed to supporting artists in the early stages of their professional development, Emerging Art Beat provides a structured and professionally curated environment in which new practices can be presented with clarity and purpose.

As a platform committed to supporting artists in the early stages of their professional development, Emerging Art Beat provides a structured and professionally curated environment in which new practices can be presented with clarity and purpose.

As a platform committed to supporting artists in the early stages of their professional development, Emerging Art Beat provides a structured and professionally curated environment in which new practices can be presented with clarity and purpose.

Project

Emerging Art Beat
Exhibition

 26 April - 07 May 2026,Creative Asia Art Centre

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Emerging Art Beat 2026: Closing Gathering

Distributed Worlds: Where Do We Go From Here?

26 April - 07 May 2026

Creative Asia Art Centre | World Trade Centre Melbourne

Join us for the closing gathering of Emerging Art Beat 2026, a celebration of emerging artistic voices, cross-cultural exchange, and the creative conversations shaped throughout the exhibition.


Presented by Australia Multi Art & Culture Council and Creative Asia Foundation, this year’s exhibition brings together 36 emerging artists working across painting, installation, sculpture, photography, digital media, moving image, sound, performance, jewellery, and interdisciplinary practice.


Guided by the theme Distributed Worlds: Where Do We Go From Here?, the exhibition reflects on how contemporary life is shaped by fragmentation, acceleration, and uneven systems of value. Across the works, artists explore identity, memory, migration, technology, labour, body, place, spirituality, and imagination.


At its core, Distributed Worlds asks how we continue to locate meaning, connection, and humanity within a world that is increasingly dispersed across geographies, systems, images, and forms of power.

“Distributed Worlds is not about resolving fragmentation, but about learning how to exist within it — where multiple realities, identities, and experiences can coexist without being reduced to a single narrative.”

The closing gathering offers audiences a final opportunity to experience the exhibition, meet participating artists, and reflect on the ideas, relationships, and creative possibilities that have emerged through the project.

Program Highlights

  • Exhibition viewing 

  • Artist introductions and informal conversations 

  • Networking with artists, curators, and creative communities 

  • Closing reflections from the project team 

  • Photography and media moments 

Featured Artists

  • Alessia Catalano – Explores digital culture, media memory, and contemporary image-making through pop-inspired painting and retro visual language.

  • Alexandra Nosova – Reimagines Australian identity through Pop Art, repetition, branding, and familiar cultural symbols such as Vegemite.

  • Alice Marie Martin – Investigates invisible illness, embodiment, and overlooked spaces through poetic painting and experimental material installation.

  • Anna Xiang – Draws on Buddhist and Daoist thought to explore consciousness, impermanence, and the fluidity of identity through painting.

  • Aster (Shih-en) Lin – Reflects on migration, home, and belonging through drawing, mapping, installation, and community-oriented practice.

  • AXIEXIE – Bridges Chinese decorative traditions and contemporary design through pattern-based objects, silk, ceramics, and cultural memory.

  • Cathy Zhang – Creates luminous mixed-media paintings that explore desire, visibility, fragility, and interior emotional landscapes.

  • Chelsea Parkinson – Uses clock imagery to explore waiting, suspended time, vulnerability, and the emotional weight of living in limbo.

  • Chloe Emmerich – Works with ceramics and painting to consider plant life, slowness, and nature’s resistance to containment.

  • Christina Rankin – Examines neurodivergence, gendered expectations, conformity, and personal agency through painting and embodied symbolism.

  • Diana Kraski – Creates contemplative paintings shaped by faith, water, light, stillness, and spiritual orientation.

  • Doris Li – Explores trauma, memory, and psychological states through watercolour, abstraction, and the metaphor of paper as fragile skin.

  • Erica Olina – Combines charcoal, acrylic, astrology, and symbolic figuration to explore resilience, transformation, and identity.

  • Falconeris Marimón – Uses reclaimed urban materials to construct playful, critical installations about cities, debris, and systems of meaning.

  • Huiyi Xiao – Reframes migrant labour, service work, and embodied resistance through performance-based video and diasporic inquiry.

  • Idgie Kagan – Explores matrilineal inheritance, family archives, and memory through layered oil painting and inherited tools.

  • Isabella Mesiti – Uses digital art and speculative storytelling to examine internet culture, artificial intelligence, and commodified connection.

  • Jessie Spadon – Addresses mental health, healing, and emotional multiplicity through figurative mixed-media work and macabre visual language.

  • Kanghao Yuan – Stages photographic narratives of queer love, traditional marriage, and unrecognised desire in historical Chinese contexts.

  • Kassie Suen – Builds dreamlike painted worlds that explore fantasy, imagination, emotional expression, and creative agency.

  • Qinyue Chen – Investigates identity, luxury consumption, performativity, and value circulation through staged oil painting.

  • Rachel Zhou – Explores destruction, repair, family memory, archives, and migrant histories through two-channel digital video.

  • Scarlett Davis – Uses oil and embroidery to explore water, movement, stillness, and the connection between people and natural environments.

  • Tianlun Wang – Creates symbolic sculpture exploring inner completeness, gender fluidity, mythology, and self-sufficient power.

  • Tom Palmer – Confronts militarism, political violence, empire, and complicity through urgent figurative painting.

  • Tobias Higgins – Translates local environments, community change, and political uncertainty into abstract painting.

  • Vivian Lu – Constructs interactive installations where bodies encounter systems of aspiration, control, refusal, and ecological alternatives.

  • Wenqing Qian – Translates sound, emotion, rhythm, and bodily perception into abstract visual forms through painting and mixed media.

  • Xinyu Yao – Reflects on Alzheimer’s disease, memory erosion, calligraphy, mourning, and fragile selfhood through layered textile work.

  • Yujun Deng – Creates installations that explore transformation, thresholds, endings, beginnings, and unstable spatial experience.

  • Yining Lyu – Reworks Chinese folk imagery into feminist installation, exposing gendered structures embedded within cultural tradition.

  • Yoka Pan – Uses colour, gesture, and figurative painting to explore vulnerability, intimacy, emotional shifts, and human presence.

  • Yoko Zou – Explores body image, beauty standards, healing, and cloud-like forms through contemporary jewellery and sculpture.

  • Yunhan Lu – Blends painting, design, photography, Chinese poetry, and emotional storytelling to create reflective visual narratives.

  • Yvaine Hou – Explores softness, intercultural experience, belonging, and in-between states through painting and poetic visual storytelling.

  • Yingyi Lin – Constructs immersive moving-image and sound environments that shift between digital space, perception, and imagined place.

About Emerging Art Beat

Emerging Art Beat is a platform dedicated to supporting emerging artists and curators through exhibition-making, professional development, and cross-cultural exchange. More than an exhibition, it creates a space for experimentation, visibility, and dialogue between artists, audiences, curators, and the broader creative community.


This closing event marks not an end, but a continuation — a moment to recognise the artists’ practices, celebrate new connections, and imagine where these distributed worlds may lead next.

 

Acknowledgements

Emerging Art Beat 2026 is presented by Australia Multi Art & Culture Council and Creative Asia Foundation, and hosted at Creative Asia Art Centre, World Trade Centre Melbourne.


We extend our sincere thanks to all participating artists, curators, project collaborators, media team, photographers, contributors, and audiences for supporting this year’s exhibition. Your presence, care, and creative energy have shaped Emerging Art Beat 2026 into a meaningful platform for emerging contemporary art.
 

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Creative Asia Foundation acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Country throughout Australia, and all First Peoples living and working on this land. We celebrate the history and contemporary creativity of the world's oldest living culture and pay respect to Elders – past, present and future.

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