Dr Alex Burchmore
Senior Lecturer in Art History and Curatorial Studies
The Australian National University | College of Arts and Social Sciences | School of Art and Design | Centre for Art History and Art Theory
I am an art historian and arts writer, specialising in the study of Chinese art, past and present, with a broader focus on travel and mobility, trade and exchange, communities and collectivism, and interactions of the personal and material. My career in academia and the arts has encompassed a wide range of roles, including curatorial and provenance research at the Art Gallery of South Australia and National Gallery of Australia; publication management for internationally distributed arts publication Art Monthly Australasia; and teaching and research with the Museum & Heritage Studies postgraduate program at the University of Sydney.
My first book, New Export China: Translations Across Time and Place in Contemporary Chinese Porcelain Art (University of California Press, 2023), traces the myriad ways in which Chinese artists have used porcelain from the 1990s to the present to shape their visions of personal and cultural identity. I’ve also edited and written a chapter for Material Selves: Object Biographies and Identities in Motion, a volume of essays by scholars in Australia, China, and the UK interrogating methods of object biography through an interdisciplinary and transcultural lens (Bloomsbury, 2024).
I received my PhD from the Australian National University in 2019 and joined the faculty of the University of Sydney’s Museum & Heritage Studies program in 2021 before returning to the ANU to take up my current role in late 2023. In 2013, I received MA qualifications in Art History and Curatorial & Museum Studies from the University of Adelaide, writing on the visual experience of death in Buddhist art and on the ethics of transcultural display. I received a Prime Minister’s Australia Asia Postgraduate Endeavour Award in 2014 to fund a year of language study and doctoral research in Beijing.
alexburchmore.com 