Chinese funeral traditions, Australian migration and India’s future: OzAsia 2025 traverses the globe
- Written by: Tets Kimura, Adjunct Lecturer, Creative Arts, Flinders University
OzAsia 2025 once again affirmed its status as Australia’s leading multi-arts celebration of unique creativity. Despite South Australia’s comparatively small Asian population, OzAsia has grown into a significant platform that integrates music, literature, dance, comedy and visual arts.
With an additional weekend this year, the festival organisers described the program as “bigger than ever,” aiming to bring together Asian and Asian-Australian artists with a South Australian art-loving audience.
Among the headline acts was Japanese jazz pianist Hiromi (known by her full name Hiromi Uehara in Japan), performing The Piano Quintet with PUBLIQuartet at Adelaide Town Hall.
Hiromi’s technical brilliance suggested two pianists in one body. Her right and left hands seemed to belong to different minds. Each inhabited its own rhythm, melody and sound. Her joyful expressiveness reflected the two words joined together in the East Asian etymology of music: 音楽 in Japanese and 音樂 in traditional Chinese, where the first character means sound, and the second character means joy.
Together with two violinists, a violist and a cellist, she presented Silver Lining Suite, composed during the isolation of COVID-19, exploring emotions of uncertainty, solitude and dignity. Hiromi remarked the work was now “completed” with the audience (though she offered the identical sentiment in Perth in previous days).
During the encore, for a moment I thought Hiromi was going to play Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee in a nod to Adelaide audiences, referencing its use in the 1996 Adelaide film Shine. But I was soon disappointed to realise it was Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm, a staple of her repertoire not selected specifically for Adelaide audiences at all.
Although Hiromi is a Japanese national, her distinctive artistic identity is shaped internationally as much by New York’s jazz scene as by her hometown of Hamamatsu, where Yamaha pianos, including the one she performed on in Adelaide, are made.
While her concert was electrifying, it did not feel uniquely of Adelaide, nor distinctly of Asia.
This year’s festival demonstrated both the strength and the fragility of cultural translation: how easily world-class performances can feel unanchored, and how small, local gestures can connect art to place.
Telling the personal
Sydney-based Ryuichi Fujimura performed a moving autobiographical piece articulating the physical and emotional struggles of a dancer.
As he moved through the deeply personal trilogy, HERE NOW, he narrated his body: sliding, swinging, twisting, following, rolling, crawling, linking, curving, rotating, skipping, tossing and bouncing. The work enacts resilience against criticism and age. His message is clear: we should persist, believe and continue working – even as the body ages.
Autobiographical storytelling was also featured in Kultar Ahluwalia’s The Mixed-Race Tape.
Drawing on his Punjabi and Irish Catholic heritage, Ahluwalia fuses hip-hop and spoken word with visual projections exploring identity, family and belonging in suburban Adelaide.
Recorded interviews with his mother – seated in the audience in front of me – resonated deeply. His depiction of commuting across Adelaide’s postcodes and negotiating multiple roles – artist, occupational therapist and father – captured the layered experience of multicultural life.
Ultimately, Ahluwalia’s message is hopeful: unconditional parental love can shield children from the pains of racial or cultural marginality. Mixed heritage, he suggested, is not a constraint but an enrichment. It deepens the texture of life.
In Omar Musa’s The Offering, poetry and music are intertwined to contemplate ancestry and colonisation. Collaborating with his wife, cellist Mariel Roberts Musa, Musa connects the experiences of his ancestors in colonial Borneo and Australia, which helped to shape the man he became.
The result is a lyrical realisation on history, identity and survival.
The art of translation
LauZone, from Hong Kong–Australian musician Rich Lau and Hong Kong-based composer Anna Lo, is a multilingual musical project reflecting on Hong Kong’s migrant histories and linguistic diversity.
Their songs, performed in four Chinese languages and English, explore the tension between heritage and modern identity. In a talkback session after the show, the artists spoke of how some migrants to Hong Kong continue to live within linguistic bubbles of their original communities — a pattern also seen in Australia.
The pair also acknowledged that their English translations, initially drafted using ChatGPT, were often too explanatory, even after their revision.
Their candour revealed a larger structural problem: despite its growing scale, OzAsia continues to struggle with translation funding. When I translated Kuro Tanino’s The Dark Master in 2019, I learned this theatre company had to contribute part of the translation fee.
While Lau and Lo’s English was very polished, translation is a distinct craft. It demands intuition and artistry beyond fluency.
Future OzAsia festivals would benefit from increased investment in high-quality translation, ensuring linguistic nuance is not lost in cross-cultural exchange.
Finding the audience
Opera for the Dead, created by Mindy Meng Wang and Monica Lim, was one of the festival’s most visually and sonically arresting works.
Drawing from Chinese funeral traditions, the show merges live instrumentation, operatic singing and ritual costuming, expressing how the end of a life can be celebrated with music and the arts.
The absence of subtitles may have alienated those who do not understand Chinese, but it also mirrored the way non-English speaking audiences accept untranslated lyrics in a Western music concert.
Opera for the Dead looks at how the end of a life can be celebrated with music and the arts.
Dewie Bukit/Adelaide Festival Centre
Here, those who surrendered to the sensory experience were rewarded with an evocative reflection on mortality and cultural continuity.
For sheer technical virtuosity, my personal accolade goes to Murthovic and Thiruda’s Elsewhere in India. Their seamless fusion of electronic music and visual projections created an exploration of India’s future.
However, programming this work at The Lab at ILA misfired. An underground nightclub venue with no seating, the performance drew an audience largely of seniors unprepared for this environment. Only a handful of people – perhaps six, myself included – danced on the floor.
Had the same act been scheduled at a free venue such as the Lucky Dumpling Market stage it might have attracted hundreds of younger people and transformed the night into a true celebration.
Elsewhere in India created an exploration of India’s future.
Sachin Soni/Adelaide Festival Centre
In contrast, young people were plentiful at AnimeGo. The fair featured amateur song and dance acts, fan-made merchandise stalls, and video game corners resembling private collections.
Young participants appeared perfectly content, revelling in their shared enthusiasm for pop culture in a warm and welcoming space — something the more polished but mismatched nightclub event lacked.
OzAsia’s initiative to attract younger audiences with its $30 under 30 ticket scheme is commendable. But effective programming depends less on discounts than on aligning the right work with the right audience and venue.
OzAsia serves two intertwined purposes, bringing leading Asian artists to Adelaide, and supporting local creative talent. Money alone cannot buy the sentiment, commitment and passion that local artists bring to the stage.
The curatorial challenge for next year lies in balancing the global and the local: selecting international guests who understand the festival’s ethos and ensuring that their participation resonates with Adelaide’s creative communities.
Authors: Tets Kimura, Adjunct Lecturer, Creative Arts, Flinders University
Daily Bulletin
