Dr. Alex Burchmore

Biography

Alex Burchmore is an art historian and arts writer specializing in the study of Chinese art, both past and present, with a broader focus on travel mobility, trade exchange, and personal material interactions. His academic career in the arts has included a wide range of roles, including curatorial provenance research and publication management for the globally distributed arts magazine Art Monthly Australasia. He served as a Lecturer in Museum Heritage Studies at the University of Sydney from 2021 to 2023. Burchmore's monograph, 'New Export China: Translations of Time and Place in Contemporary Chinese Porcelain Art,' published in 2023 by the University of California Press, explores the myriad ways artists in China have used porcelain from the 1990s to the present to shape visions of personal and cultural identity. He also edited and contributed to 'Material Selves: Object Biographies in Identities in Motion' (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), an interdisciplinary collection of essays by scholars from Australia, the UK, and China that interrogates methods of object biography through a transcultural lens. Burchmore holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) from the South Australian School of Art, a Master's degree in Art History, and a Master's degree in Curatorial & Museum Studies from the University of Adelaide, as well as a PhD from the Centre for Art History and Art Theory of the Australian National University.

Research Interests