The conference was Convened by the Chinese Australian Studies Research Centre to examine the ways in which the creative self, tradition and the modern institution are bound together, the  conference took place at the John Curtin Gallery in Perth in February 2009. It was the second of two linked conferences (the first, held in Guangzhou in 2007, examined the effects of globalisation on traditional Chinese visual practices). At the centre of the conference was the premise that, in what Ulrich Beck calls Second Modernity, and in the conditions of what Zygmunt Bauman calls Liquid Modernity, the need for a reflexive cosmopolitanism is paramount. How does this then impact upon the creative individual when negotiating tradition and the institutions of modernity? How important is the subjective realm as a space for creativity and how relevant is the social realm for creative engagement? The conference  discussion around these issues came from sociologists, anthropologists, educationalists, artists and writers. A collection of essays drawn from the conference,  Subjectivity, Creativity and the Institution, has been published by the BrownWalker Press.