About

Sia X. Yang is a bilingual writer-researcher as well as a weirdly lucky person.

Since 2018, Sia has been on an ongoing career break, thanks to the births of Thomas and Myfanwy. Her deepest ambition is to remain a playful mum.

Academia is a paradise for someone who mistakes neglect for freedom. I entered it over a decade ago, consoled by the thought that not being able to drive would be the least of my dysfunctions.

After over seven years of intellectual hibernation and professional near-death, my writing has reappeared in 2025—unexpectedly ambulant—in Memo Review, Art Review Oxford, Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Made in China Journal, and Cultural Politics (Duke UP). Additional manuscripts are undergoing peer review across reputable journals in critical art history and interdisciplinary humanities. Despite prolonged exposure to editorial triage, the work displays an anomalously high resistance to desk rejection.

I spent a year (2016–17) as a visiting scholar in Early Modern European History at the University of Oxford, where I was, with complete sincerity, repeatedly mistaken for a Japanese high school girl. I later became the inaugural (and possibly terminal) recipient of the Judith Neilson Scholarship in Contemporary Art (2018-23), completing a PhD in Art History at the University of Sydney. The period established my reputation as an askhole and coincided with my chaotic debut as a mum, leaving me with the unshakable conviction that my most dependable skill is breastfeeding.

I do miss those days when my babies were moving inside me—slow turns, sudden kicks, little hauntings under the skin. That bizarre hormonal happiness wiped out the all-day nausea like a glitch in the system. And for someone who started life with an A cup, I breastfed with genuine enthusiasm—two children, two years each—four glorious years of unexpected boob prosperity before everything quietly retired, shrank back to modest A, lopsided, and surrendered to gravity.

I remain effortlessly thick-skinned, and my work has since been recognised with the Australian Academy of the Humanities Travelling Fellowship (2024), which allowed me a ten-day return to little Britain to exhibit my Australian English, followed by a granny-sponsored detour to Tokyo for anime idol worship.

Early in 2014, I was selected for the Harvard-Yenching—Tsinghua Advanced Research Program (and halfway through, I defected to the wild artists). Before relocating to Sydney and officially immigrating to my imagined wild, wild Australia, I worked as a junior research slave for one year at the School of International Studies, Zhejiang University, my alma mater.

Zheda 浙大—lying beside the romantic West Lake, perpetually ranked third in China (the forever ‘other’ to the Tsinghua–Peking couple, seductively proud of its irreplaceable position)—was also where I grabbed my PhD in Comparative Literature in 2015. Those years were solitary and, in retrospect, improbably calm: multiple projects, two male chinchillas, and a self-imposed exile in the Beijing suburbs, with no sense that I was already quietly training for a more intricate manoeuvre—one that would later acquire a sociological name: run 润.

I occasionally take part in collaborative art projects. After all, I once instantly turned one of the most handsome sculptors I met (Zhou Yanfeng StudioooO) into my children’s father, who, since then, with admirable sobriety, concluded that making art is radically unhelpful for raising a family. He survives on behalf of my hedonism, my incurable laziness, my naïve arithmetic of Sydney’s rent, my final fantasy in the precariat’s doomed endeavour toward the middle class.

A bonus musical skill: I was an ungifted child modern Guzheng 古箏 player.

My high school besties still believe I fulfilled my dream of becoming an anime artist.

I speak less than most men and am allergic only to others’ boredom.

I’ve, at last, made peace with Reviewer 2.

…

Eastwood, Sydney

October 2025