Aaron Choulai

My practice as a pianist, composer and conductor is grounded in the creation of culturally coded art music that speaks from an Asia Pacific and diaspora perspective. My work emerges from the lived complexity of multiple cultural identities, with a commitment to presenting that complexity with nuance and in a contemporary framework.

At the core of my artistic intention is a desire to express my many cultures at once , PNG tradition inflected with Chinese heritage, the personal culture that develops from fifteen years of life in Japan, and a deep immersion in jazz and hip-hop. My music reflects a layered, lived reality of culture. This has led me to projects that bring together Motuan Peroveta choral traditions, Japanese Gagaku court music, jazz, hip-hop and improvised music, not as an exercise in eclecticism, but as a reflection of how these traditions genuinely coexist within my own artistic and cultural experience.

A central ambition of my work is audience. I am committed to bringing newer and more diverse audiences into the creative music space, people who may not yet see themselves reflected in existing art music institutions or repertoires, but whose cultures, stories and musical lineages are deeply present in the work I make. I believe that art music in Australia has an extraordinary opportunity to speak to the full diversity of this country, and I approach that opportunity with both seriousness and urgency.

As Artistic Director of the Australian Art Orchestra, I am committed to building an organisation whose work genuinely reflects Australia as an Asia Pacific nation. The AAO has a distinguished history of adventurous work, and I see my role as extending that spirit into new cultural and geographic territory with a particular focus on this vision.

My practice is ultimately driven by the conviction that cultural specificity and artistic ambition are not in tension — that music rooted in a particular cultural truth is capable of speaking widely, and that the art music space is enlarged, not diminished, by the presence of diverse voices within