A lack of time, a lack of experience and a lack of willingness may be among the reasons why Melbourne arts organisations have largely failed to engage with the city’s Chinese-speaking student population, the authors of a new report have suggested.
‘Let’s be fair, I think Melbourne has changed pretty quickly and pretty significantly, particularly the centre of Melbourne over the last 10 years. And perhaps we haven’t quite caught up with that in the art sector,’ said Kate Ben-Tovim, who together with Tam Nguyen and Wenona Lok is one of the three lead authors of the 520 Melbourne report.
‘Frankly, I think that because there are limited Chinese-speaking young people in the art sector that have come from the international student cohort, there isn’t a sense that the sector is actually organically engaged – it’s all pretty new,’ she added.
Wenona Lok, another of the report’s co-authors, added: ‘I think a lot of times, when people look at this audience, they think, “Oh, I don’t speak the language and it’s just too much work.”‘
Lok encouraged arts organisations to think of the issue as being around cultural barriers rather than language barriers.
‘Yes, language is important. But understanding their culture is a whole other thing,’ she said, going on to describe the Chinese-speaking student population as ‘quite a low hanging fruit’ in terms of potential audience segments.
‘Things like food, connectivity, shareable assets, all those things add to it for that particular audience. And I think they are things that we often just neglect because we think, “Oh, Chinese language students – too hard,”‘ Lok explained.
A HIGHLY ENGAGED AUDIENCE
According to the 520 Melbourne report (commissioned by Imagikai and Turning World and named after the Chinese online slang term ‘520’, meaning ‘I love you’) the city’s Chinese-speaking student cohort is trend-focused, heavily engaged with social media, and dine out more than once a week.
But despite their disposable income and stated desire to engage with Australian culture during their time living overseas (as reported in focus groups conducted during the report-writing process) their presence in the city is not reflected in the audiences of most arts and cultural venues.
Indeed, most focus group participants were unable to name any Melbourne cultural institutions except for the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), the 520 Melbourne report states.
The success of the NGV in attracting this Chinese-speaking student audience indicates that such a strategy doesn’t have to be big and expensive; it can start simply by recognising the cohort’s need for unique experiences which they can connect with and share on Chinese social media platform such as WeChat.
‘I believe NGV started out pretty small in terms of just working with somebody in-house who spoke Mandarin and just reposting their own existing content on the platforms. In the beginning I don’t think it was a grand campaign; I just think they identified this as an audience they wanted to attract, and actually spoke to somebody that knew that audience and was, you know, aligned to that audience and just kind of went from there,’ Ben-Tovim explained.
What the NGV did especially well, Lok adds, was to tap into this audience’s desire to be across the ‘latest thing’.
‘That’s what NGV did remarkably well with some of the earlier exhibits – I think it was Dior, Van Gogh – not everything was just about the art. They had those big installations … I vaguely remember that it was like, “Come take a photo with a Van Gogh background,” and then you can send it to yourself straight away,’ she said.
‘I think I was overseas at that time, and I opened up my Facebook or Instagram, and everyone was posting about it. So to these students, it’s no longer just about visiting some museum, it’s getting this full experience of learning about the artists and being able to be part of that experience, as well.’
USING THE RIGHT CHANNELS
Using the right social media channels to connect with this Chinese-speaking student audience is another key finding of the 520 Melbourne report, which found that 66% of this student cohort do not engage with any Australian media, online or offline.
However, it also reports that 97% engage with Chinese-language social media platform WeChat every day.
‘We say this in our report, “if it’s not on WeChat, it doesn’t exist,”‘ Ben-Tovim explained.
The report emphasises the importance of engaging with the right social media platforms.
- 97% of survey respondents are on WeChat every day. 84% engage with WeChat Moments and 78% engage with WeChat Groups every day. The next most common Chinese social media platform is Weibo (76% every day). And just under half of survey respondents use Xiaohongshu (aka Little Red Book) daily (48%).
- Popular non-Chinese specific platforms include Instagram (which 70% use daily) and YouTube (which 61% use daily).
- Social media platforms are critical to this cohort’s decision making, with 85% of people finding out about events online (58% specifically through Chinese-language platforms).
The influence of Chinese social media – in particular WeChat – cannot be overstated when it comes to engaging this audience, the report states.
520 Melbourne was written pre-COVID and was due to be launched last year, until the pandemic disrupted its planned publication. While specifically Melbourne-focused, its findings are expected to be broadly applicable.
Pre-COVID, international students made up one in seven of the youth population of Victoria and one in five residents of the City of Melbourne. Like the arts sector more broadly, the student cohort has been hard-hit by the pandemic.
‘I think everyone knows that international students particularly have had a terrible time over the last year, a terrible time,’ said Ben-Tovim.
While Melbourne is slowly returning to COVID-normal, it will take some time before the Chinese-speaking student population returns to pre-2020 levels.
‘Our hope is that at whatever level this [cohort] returns, and however slow or fast that is, the key message is that they are a really important part of our city and they should be engaged in our cultural life. We should be understanding them, we should be involving them more. We feel like that’s a message that’s even more important now, because they are such an important part of who we are,’ Ben-Tovim said.
Read the 520 Melbourne report.
