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Arts and tourism promote engagement with countries across Asia - Creative Australia

Summary to be updated.

Nov 18, 2018
Fuju light installation Vivid Sydney 2018

Arts and tourism promote engagement with countries across Asia. Asian markets have been identified as a tourism focus by both arts organisations and tourism bodies in Australia.

International arts tourists by country

  • Almost 620,000 arts tourists came to Australia from China in 2017 – as a country it’s our biggest market.
  • The five countries making up the largest numbers of international arts tourists in 2017 were China, the UK, the USA, New Zealand and Japan.

Arts tourists from Asia

  • In 2010, visitors from Asia replaced those from Europe as the largest proportion of international arts tourists.
  • By 2017, almost half (48%) of international arts tourists were visitors from Asia, up from 32% in 2008.
  • Given the high volume of tourists from this region, arts tourists from Asia were the largest group engaging across the majority of arts activities.

High growth in the number of opera tickets sold to Chinese tourists when visiting Australia has seen Opera Australia include surtitles in simplified Chinese, coinciding with the company’s first tour to China in 2018.

Proportion of international arts tourist by region, 2008-2017

To find out more about International Arts Tourism: Connecting cultures

Download the report

(PDF, 1.3MB)

Download the report – Accessible Version

(RTF, 0.3MB)

Explore the data in our interactive dashboards

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Phlegm & Hense for PUBLIC Silo Trail. Northam, 2015.
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Tim Hecker presented by The Substation and Room 40, 2023
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We acknowledge the many Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and honour their Elders past and present.

We respect their deep enduring connection to their lands, waterways, and surrounding clan groups since time immemorial. We cherish the richness of First Nations peoples’ artistic and cultural expressions. We are privileged to gather on this Country and to share knowledge, culture and art, now and with future generations.

Art by Jordan Lovegrove