The_Asia_Pacific_Triennial

The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) is an ongoing project initiated in 1993. It is one of very few regularly recurring international exhibitions with a declared interest in a specific region; it addresses culture and ethnicity and acknowledges historical diasporas. It is also one of the rare series sustained within a museum context. With every exhibition since the first, the APT has been the subject of much discussion and debate in the art world and it has developed a large, dedicated audience. Its uniqueness, asserted through geography, provides structure and agency. Today, one of the most prominent ways of seeing contemporary international visual art en masse is via the biennale or triennial platform. These exhibitions are characterised by their scale, together with an understanding by artists, curators, educators, administrators, funding agencies and audiences that they offer a distinct perspective on the cultural life of a particular place. They provide evidence of cosmopolitanism and a ground for the exploration of ideas; are platforms for dialogue; and advocate a range of intellectual, political, aesthetic and otherwise ‘artistic’ views. They are also an important means of bringing a broad range of international contemporary art to local audiences who would otherwise not have the opportunity to see such work. They have bloomed across the world, multiplying most recently in places where art infrastructure is less established, particularly in Asia, thus allowing for a decentralised viewing of contemporary art. As the curator and critic Hou Hanru recently commented: ‘biennales are really the most intense moments we see in the art world’.3 It is interesting that most of the best regarded of these events are not staged in the major art capitals of London, New York or Tokyo, but rather in Kassel, Brisbane, Gwangju, São Paulo and Havana. These towns and cities provide a critical level of population, infrastructure and interest, at a scale that is not suffocating, yet big enough to present an international event that allows for both a physical space that is open and accommodating, and a conceptual space that is curious and engaging. The curatorial structure of the inaugural APT laid the groundwork for subsequent events. It eschewed the auteur in favour of a multitude of voices, initially because it was a pragmatic way of both engaging and reflecting the diverse cultures of the region. The structure was built around Queensland Art Gallery staff working with curatorial partners in different countries. As Gallery expertise grew, this model evolved into an internal Gallery curatorial team seeking advice from curatorial colleagues and artists abroad and at home In these two unique ways — regional specificity and no single directorial voice — the APT differs from other biennales and triennials. Importantly, it also provides opportunities for artists from the region to have external critical perspectives brought to their work. The APT advocates for decentralised positions, and was one of the first in this part of the world to concentrate and frame its ‘looking’ via this geography. Why is this important' It is an assertion that the work of artists from Asia and the Pacific be presented in a regional context within the international framework of the triennial. This productive focus offers significant perspectives generated by privileging location. As independent curator and publisher Sharmini Pereira notes: Even if an ambition to foster a world art history guided early APTs, its subsequent incarnations have highlighted the impossibility of such an enterprise. Defining itself in relation to Asia and the Pacific, the APT is, by choice, not geared to encompass a world art history. Through its exclusive regional focus, it has not only made a phenomenal contribution to cultural debates internationally but has provided rumination on problems of canons and linear narratives.4 With every APT the definition of the region is tested. APT6 includes the work of artists from Iran and Turkey for the first time, with the major thematic cinema program Promised Lands exploring the rich cultures of the Indian subcontinent through to West Asia and the Middle East. Looking to the immediate west was first mooted by a number of Indian and Pakistani artist and curator colleagues who, when talking about their own practices, would often frame discussion around the complex exchange of artistic and cultural ideas from the Middle East, especially Islamic art. It is, in fact, a natural extension, and allows us to acknowledge the considerable influence that Islamic art and culture have across the region. Also included for the first time is a presentation of work from North Korea (DPRK). Working with Beijing-based British filmmaker Nicholas Bonner as co-curator, the discussion about showing art from North Korea began in early 2005. Given Bonner’s long-term relationships with artists and filmmakers in the DPRK, the 13 commissions at the heart of the display have been developed in close consultation with the artists from the Mansudae Art Studio, the curators and the Gallery. One clear aim of the exhibition has been to challenge assumptions, and therefore broaden understanding about what contemporary art is. The APT consistently addresses how artists live and work in diverse conditions. One of the great contributions this exhibition makes to broader discussions about art is the recognition of different, parallel art histories that have developed in the region in locally specific ways. For example, the art historical canons cited in the works from the Mansudae Art Studio include the socialist realist styles that were imported from the Soviet Union and China as revolutionary artistic movements, a form also echoed in the iconography developed in trade union banners in Australia and the English Midlands. Yet, this is not the only stylistic influence. Brush-and-ink painting, or chosunhua, is still considered the most important art form in Korea due to its established place in East Asian art; this is also the case with oil painting, which has its roots in Europe and was most recently taught to Korean artists by the Japanese during the occupation from 1910 to 1945 Such a trajectory is in sharp contrast to the art history that octogenarian Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian draws on in her dazzling mirror mosaic sculptures. The rich traditions that distinguish Islamic architecture are key influences. The geometric structures and the ordered repetition of patterns that were developed as an intrinsic aspect of Islamic shrine and temple architecture, dating from the seventh century to the present, have been inspirational to her work. But so too was the artist’s training in New York during the late 1940s, when she studied at the Parsons School of Design. She then spent 12 years living and working as a freelance designer for American Vogue magazine, and as a commercial artist and fashion designer for the department store Bonwit Teller. Her exposure to artist colleagues, gallerists and other art world luminaries at the time meant she observed the postwar flowering of the New York Avant-garde before returning to Iran in 1957. Working mostly instinctively, her shimmering works are testaments to modernist abstract principles as well as the purity of Islamic geometry. The one constant of the APT is dissonance. There is a certain impenetrability that such ‘noise’ engenders. An ordered consonance is not possible when the framework demands such broad scope. The voice of the Pacific — and for APT6, it can literally be heard in the drop beat of Pacific reggae — adds yet another pitch. Looking back at past APTs, it has been the Pacific artists who have challenged the structure of ‘seeing’. Perhaps this is due to the nature of contemporary practice on the many hundreds of islands, which also includes indigenous art-making forms. The inclusion in APT6 of powerful customary objects by North Ambrymese sculptors from Vanuatu encourages us to focus on the historical process of artistic creation and the engagement with tradition. In these circumstances, the act of separating oral, performative and visual art practices is both unproductive and uncreative. Why persist when such canonical definitions are of no concern in the local contemporary context' The work of these artists readily challenges assumptions about the stability of definitions within contemporary art discourses in the museum. For artists to alter the museum space is not a new phenomenon. It has a longer history growing from the restless dissent of the 1960s and 1970s, when artists in the West focused their energies on testing the conventional relationships between artist, audience, museum and market. Museum director and writer Sandy Nairne describes the burgeoning history of these phenomena: The general term ‘space’ replaced the word gallery (alternate spaces followed after experimental galleries and laboratories) and was used precisely because it was supposed to avoid the connotations of an institutional or commercial environment, where a hierarchical, formal arrangement might determine audience behaviour in pre-set ways. ‘Space’ usefully removed the immediate connotations of commodity. If artists already had any ‘space’ it was because they had studios. And the connotations of studio activity had long passed from associations of the model and the arranged tableau to a less structured, process-oriented concept of the creative site. The new spaces in the early seventies were thus much less the laboratories of technological or participatory experiment than a self-consciously chaotic milieu (of which Warhol’s space of the Factory is a precursor), where gesture and incident could be prominent and pre-eminent.5 I include this quote by way of arguing that, indirectly, the APT has had a similar influence on the art museum in which it takes place. The nature of art-making across the region is incredibly diverse and includes places with highly developed art infrastructures, as well as others with very limited foundations. Over the last two decades, the APT has shown the work of over 300 artists. In this context, it has introduced the work of little-known artists to Australia while also profiling artists with major international reputations, whose work is generally known through art publications rather than exhibitions staged in Brisbane. While APT6 presents work from places not previously included, the exhibition is built around artists from East Asia, South Asia, South-East Asia, Australia, the Pacific, as well as the diaspora, as it has from its inception. Thematic ideas — such as the significance of collaborative practice and the perspectives offered in the inclusion of the two major film programs, Promised Lands and The Cypress and the Crow: 50 Years of Iranian Animation — are integral to the APT, and are discussed in the other overview essays in this publication. The discrete projects — such as The Mekong, Pacific Reggae: Roots Beyond the Reef, the works from North Korea (DPRK), and the thematic film programs — each concentrate on particular regions to present more in-depth perspectives on art history and contemporary ideas. For example, The Mekong uses the river as metaphor for the movement and exchange of knowledge. As Rich Streitmatter-Tran, co-curator of The Mekong states: The Mekong region is often referred to through a variety of organisational frameworks including historic–cultural areas, sociolinguistic zones, and by the borders of the nations themselves. It has always been a shifting territory — an ebb and flow of conflict and cooperation, modernisation and preservation, exploitation and conservation. Each struggle can be found documented in the arts, whether in historical artefact or in the contemporary work featured in APT6.6 There is always more to be said about contemporary art and art-making in Asia and the Pacific and, as we approach the second decade of this century, the economic, social, political and cultural dynamics of the region — and its relationships with the rest of the world — are more intense than ever. Every three years, the APT revisits this territory. Within Brisbane and internationally, this exhibition marks a point of concentration and deliberation valued by many. To return to Storr’s apt observation, ‘a good exhibition is never the last word on its subject’ Reuben Paterson Whakapapa: get down upon your knees 2009 Glitter and synthetic polymer paint on canvas | 16 canvases: 200 x 200cm (each) | Image courtesy: The artist and Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland | Photograph: Schwere Webber Long Gallery 1.2, GoMA Reuben Paterson’s Whakapapa: get down upon your knees extends the customary Māori use of design, pattern, weaving and layering by using seductive new materials. Drawing on his own Māori culture and floral fabrics from the 1960s and 1970s, his judicious use of colour, patterning and composition recalls American Modernism and Op art. The art work’s title suggests its concern with Māori whakapapa. Papa means anything broad, flat and hard, such as a flat rock, slab or board, and whakapapa is to place in layers, or lay one upon another, and to name and to recite one’s genealogy in proper order. Paterson says: A central concept in these new works reiterates my gratitude to life and acknowledges life’s juxtaposition to misdeed through the sequential recital of the various names for the first states of existence designated Te Kore (the void), Te Po (the dark), and Te Ao Marama (the world of light). Te Po, for Paterson, is the celestial realm signifying aeons of time when the earth came into being and, likewise, is a state of perception from which his new works issue forth, divide and unify. Paterson’s art layers a personal symbology that melds Māori traditions with Western imagery in an eclectic combination of influences and styles. His use of contrasting patterns provides an optical pulse while sparking both nostalgic and celebratory responses. Gonkar Gyatso Angel 2007 Stickers and pencil on treated paper. | 152 x 121.5cm | The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 2008 with funds from Michael Simcha Baevski through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery Gallery 1.3, GoMA A personal history of movement and change informs the works of Gonkar Gyatso. Born in Lhasa in 1961, Gyatso’s childhood coincided with the tumultuous years of China’s early occupation of Tibet and the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). After returning to Lhasa from Beijing, where he trained in traditional Chinese calligraphy and landscape painting, Gyatso became more aware of his Tibetan religious and artistic heritage, suppressed under Maoist rule. In 1985, he co-founded an avant-garde artists’ salon named Sweet Tea House, and in his work sought new ways to engage with the iconography of Tibetan Buddhism, including the image of the Buddha. After living briefly in Dharamsala, India in 1992, where he studied traditional Tibetan thangka painting, Gyatso moved to London, abandoning painting in favour of a more conceptual approach. A central theme in Gyatso’s work is the experience of migration. Combining iconography drawn from different geopolitical locations, Gyatso explores the shifts of identity and belonging caused by constant movement. Building up collages of colourful stickers and mass-media imagery, and using traditional calligraphy and Buddhist thangka painting, his current works gently demonstrate the notion of ‘emptiness’ – an untranslatable state central to Buddhism – while also confronting the commercialisation of Buddhism in the West and romanticised understandings of Tibet, its people and religion. Kibong Rhee There is no place – Shallow cuts 2008 Glass, fog machine, artificial leaves, wood, steel, sand, motor, timer | Installation view, Kukje Gallery, Seoul | Images courtesy: The artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul Gallery 3.6, GoMA Kibong Rhee’s recent installations use metaphysics as a basis for developing an ecological relationship between nature and human intervention in art. Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that seeks to identify the fundamental principles organising our universe; often this is discussed in terms of finding the ‘essence’ of things. This essence is invisible, understood as something transcending our reality and existing beyond schools of science or philosophy. The idea of a larger truth permeates Rhee’s art, which questions how we perceive reality, the nature of being, and the relationship between nature and humanity. There is no place – Shallow cuts repositions a large willow tree from its natural habitat into a cultural space – the gallery. It inhabits a controlled, artificial environment behind a vast glass screen, immersed in what appears to be a ‘natural’ mist, but which is produced by a machine. As in the misty or empty spaces that feature in classical scroll or screen paintings, the sweeping boughs of the willow tree are partially obscured. This impression relates to the artist’s own drawing practice and its intuitive processes. Rhee is interested in creating works that are as much about the disappearance or obscurity of objects as it is about the existence of them. When considered alongside his work, the title There is no place – Shallow cuts questions the trustworthiness of reality and our beliefs, and evokes an atmosphere in which to contemplate what lies beyond or beneath appearances. Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan In-flight (Project: Another Country) (detail) 2009 Mixed media | Site-specific installation | Collection: The artists Gallery 3, QAG Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan transform ordinary objects and paraphernalia to express their personal interests and experiences through art, exploring consumerism, family, home, memory and migration. Collaboration is central to their practice: working both in and outside the studio, with individuals and among communities, they foster the exchange of ideas, new relationships and dialogues. Acknowledging the creative potential of difference in people, groups, contexts and places, their art projects have a social and educational aspect, while unearthing what artists do by making art and its processes visible. In-flight (Project: Another Country) is inspired by the Aquilizan’s move from the Philippines to Australia in 2006. Recycled materials donated for this project have been used in a series of workshops involving both children and adults in Brisbane; here hundreds of individuals fashioned their own unique, hand-sized aeroplanes. The artists collect these diverse aeroplanes and combine them to form an installation that evokes a wheeling flock of birds, gathering and breaking up into larger and smaller groups, as if on a migratory flight.