Present Encounters : Papers from the conference of the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, 1996

responses, not all favourable. One of the small successes of the work was that it g radually was disseminated among the communities of local children, who weaseled the toys of their choice out through the plastic after the church ceremonies in the adjacent room every Sunday. I n 1 995, while participating in an i nternational sculpture symposium in Korea , I found myself to be the only Australian amidst a group of artists who were mainly Korean or German . The symposium included tours of various historical sites and museums, and it was during these tours that I became aware of contemporary Korea's commitment to establishing a cu ltu ral history strongly differentiated from that of China or Japan . I n the numerous dioramas of archaeological digs and reconstructions of ancient Korean life , I also was made aware of the role which the Kut, or ceremony performed by women shamans, had played within traditional Korean life. Du ring the weeks in which the participants prepared their installations, the strong influence of the Beuysian trad ition was evident in the majority of the work by the participating German artists. Caught between these two strong identities, my own contribution was an installation that fel l somewhere between my failure to fully understand either the German or Korean contemporary artistic expression. In an abandoned Korean farmhouse, I reconstructed my own mock archaeological digs - a kind of reconstruction that fell clumsily between a Korean museum diorama and German art gallery art. My clumsiness with language was equally apparent; from between the German 'kunst' for art, and the Korean 'Kut' for the female shamanic ceremony, I titled the installation Kunthouse and fi lled it with a variety of imaginary fetishes constructed from off-cuts of rubber and hair products and ladies' hosiery salvaged from the local markets. I n this particu lar reg ion at this particular point of history, all kinds of cultural takeovers a re an ever-present reality. Perhaps there i s no territory that more appropriately epitomises th is position than Hong Kong. My role as a co-curator for the Hong Kong selection of this Triennial brought this home to me all the more viscerally as I experienced aspects of Hong Kong popular culture through a heightened awareness that the forms of popular culture belie the divided identities of transcultural dialogues. The usual depths of my incomprehension as a tourist were ameliorated by fel low co-cu rator Oscar Ho, but the inconsistencies of identity rather than fixed icons of identity continued to emerge as the significant indicators of Hong Kong's present situation . Which is why I used the metaphor of food in the essay I wrote for the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial catalogue; the dishes Oscar and I shared on the night of our first meeting seemed to be the ideal metaphor for doubly-dislocated tendencies; in both form and content the portions seemed caught between traditional Chi nese cuisine and the health-conscious, vegetarian fast food demands of a high-energy corporate culture . As I have already pointed out in this paper, when poised between a colonial past and an uncertain future , sometimes t he best way t o deal with establishing you r own impermanent identity is through humour, irreverence and irony. I discovered one of the best examples of this recently in the pages of Time magazine, which quoted this piece of doggerel as an example of the spirit of the streetlife of Hong Kong at present, as ordinary citizens struggl e for ways o f comi ng t o terms with the unforeseen changes that are immanent. At this point in the paper I would like us to bow our heads as we listen to one example of a new kind of transcu ltural dialogue bred from the territories of uncertainty: Our Brother which art in Beijing, DengXiaoping be thy name. United Kingdom gone. Thy will be done in Hong Kong, as it is in China. (But) give us this day our daily bet. And forgive us our speculations, as we forgive those who speculate against us. And lead us not into communism, but deliver us from gwei/os (foreign devils) For thine is the sovereignty, and the power, and the authority, for ever and ever. Chow mein. 1 28