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

i nterpreting Asia-Pacific regional art . As former Austral ian Foreign Min ister Gareth Evans has noted , 'A geog raphically remote country of seventeen mil lion people in a world of five and a half billion should not get ideas a bove its station'. I n order to open up d iscussion and set the scene for this Second Triennial Conference would l i ke to review some of the art from the First Triennial exhi bition in 1 993. [Slides of a variety of works were presented at this poi nt, but the commentary has been omitted from this paper.) The strength of idealism of the artists who participated in the last Triennial and their strong belief in justice and equality as well as working communally with their people had an extraordinary i mpact on Australian aud iences. As Dadang Christanto reminded me recently in Cairns, h is work is about 'speaki ng from the heart' , and in our contemporary world 'we must not forget to respond from the heart'. Art rel ated to ancient cultura l traditions as well as to new disjunctures in the modern world , Dadang's h umanistic world view, Montien Boonma's religious inspired art, Roberto Villanueva's shamanistic world , crossing the edges of the known and unknown , life and death , had a profound effect on Australian audiences at the last Triennial . New perspectives were provided from different cultures. For example, when Jonathan Mane­ Wheoki told us that, for Maori 'the future is beh ind us: the past is in front of us. ' I n the Pacific and in Asia , the span of ancient cultures and the comprehension of long cultural development makes Western i nfluence seem potentially insign ificant in the broader sweep of history. It is a lmost a truism that the countries of the Asia-Pacific are in the process of dynamic change and many are engaged i n an economic resu rgence which has completely altered the way the West perceives this reg ion. Change is not necessarily about 'prog ress' in a Western sense, and many of the artists question a Western model of modernisation and economic development. So often the definition of cultural identity has been in terms of a cou nterpoint - defining what we are not rather than what we a re - the myth of the Stranger, the unreality of orientalism or occidental ism, the lure of exoticism and the necessity of Otherness. The world today presents us with a paradox - apparently moving to a global information society it seems, but nevertheless, also reconstituti ng itself through local and regional identities, some new, some very ancient, and i n the process developing 'fault lines' of separation . I n talking of the changes in our world today, theories have been put forward of increasi ng globa lisation leading to i ncreasi ng similarities between cultures and nations, the decline of the nation state, the end of ideologies, the revival of religion, and the 'clash of civilisations'. (See Samuel P. Huntington Foreign Affairs, vol . 72, no. 3, p.26) . Ferd i nand Braudel's theory of strong , economically dominant centres and their effect culturally on their peripheries held true for much of the Asia-Pacific region until very recently. The world has changed so dramatically in the last ten years with the decline of the superpowers and the growing strength of the economies of much of the region, that the 'centre' o r 'centres' are now obscu red . A salient lesson has also been learned with the revelations of the cultu ral man i pulations of the superpowers in the Cold War era. One of the most obvious points which was put forward by many speakers at the last Conference , is that 'Euro-Americentric' viewpoints (or 'Westcentric' viewpoints, to use Chinese writer Hou Hanru 's term) , are not appropriate for evaluating the art of this region. There is considerable evidence that what is happening in contemporary Asian and Pacifi c art i s not u nderstood i n the West. Hou Hanru has made the point that a lthough contemporary Chinese art has been seen i n exhibition i n the West, there is still an ideological political perspective connected to 'conventional Westcentric and colonialist cultural viewpoi nts'. 20