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

I assumed , when I started to work more directly with Asian cou ntries, museums, galleries, art departments, curators, and artists, that systems in Asia wou ld , with time, become more l i ke ours. I assumed international practice both conceptually and practically would gradually, for me as a creature of the Western system , get easier to negotiate. I assumed that I would find infrastructures like there are here gradually developing, that Mi n istries in Asia wou ld increasingly support international exchanges, that my group of curatorial and administrative colleagues would grow, that younger eager cu rators would be knocki ng on my door, keen to work and create mutual projects. Like many of us here, I did meet a group of individuals in most countries with whom we work, and APT is testament to the idea that those individuals remain the focus for our interaction . The sympathetic, active infrastructu re that I imagined remains somewhere in my imagination. I n some countries, for internal reasons, responses to i nternational overtures have even decreased with time. What are the reasons for th is? Sometimes of course it is political, for the reason I spoke of at the beginning - that contemporary art is by its nature subversive. I n other cases it is historical - that we in Australia respect government institutions wh ich have worked for us, by and large, over h undreds of years. We expect the system to be active , reactive and proactive in our interest. Most Asian cultures don't have this history. By and large other systems, based on family, clan, language group, or ethnic g roup prevail as the system to trust. An arts infrastructure based on common or general interest isn 't expected to do much. So, political and infrastructure issues arise . There are also the cultural issues of authority and tradition. I see now the conflicts between individual curators and their superiors, never overt of course, but there. How if the superior says no to a project, there is no way for the junior to proceed , no possibility of negotiation . Again , contemporary art is about pushi ng boundaries, taking risks - not only for the artist, but for the administrator, for the curator. How can a curator take risks with in systems where losing face or causing controversy are such issues? David Williams and I heard a curator in Taiwan last year explain how his museum had brought in foreign curators to work with local academics to plan a show because they, as cu rators in a public service situation, cou ld not, on pri nci ple, make decisions about the value of one artist over another. I n societies where age and status are important, respect for older artists is assumed. The Western promotion of new, controversial , challenging and often young work is often questioned by those in power in arts organisations in Asia and deemed i nappropriate and certainly unrepresentational of local cu ltu re. The local curator must negotiate this, as the artists do, and it seems to me to be a much tougher and more complicated role than we in Australia or Europe or America understand and acknowledge. I am not criticising that position , merely using it as an example of the different cu ltural pressures on what we i n Australia and t he West see as a natural cu ratorial role. One irony in Austral ia's role i n this, is that I think of all nations i n the world, rightly or wrongly, we hold fondly to values which are at the opposite extreme of the so-called Asian ones. We are anti-authoritarian , we regard equality as an extreme virtue. Youth can get precedence over age, and certainly does i n imagemakers' minds. It is important for us at all levels to eat with junior staff, to be seen to do menial jobs, for cu rators to use hammers and brooms and physically work on putting up exhibitions, to show we do not regard ourselves as above others in status. Even in political matters, desire for equality of sexual status is probably as strong here as anywhere, so Australian curators are very sensitive to how many women compared to men are i n exhibitions, and say proud ly that the gender balance is good, often meaning 'more women'. Th is isn't all bad news for our relations with Asia. One important part of Australian life is multicultural ism, where the emphasis is on all ethnic groups being treated equally. I thi n k it 42