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

What I am therefore suggesting is that, for particular 'public' works, artists go with the strength and , similarly, institutions of speciality and complexity provide creative project support which m ight be beyond their normal charter of activity. Slide of Hanoi University of Fine Art Who might these supporting i nstitut ions be? They are generously represented here at the conference. There are museums, state , reg ional and commercial galleries, art schools, universities, research centres, Federal, State and local government agencies, book and magazine publishers, foreign affairs, d i plomatic and related international agencies, broadcast a nd i ndependent media producers as well as a wide range and variety of commercial and industrial enterprises. Thinki ng and tal king about these issues, since the arrival of APT artists in Brisbane a few weeks ago, it is quite clear that the Queensland Art Gallery certainly i ntends building further upon the success of the APT model and I can report that my own institutions that I have links with - the Queensland College of Art and Griffith University along with Brisbane City Counci l , The Hanoi University o f F i ne Art , Metro Media Technologies and Asian Art News - a re a l l interested in supporting t he concept o f artisUinstitutional liaisons. Slide Griffith University 25th Anniversary Fireworks Celebrations I will show two sets of slides from G riffith Un iversity's 25th ann iversary event nearly two weeks ago and I don't in any way suggest that this is an art work, nor because it invo lves fireworks does it have any relationship to Cai Guo Qiang's work. I am showing these images simply because they are an i ndication of the scale and the capacity of major institutions, this one a university, of worki ng creatively with i ndividual or groups of artists. These are, in fact, fireworks across from Southbank, where twenty-five of the highest Brisbane buildings were adorned with various fireworks denoting the twenty-five years of Griffith University's h istory. So, along with people and institutions that I have mentioned before , I expect there are a whole lot of people here representing institutions across a wide spectrum of activities related to the arts that might see collaboration as an important developmental activity for their own involvement and contri bution to the visual arts. Slides, Mai Anh Dung and major i nstitution I conclude with two slides. We have now returned to Mai Anh Dung, one of the artists from Hanoi, an independent person by all accounts doing quite brill iant work but operating in an extremely limited physical space and now exhibiting i n a formidable institution . It could be an art gallery, it could be a un iversity, it could be a government office. What I am suggesting here, is that, if the role of the artist is to remain competitive i n the ideas stakes and/or it is desirable to gain a more general and widespread audience beyond the gallery walls, then strategic alliances should surely be the way to proceed . The APT has demonstrated this potential and by all accounts the many institutions which have g rown up around artistic practice appear now willing to both del iver their expected services and creatively engage in co-operative artist projects, thereby turn ing present encounters into fabulous futures. 58