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

works. This does not mean the visual ideology of protest and criticism must be read by a viewer who shares the cultural context of the artist to be effective, especially if such protest is agai nst global forces. Of cou rse not. All art is open to interpretation, all symbols a re mu lti­ valent. Each of us brings to any work of art our own experiences, our knowledge, our values, a view of the world that cuts across the intentions of the artist, and from this invariably spring the sort of misunderstandings that David Elliott was talking about yesterday, both artistic and politica l . But such misunderstandings can be wonderfully productive , for out of them flow new beginnings, new d iscourses, opening up new possibilities for borrowi ng in both directions. Of course such opportunities do not free us as viewers from the responsibility to make the intellectual and empathetic effort to understand the artist in his or her terms, to touch real concerns of the artist. But that very effort sets up personal reverberations that the artist cou ld never have had in mind, reverberations which in turn will have their own social consequences. Let me take one or two brief examples. Vivan's upturned boat is a powerful symbol of arriving with the i ntention of staying . It speaks to us of migration, of the difficulties migrants encounter in being accepted - the upturned boat is not a home, although it may serve as he suggested as a center for communication, for community. What it powerful ly suggests, however, is the possibility of rejection, the need to sail on . For Vivan the upturned boat questions the unexclusiveness of I ndian society. It makes a statement about communal tensions. For us in Australia the work may evoke the human drama of the exoduses that we are more aware of, boat people from Vietnam, their voyages, the ambigu ities of their reception here. Kami n Lertchaiprasert's Problem-Wisdom used the recycling of daily papers as a metaphor for the transformations of rebirth, a metaphor immediately accessi ble to Thai viewers. The problems are social, of the kind we read about in the daily papers. The wisdom to solve them requires a process of d isci plined moral renewal , the daily moral d iscipline of the monk through meditation, the daily artistic discipline of the artist over two painstaking years. The solution offered is profoundly Buddhist, resting as it does on the notions of karma and rebirth . Across cultures the message must be reinterpreted ; but i n a way that loses none of its urgency in demand ing ind ividual action and responsibility. Vu Dan Tan 's Monsters, devils and angels also sounds a theme of transformation and renewal . But these are festive masks. They take us from the individual to the communal, from Buddhist to Confucian social values. The carnivalesque subverts, while the mask ensures anonymity. To me this says something about the social and political space available to the artist i n Vietnam. I take it as an oblique, masked comment on Vietnamese society today. But what I read into Vu 's work reflects my values, not his, and he might be horrified by my interpretation. The discussion and criticism of art is a social event, whose implications go well beyond the aesthetic. Art has the power to cross cultural boundaries by stimulating discourses whose outcomes are both social and politica l . And so how should we respond to the u rgency of artistic activism of the kind that we have encountered this morning? What is the role of ou r own artistic institutions i n relation t o that activism? Works o f art publicly d isplayed escape the artist. Their messages are forever being reinterpreted in other contexts. In that lies their subversive power. It was Khrushchev who said that history was too important, too dangerous, to be left to historians. So too for art , for the ripples of impact of all g reat art wash onto shores never imaged by the artists. It is the purpose of this Triennial to extend those shores. 70