Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, 1993 : Exhibition report

art today, the aim of this project has always been to focus on the vitality and diversity of contemporary art practice. Nevertheless, the historical context of the development of modern art in the countries of the region is fundamental to an understanding of their contemporary art. People and nations bring their past with them into the future. The Gallery has addressed this through the publication of a major book, Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific, with essays by experts from each of the countries involved and also from India and Taiwan. We thank the publisher, University of Queensland Press, for this significant contribution to scholarship. It is surprising but perhaps highly revealing that there has been so little scholarly attention paid to the development of the modern art of the Asia-Pacific region.... This lack of knowledge of the twentieth-century achievements of the art of the region can be partly attributed to the absorption of the West in its historical and classical art. T. K. Sabapathy from Singapore has noted the bias of Western scholars of South-East Asian art to Hindu-Buddhist classical art, and the lack of interest even in the centuries that follow the Angkor period. This later era coincides with the beginning of Western colonisation in many of these countries and colonisation depends for its legitimacy on assumptions of cultural superiority. It is an irony that the West has accepted the great achievements of the art of this region of the distant past but has on the whole paid too little attention to the immediate past and the present. Unable to see beyond the concept of the development of a linear Western tradition in art, the West has almost entirely ignored the fascinating story of the adoption of new ideas and their effect in art (as, for example, Islam in South-East Asia). Western modern art.critics have largely been interested only in the development of Western ideas in the art of the region. They have judged this art by its integration of a Western tradition. Their interpretation has too often been a product of cultural assumptions, for example, in the way Western art critics have seen Western abstraction in Asian art without taking into account possible Eastern art approaches; or in the overemphasis of a socioeconomic context rather than a mystical-aesthetic one. Cultural interaction is no new phenomenon in this region and has taken place over the centuries. The history of the region is one of cultural engagement and adaption which may make Western influences seem minor to future historians and even superficial by comparison...What Dr Apinan Poshyananda says about Thailand holds true for the region as a whole. ‘Cultural syncretism’ has been fundamental and contemporary art cannot be fully understood by looking through the windows of the ‘Euro-American paradigm'. Yet this is exactly the criterion that had been applied. At the important Conference on Modernism and Post-modernism in Contemporary Asian Art held at the Australian National University in 1991, the issue was raised whether the art under discussion was ‘derivative’ of Western ideas. This issue was once and for all put to rest by a South-East Asian speaker who asked how long Western art critics believed they could ‘own’ the ideas of modernism and post-modernism. Artists trained in well-established national art schools, and many having travelled abroad widely, cannot fail to be aware of art outside their own cultural and regional environment. The essays in Tradition and Change document the global move away from dependence on international critical approaches that was evident two and three decades ago, including in