The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, Australia, 1996 : Report

a video component. Her video work engages with issues of identity and gender, and her minimalist vocabulary focuses more on editing than shooting. During her visit to Australia, she was artist-in-residence with Griffith Artworks, Griffith University, Brisbane, where she experimented with new technology media and prepared her work Drained IV. The installation is about the distorted time frame that Hong Kong is experiencing in the hand-over to China on 1 st July 1 997. The whole city is motivated by a deadline, by one goal. Can you imagine the city as a chicken (that laid the golden egg) put in a microwave and is ready to be served at the 'ting' sound? (extract from artist's statement) JAPAN Emiko Kasahara creates symbolic works that reflect the complexity of notions of gender and sexuality. A cutting-edge artist with an international career, including a long period of work in New York, Kasahara presents a body of exquisitely crafted , marble works with strong sexual connotations. With their clinical characteristics, the merging of opposites, and references to art history, her works possess a unique and complex sense of humour and are critical of gender stereotypes. Describing her work Untitled-(in)different, the artist says that it 'is a formation presenting the evolution of embryo genitals from the prior primitive form till it reaches their sexual d istinction. This specific area where all human beings have made passage, is the critical point of both the biological difference of sex and genderism. From this point we part as man or woman. What does this signify, what did the fact constitute to and how will it proceed henceforth? This work submits an issue which manifolds further beyond the gender of one human being'. Yasumasa Morimura's large photograph Blinded by the light is based on Pieter Bruegel's painting The parable of the blind ( 1 568) and is part of a series of photographs that Morimura created , reinterpreting famous Western paintings by artists such as Cranach , Rembrandt and Goya. Similar to Bruegel's blind men who have strayed from the straight path of Christianity, the modem Japanese family in Morimura's work is falling into a d itch, blinded by its consumerist obsessions. All the family members i n the photograph are images of the artist himself. The purposely kitsch interpretation of Western and Japanese iconographical elements, the technical perfection and the sharp critical approach create an effective parody of modem Japanese life and values and 5