APT 2002 Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, Australia : Report

Joan GROUNDS b. 1939, United States/Australia Joan Grounds, Untitled Joan Grounds is an artist whose current practice derives from the post-object tradition of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Arriving in Australia in 1969 from North America, she was first known as a ceramicist, but has since worked in performance, film, sculpture, installation and sound. Like other Australian artists of her generation, she has engaged with what Rosalind Krauss has dubbed the ‘expanded field’ of sculpture and installation. In her practice Grounds has been attentive to contemporary social issues, addressing these through a distinctive feminist idiom, which implicitly argues for a collective political responsibility. Today Grounds makes cross- disciplinary sculptures, installations and sound works that are often site-specific and collaborative. From the mid-1980s onwards, she has worked with a lexicon of disparate objects and materials, choosing each for their metaphoric potential. Ralph HOTERE b. 1931, Aotearoa New Zealand Ralph Hotere, Round midnight 11 Ralph Hotere has exhibited since the early 1950s and is a greatly respected artist in Aotearoa New Zealand. Shaped by distressing family associations with WWI and his response to the Vietnam War, Hotere’s political conscience sharpened in the late 1960s as did his creative focus. An exemplar was found in Ad Reinhardt, whose so- called ’Black Paintings’ prompted Hotere’s own series with this title. The artist’s Maori heritage and personal religious beliefs find form through these subtle, serial variations on painting and mark-making. These qualities have been eloquently sustained over some thirty years. A long-term collaborative relationship with Pakeha artist Bill Culbert culminated in 1991 with their major work, Pathway to the Sea – Aramoana , constructed from paua shells, fluorescent tubes and rock. Recent wall relief works also incorporate corrugated aluminium and discarded building materials, which trace the artist’s close relationship with his homeland. Concern for the welfare of the land of Aotearoa has promoted Hotere to political activism and has continually fed the artist’s imagination. Yayoi KUSAMA b. 1929, Japan Yayoi Kusama, Untitled (Artist reclining on Accumulation no.2 and Infinity nets background, macaroni carpet) c.1966 Yayoi Kusama has been working as a painter, sculptor and environmental artist for the last 50 years. She has been extremely influential and is undoubtedly one of the most significant post-war artists to emerge from Asia. Born in Matsumoto, Kusama moved from Japan to the USA in 1957 where she lived and worked for fifteen years, participating in the politically charged artistic environment of New York. She returned to Tokyo in 1973 where her practice has continued unabated. Kusama explores the motif of the ‘infinity net’ in her work through various materials and forms. This recurring interest is traced to her early childhood experiences and Kusama discusses the net as a screen that protects her from the world, as a device through which her perception of the world is mediated, and also as a metaphor for the dynamic and all-encompassing nature of life. These net images, which proliferate in her paintings and sculptures, led to the development of the infinity mirror rooms. These celebrated installations continue Kusama’s reflection on the vastness of life, its infinite scale – its intangibility. 26