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

SONG Dong b. 1966, China Song Dong, Writing diary with water Song Dong is the youngest artist in APT 2002. Conceptual interests are at the centre of his practice, which embraces photography, installation and video. Emerging from a strong Beijing-based avant- garde performance art community, Song Dong’s practice explores notions of perception, transience and the ephemeral nature of existence. Many of his performances are meditations, such as his ongoing Writing diary with water project, in which the artist ritualises the daily actions of writing and uses serial photography as a means of recording this process. Through his photographic series and short video pieces, Song Dong employs the sequenced image to explore a rapidly modernising China and to capture notions of transience and illusion in contemporary society . SUH Do-Ho b. 1962, South Korea/United States Suh Do-Ho, Blue-green bridge Suh Do-Ho is a young Korean artist with a rapidly growing international reputation. The idea of the ‘global village’ is of keen interest to Suh Do-Ho, who examines the cultural implications surrounding the rapidity with which large numbers of people are able to move between cities and nations throughout the world. The relationship between the individual and the collective is at the core of much of Suh Do-Ho’s work. Using replication, Suh Do-Ho often develops large-scaled works using vast numbers of repeated multiple components. The work Who am we? takes up these ideas in an installation comprising wallpaper designed by the artist which features 40 000 individual faces to form an endlessly repeating grid. Howard TAYLOR 1918-2001, Australia Howard Taylor, Light source reverse The late Howard Taylor was one of Australia’s leading Modernist painters. Trained in England after WWII, Taylor was based first in Perth in Western Australia, and then for many years in the remote forests of the south-eastern corner of that state. Taylor was remarkably well-versed in modern painting but he eventually became independent of it, taking the international style that he had inherited and turning it to local and personal uses. One succinct way to summarise Taylor’s work is to say that he spent forty years studying the effect of light filtering through the trees of the great forests of in the south-east of Western Australia. Another is his constant search for perfection and his equally constant return to nature. Landscape remains the artistic genre most inflected with regional significance in Australia. Howard Taylor's great achievement was to offer national and international audiences a sense of the beauty of that particular landscape, expressed in refined and simple forms. 30