The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art exhibition catalogue (APT2)

Certainly, the emotional appeal of metaphors like this can serve to unite the disparate peoples of a multicultural nation. As such, its meaning shifts from being culturally specific to being geographically relevant. It can become a locus of identity for people who live in the same place, cutting across cultural, political, ethical and personal differences. It represents not a single view, but a range of individual perspectives, its multiculturalism not about 'one New Zealand' but 'many New Zealands'. In this way, the waka metaphor accommodates the individual practices of the eleven artists selected through the quality of their work to represent New Zealand. They participate as a group, their presence supported, challenged and strengthened by one another. Their works, however collectively based on fluid notions of value and exchange, in the event function separately and are encountered individually. Whether the conscription of a culturally specific metaphor to describe shared geographical experience is seen as appropriate or even legitimate, necessarily depends on one's cultural perspective. While some may see this practice as a form of intellectual colonisation, others may regard it as a practical adaptation of cultures in a state of transition: the waka a useful vessel to hold multiple identities without individual conflict. It is here, in this area of personal identification with cultural myth, that the most vital and challenging art is being made in New Zealand today. The eleven artists who represent New Zealand's visual culture in this exhibition are leading exponents in this new navigational field, the uncharted waters of multiculturalism. It is through the individual paths they trace as visual artists that the shape of New Zealand culture is mapped. Lara Strongman, Waikato Museum of Art and History,Aotearoa/New Zealand Travel Agency: Exporting New Zealand Art You know the story. Once upon a time, the centre held, New Zealand seemed islanded from the wellsprings of European culture, and cultural cringe was the upshot. No longer. Today, the art world's fickle gaze has shifted. The centre, such as it is, has made the margins its business– mainstreamers are out, outsiders in. The stage now belongs to those who once spun their art on the peripheries or even off the map: boundary riders, fringe dwellers, genre benders. In this swampy and shifting terrain, styles crossbreed and mutate, once-cherished certitudes fray and unravel, and all the old guidebooks are rendered obsolete. New game, new terrain. We will need new maps to navigate these new territories, and it is one of the undergirding assumptions of the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial that artists can offer those maps. Spreading sail and striking out into this uncertain territory are the eleven New Zealand artists gathered here beneath a sea-faring metaphor: namely, the waka or canoe. The image is not an inappropriate one, for New Zealand culture is soaked in myths of coming and going, of departure and distance, of seas, oceans, migrations and embarkations. Far from being a mere canoe, this waka is at heart a transport for ideas, a symbolic vessel ferrying New Zealand's art out over latitudes and longitudes and into the Pacific's wider cultural spaces. Bearing up gracefully under a potentially lumbering curatorial metaphor, the works of art in the men's waka seem to chafe at attempts to herd them into a single ethnic corral. Though they share the same physical space for the duration of this journey, this diverse crew of artists is far from being a homogenous group: this is a babel, not a chorus. Ben Webb renders lushly brushed dreamscapes and watery psychodramas in which naked, grappling figures surface and submerge through pools of memory. Addressing their art to the human touch, Brett Graham and Chris Booth hew holistic, richly textured and thoroughly earthed sculptures. Booth's massive, towering pumice mountains and Graham's time-worn, lovingly smoothed wooden sculptures find an ironic foil in the video performance work of John Pule and the barbed, bleakly sardonic paintings of Peter Robinson. So while some of these makers have their sights set on the future, others are guided by the rudder of the past, and while some seek the safe harbour of older certainties, others aim to map and re-map new identities. To move in imagination from Graham's heartfelt handwork to the razorbacked ironies retailed by Peter Robinson is to sense the giddying diversity of New Zealand's latest art exports. The joker in this pack, Robinson anatomises the art world's ambivalent obsession with young Maori artists by adorning his paintings with numerals denoting the percentage of Maori blood flowing through his veins. Giving the market a run for its money, Robinson's paintings snap back sharply at the assumptions of the institutions that display Top left Brett Graham Kahukura 1995 Laminated pine 160x220x200cm Collection:Centre Culture! Jean-Marie Tjibaou, Noum~a Bottom Chris Booth Pumice from the mountains 1993 Pumice stone threaded on stainless steel cable and wire Dome Installation #18,Sarjeant Gallery, Wanganui Collection: The artist A RT I s T s : PA c I FI c I 125