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

East-West crossroads for Pacific cultures, and the Centre Culture! Jean-Marie Tjibaou (designed by Renzo Piano) rapidly nearing completion near Noumea in New Caledonia has considerable potential to redraw the cultural map of the region, Auckland, as the world's most populous Polynesian city, must rank as a major centre for Pacific art and the hub for art of the South Pacific. Certainly, the challenge of reconciling where they have come from with where they now find themselves infuses the work of contemporary Pacific Islands artists in New Zealand with a distinctive radiance, as manifested in 'Bottled Ocean: Contemporary Polynesian Artists', the first exhibition of such art, curated by Jim Vivieaere, which toured the country in 1995. This phenomenon adds a further layer of richness to what was once a resolutely monocultural, exclusively Pakeha art enterprise. The Pakeha majority (around eighty per cent of the population of 3.6 million) have had to adjust to, and their art institutions accommodate, dramatically altered circumstances, including the recentering of art in their own country and in the Pacific region. Some Pakeha artists have already embraced this altered world view. In Another map of the world 1988, for example, Ruth Watson centres New Zealand in the lower half of the composition, while Europe and North America slide over the other side of the globe. The Wizard of New Zealand (formerly known as Ian Brackenbury Channell), the country's 'living work of art', produced a map (the Wizard's New World Map) in 1973 on which Mercator's projection is inverted to show Australia and New Zealand not 'down under' but 'up over'. Secure in their New Zealand identity, some artists engage with the Maori art tradition; others link into the wider Pacific-for example, the Auckland painter Don Binney to Hawai'i (from 1990), and the Christchurch sculptor Graham Bennett (from 1992) to Japan. Scores of contemporary New Zealand artists have been featured in exhibitions 'across the ditch' (the Tasman Sea), in Sydney: for example, in Biennales and the 'ANZART' exhibitions; and 'Headlands: Thinking Through New Zealand Art', at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art in 1992. The proportion of works by contemporary Maori artists in such surveys has increased dramatically in recent years, for example, of the thirty-eight artists represented in 'Headlands', eight were Maori; four of the seven artists featured in 'Cultural Safety: Contemporary Art From New Zealand', shown in Frankfurt in 1995, were of Maori descent. From international exposure of taonga (treasures)– 'Te Maori: Maori Art from NewZealand Collections' at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (and subsequently in Saint Louis, San Francisco and Chicago) in 1984; 'Taonga Maori: Treasures of the New Zealand Maori People' in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane during 1989 and 1990; and the forthcoming British Museum show-Maori art has gained recognition as one of the world's great art traditions. Contemporary Maori art, featured in separatist exhibitions such as 'Te Waka Toi', which toured the United States in 1993, or included in survey exhibitions of New Zealand art, is also attracting international interest. Maori do not readily draw distinctions between customary (or conservative) and contemporary (or innovative) art modes, however: 'Taonga Maori' included works by contemporary urban Maori artists, while 'Te Waka Toi' included works by marae-based carvers and weavers working with traditional materials and techniques, in order to affirm that sense of the continuity of the immediate present with the distant past, a crucial element in asserting Maori identity. In his essay 'Maori: At the centre, on the margins', in the 'Headlands' catalogue, the Maori art historian Rangihiroa Panoho asks: 'Given Aotearoa's geographical isolation from Europe and the presence of such a rich local tribal culture, the question to be asked is: shouldn't the idea of centre/margins be reversed?' 2 Reversing the idea would mean seeing Europe as geographically remote from Aotearoa/New Zealand, as New Zealand's antipodes, and positioning the Maori cultural presence as the core element in the country's national and cultural identity. This is a prospect that the Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa Act 1994 foreshadowed. The Act sets out to, 'encourage, promote, and support the arts in New Zealand for the benefit of all New Zealanders'; 'recognise the cultural diversity of the people of New Zealand'; 'recognise in the arts the role of Maori as tangata whenua (people of the land, indigenous)'; 'recognise the arts of the Pacific Islands' people of New Zealand'; and 'promote the development of a New Zealand identity in the arts'. In its use of the ancient term 'tangata whenua', the Act appears to ascribe primacy to the Maori arts by invoking the fifty-to– sixty generation timeframe-a thousand years or more of human culture in Aotearoa-to which the present generation of Maori relates, instead of the colonisers' narrower timeframe of just over one hundred and fifty years. By according the Pacific Islands' arts communities separate recognition– an anomaly under the Treaty-the Act, in effect, repositions New Zealand as a hub or centre for the arts of Pacific peoples, whose traditions extend back thousands of years. From this centre several Maori artists are retracing the paths of their ancestors across Te Moananui-a– Kiwa-the great sea of Kiwa (the Pacific Ocean), and rediscovering their commonalities with Pacific peoples and cultures, through dialogue with artists indigenous to the region or by engaging with their art. Various forums enable this to happen: meetings of experts in Polynesian waka/vaka/va'a (ancestral canoe) traditions; conferences of the Pacific Arts Association and the Pacific History Association; the Festival of the South Pacific; and now the Asia– Pacific Triennial. In the lead up to the opening of the Centre Culture! Jean-Marie Tjibaou, several Maori artists have been invited to New Caledonia as guests of the Agence de Developpement de la Culture Kanak. (Maori solidarity with indigenous Pacific peoples still colonised by France has been paralleled by New Zealand's vehement opposition to French nuclear testing on Mururoa Atoll in the central Pacific.) Robin White took up residence in Kiribati in 1982, and now understands the import of Colin McCahon's previously unfathomable assertion: for her, the Pacific has become the centre of the world. Brett Graham, a Maori artist who completed graduate studies in Fine Arts at the University of Hawai'i in 1991, is among a number of New Zealand artists for whom the centrality of the Pacific in their lives and work is a given. In 1995 a symposium of indigenous artists, hosted by Maori in Rotorua, drew practitioners from Japan, Papua New Guinea, Australia, New Caledonia, Fiji, Niue, Samoa, Tonga, Vanuatu, Hawai'i, and the West Coast of North America. Several of the participants (John Bevan Ford, a senior Maori artist, and ItoWa'ia, a young Kanak artist from New Caledonia) have subsequently paid homage to cultures and traditions other than their own represented at the symposium through appropriated motifs and styles. Although these gestures are respectful, there are issues appertaining to appropriation, and indigenous cultural and intellectual property rights that have yet to be resolved. Internationalisation, too, can be a great leveller: everywhere, even in this corner of the global village, is in danger of becoming the same. A search for origins ultimately draws Pacific peoples back to the ancient world of what the West has named 'Asia', from whence their ancestors came many thousands of years ago, migrating slowly, island-hopping eastwards across Te Moananui-a-Kiwa. Today, another, more direct migration from Asian countries to Aotearoa/ New Zealand is in progress, facilitated by the waka of the late twentieth century-the waka rererangi (aeroplane). A resemblance in outline between aeroplanes illustrated on an Air New Zealand poster and the form of the traditional waka taua (war canoe) inspired Maori artist Peter Robinson, an artist of Pakeha and Maori descent, to draw parallels between the two modes of transportation involved in the peopling of New Zealand in ancient times and the present. And a new generation of artists of Asian descent-Yuk King Tan, Luise Fong, and Denise Kum, for example-is now rising to the Es sAV s I 29