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

Top Kim Hong-Joo in his Taejon studio during curatorial visit, 1995 Middle Choi Jeong Hwa and David Williams in Seoul during curatorial visit,1995 Bottom Victoria Lynn and Mrinalini Mukherjee in New Delhi, 1995 Contemporary Indian Art: Between Continuity and Disjuncture Victoria Lynn India is a word, a name, a culture and a concept that resonates with an extraordinary weight of romanticism in the popular imagination; almost more than it can bear. The musical form of the raga, the philosophy of Tagore, the carvings at Khajuraho, the cave paintings at Ajanta and the miniature tradition are just some aspects of Indian history that have been celebrated internationally as representative expressions of this great culture. With a population over 900 million, however, India experiences an insistent force of fragmentation on a number of levels-economic, cultural, political, social and aesthetic. Ancient and modern, traditional and progressive, exist side by side. The Orientalist images of India have sought to unify this sense of daily fragmentation under a romantic veil; to present India as a culture that is permanent, eternal and static. Museum exhibitions of the 'civilisation' model have been as responsible for perpetuating this view as the tourist literature. As museums 'move from an authoritative presentation of culture to an interrogative one' 1 in the present decade, exhibitions such as the Asia-Pacific Triennial can begin to question such Orientalist images and beckon a reappraisal of the arts of non-Western cultures. They can, as Ivan Karp suggests, exhibit the problem, rather than the solutions, present the fragments rather than an imaginary whole. 2 Fragmentation is ever present in India, where basics such as literacy, medical care and the provision of food are not givens. Simple facts about India have immense ramifications. For instance, the one-hour flight from Calcutta to New Delhi passes over 400 million people. There are one million potters in India (in some communities they are considered to be priests) who make up a substantial part of the living tribal and folk traditions. One is just as likely to encounter a potter, a pavement dweller, a business executive or an entrepreneur during a stroll down a city street. Indeed, the various modes of transport that populate the main roads of New Delhi or Bombay come to represent the diverse aspirations of the multiple levels in Indian society. The Suzuki Maruti, the Ambassador taxi, the auto– rickshaw, the bicycle-rickshaw, the bus, the camel and cart, the bicycle, the man-drawn cart, and the moped each travel at a different speed and with different purposes through an obstacle course of sacred white cows that sit unperturbed on median strips and sidewalks. A taxi ride in Bombay took myself, co-curator Kamala Kapoor and coordinator Rhana Devenport through three indescribably different zones of human experience: the Westernised five-star hotel; Dharavi, the largest slum in the world; and a studio where catalogues from New York's Museum of Modern Art graced the dedicated artist's bookshelf. When one becomes caught up in this kind of detail, the region known as 'Asia-Pacific' seems difficult to conjure. As a visitor from Australia, it is impossible to be unaffected by India's self-sufficiency, inde– pendent spirit, immensity and fragmentation. I have little understanding of how my Indian colleagues experience this density and accumulation of imagery and asked many of them to elaborate. No Indian artist ignores these aspects of daily life and the many traditions that punctuate India's history, and yet no contemporary urban artist completely embraces them either. In the context of the European avant-garde, a sudden break with the past is understood as progressive, whereas in Indian modernism, artists have been concerned to forge an independent position between the international avant-garde and their own history and social reality. The question for artists is whether to accept tradition as a formula, to assimilate it, transform it, borrow from it, sociologically examine it or apprehend it through memory. In a highly intellectual milieu, the urban artists in India consider their relationship to the term 'tradition' with great care and thought. Further, they are sensitive to social fragmentation, many Indian artists having built long and distinguished careers reflecting this aspect in their work without resorting to didacticism. Modern Indian painting has been dominated this century by a figurative narrative mode. The sculptor N.N. Rimzon speaks of this modern tradition in twentieth-century Indian painting as 'indigenous', so forceful has been its integration in the art schools' curricula. While sculpture in India has largely been confined to single works on pedestals, painting developed a highly critical and self-conscious language through the use of multi-layered imagery and social concerns. One of the most noticeable shifts in contemporary Indian art over the last decade has been the opening up of attitudes to sculpture and what it can be. Artists such as Mrinalini Mukherjee, who has pursued a sculptural practice since the 1970s, are not only experiencing a new vitality in their own work, but also increased encouragement from their peers. Other artists, such as Vivan Sundaram, Nilima Sheikh and Nalini Malani, have moved from a painting practice into installation, amplifying their concerns through the physical encounter with space and the principles of performance. Younger artists of Rimzon's generation also practice a form of sculpture that uses multiple elements, and have done so since the late 1980s. The emergence of installation art is hotly debated in Indian art circles. Shifts in art practice in India, however, do not occur exclusively within the parameters of aesthetic debates. While a sensitivity to sociopolitical issues is by no means new in modern Indian art, the rise of religious fundamentalism in the wake of the destruction of the Muslim mosque in Ayodhya in CURATO RI A L Es s AYs : s o u TH AND So u TH - EA s T As I A I 47