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

and the relatively novel yet increasing number and prominence of individual artists and writers. Consequently, the curatorial team for Vietnam included Professor Nguyen Luong Tieu Bach, Director, Hanoi University of Fine Arts and Do Minh Tam, independent artist; as well as Ca Le Thang and Dao Minh Tri, both executive officers of the Visual Artist Association, Ho Chi Minh City. As stated earlier, the three artists selected, VO Dan Tan, Dang Thi Khue, and Mai Anh Dung, have been chosen because of their works and ideas, each artist having been motivated by deep enquiries about what art can do. It is this purposeful intent that dominates their images. Secondly, as artist practitioners, their use of decoration is exemplary as it demonstrates the role composition and aesthetics play when they impact upon content and style, compounding the meaning and significance of each work. Consequently, these artists offer us insightful images that comment directly and indirectly on the range of social, political and spiritual conditions surrounding their lives. Vo Dan Tan Making Do Tan's work could be described, at its most significant level, as talking back to used institutions. Perversely, his use of decoration relates to a connection between the individual and the state. His works deny the reality of their original materials and hence attempt to defy the increasing supremacy of the legitimate economy by recycling rubbish and turning it into new, real things that claim to be works of art. Obsessively working with discarded boxes, papers, wrappers and packaging of all kinds, Tan's compulsive working process aligns his work with the art brut artists of Europe and outsider art of Australia. From humble and banal materials he creates puppets and masked characters that are of another world. In his own private way, Tan confounds the inevitable and immutable processes of the world of objects by changing the value and meaning of already used things. Through this process he creates an imaginary life in which he prefers to exist. The preciousness of this discarded material, the way it might transform reality, has understandably been recognised and embraced by Tan, a senior Vietnamese artist whose life and expectations have been conditioned by hardship and embargo. Dang Thi Khue Digging In Khue is both an art historian and a painter. She is writing a comprehensive book on contemporary Vietnamese art and perhaps it is because of her extensive knowledge of the range and diversity of styles of current Vietnamese painting that she has comfortably stayed within the figurative tradition. With the confidence her experience provides she examines, possibly for the first time at this critical level, issues of race and gender. Her use of decoration and pattern provides both personality to the subjects of her paintings and a local or historical context for the issue she may be examining. Khue is secure in and satisfied with her stylistic conservatism which has provided a vehicle for a convincing portrayal of contentious subject-matter. The common inclusion of folk costumes or items of domestic life in her paintings does not refer to a nostalgia for the past, a naive belief in the essential goodness of more base experience, nor the seductiveness of new-found levels of domesticity and security. Rather, the clarity and easy recognition of the subjects initially 'free up' the painter and her audience, a trap of seduction which is then closed shut as the blackness of the paintings and their patterns imply more grave questions.The works are imbued with complex and controversial themes on the role of indigenous people and women in contemporary Vietnam. Mai Anh Dilng Breaking Out Dung's use of decoration relates to the construction of experience allied to the concept of the soul. He lives and works in a room measuring less than twelve square metres. It is situated on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City behind a chaotic wrecking-yard of cannibalised bulldozers and forklift trucks. The ground is pooled with sump oil. Born in 1967 in Dong Mai Province, Dung has grown up less influenced by overt political rhetoric yet more exposed to the environmental damage of a country long at war. From this materially, and one could suppose spiritually bleak background, he has undertaken, remarkably, what must be recognised as an extreme journey into the forgotten world of the ancient Champa Kingdom of South-East Asia. His tiny studio room is crammed with collected artefacts, experimental assemblages and large paintings that reach from wall to wall. Each work explores and constructs a spiritual world that appears wildly fantastic and completely alien to the material conditions of suburban Ho Chi Minh City. Mandalas, totems, symbolic patterning and placements, along with ritualistic carved frames, transfix the viewer and elevate Dung to a world– half-researched, half-imagined-of overwhelm– ingly rich experiences and spiritual value, immutable of individual perfection and symbolic order. Dung cuts through the traumas of recent history and present life to reclaim the soul of the Cham people who disappeared from lndo-China eighteen centuries ago. Professor Ian Howard is Provost and Director of !he Queenland Collegeof Art, GriffithUniversity, Australia 1993:Nguyen Xuan. 1996:DangThi Khue. Mai Anh DOng and VO Dan Tan 1996 CuratorialTeam Ian Howard,Nguyen Luong Tieu Bach, Do Minh Tam. Ca Le Thali'gand Dao Min Tri 50 I CURAT o RI A L ESSAYS · so UT H AND SOUT H- EAST A s I A The Philippines: Present Tense Julie Ewington In his novel Ghosts of Manila, James Hamilton– Paterson has his protagonist, a British anthropol– ogist, reflect that the key to The Philippines lay not in the past but in the extraordinary present tense of its flamboyant political culture. 'Mostly, it was the present which pressed intimately against Prideaux like an anonymous someone in a crowd whose intentions, whether erotic or larcenous, are never made clear, nor even their identity.' 1 The present is shadowed by the past and no one lives out of its reach. Yet the works by these five artists from The Philippines are principally committed to the present moment, and through it, to the future. What was the Philippines curatorial team searching for, as we combed the present? Works in a variety of media: the diversity of Philippines art demanded it, and the exhibition's open curatorial structure suggested that broadening our selection would broker strangely felicitous alliances between work from The Philippines and elsewhere. In Manila, the Philippines curatorial team-Imelda Cajipe– Endaya, distinguished artist and exhibitor in the 1993 Asia-Pacific Triennial; Christine Clark, APT Project Officer; and myself-saw work by nearly fifty artists. We travelled to Bacolod and lloilo in the Visayas, and Christine Clark and I also visited Baguio, in northern Luzon. From this plethora of activity we were charged with finding work by just five artists. Our only difficulty lay with our original shortlist, fully twice as long as our allocation.Thus we are clear that our selection does not exhaust the present possibilities of Philippines art but only begins to indicate its plenitude. Contemporaneity, richness, variety: these were key words for the Philippines selection. Paintings by Charlie Co and Sanggawa continue the fine traditions of figurative painting from The Philippines, though in very different veins. Charlie Co's magical social landscapes of Bacolod are peopled with his own persistent dreams and desires; and Sanggawa takes up current political issues with an acuteness and attack reminiscent of the paintings and murals of the martial law period. From their works it is clear that the social problems of The Philippines were not resolved in 1986 with the fall of Marcos and the return of democracy. Indeed, the national scandal of the plight of overseas contract workers is highlighted in the installation by Jose Tence Ruiz. Based on the traditional fiesta game pabitin, it does not regret the past but addresses present wide– spread poverty in The Philippines and the strenuous efforts Filipinos must make to achieve material comfort. (This work has implications for other peoples, other nations.) Mark Justiniani takes up the recurring Philippines theme of the Jeepney as a metaphor for shared humanity, not nostalgically, but in the current mode of the road. And Francesca Enriquez works at the intersection of the domestic sphere and the formation of subjectivity through