Beyond the Future: Papers from the Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

SPEAKER: Dana Friis-Hansen The APT offers tremendous opportunities for artists, curators, historians, and perhaps most importantly the general public, to see, enjoy, and hopefully be provoked by contemporary art from a part of the world that has suffered from a lack of serious scholarly attention and documentation of its current art. The QAG has already made a real and lasting contribution to the international art world through scholarsh ip, documentation, and curatorial collaboration and artist exchanges. That said, the APT also raises several dilemmas, wh ich Al ison Carroll has asked us to discuss . First, outsiders coined the term 'Asia', and mapped its present coord inates. The 'Asia-Pacific' is a geo-political construct, and its importance in the past decade seems to be qu ite connected to the economic needs and aspirations of Australia. But I am not terribly worried about the economic overtones , because there are many social and cultural advantages, and applaud the Art Gallery in making it a high priority to help their citizens get to know their neighbours and potential trading partners. So I say, let's stick with the broad context, but try to fill in the holes, the areas not represented . What concerns me most is the APT's urge to 'd ivide and conquer', to categorise artists by nation-state . Thankfully, the artworks are installed upon aesthetic and thematic lines, not by nationality as they were with the first APT. The catalogue is where the d ivisions are most visible, but I sense a general d rifting away from this hard-headedness , which I am eager to encourage. It is not clear why, for example, Guan Wei is grouped with in Australia but not Simryn Gill, even though both are foreign born and live in Sydney. Why not just arrange the artists alphabetically in this book, or arrange them as an unfolding aesthetic or thematic journey, as one enjoys the exhibition? The new Crossing Borders category is extremely helpful because it allows artists such as Shahzia Sikander to be included in the APT. She was trained as a miniaturist in Pakistan, and this still greatly influences her work, but she's since stud ied and developed a career as a resident of USA. I proposed the artist and curiously enough, the Pakistan team also wanted to claim her as their own (and they should ! ) so the computer wh ich printed out my tag for the Conference very nicely aligned me with my Pakistani colleagues, people I had not yet met. I like this cultural confusion . There is no such thing as 'pure culture'. Since the first land bridges , outriggers and dugout canoes - and more recently, aluminium airships - inter-cultural encounters have enl ivened human existence. The APT is about cultural exchange, really, not i�olation or categorisation . The inevitable exchange of ideas, in the form of cultural practices which we might call 'the arts' produces an ebb and flow of hybrid products. To find an intact culture , unexposed to any other, would immediately eliminate such status, like a plot out of a Borges story. And yet China and the Soviet Union, until recently, had iron curtains to isolate those art worlds, and throughout h istory, ignorance or arrogance have isolated many other cultures . But nearly everyone has McDonalds. Cuisine offers one easy example of cultural hybridisation . If you go to McDonald's in Japan, the experience is unique, from the immed iate cry of 'lrrashaimase', the required welcome of shopkeeper, to the hint of ginger I sensed had been added to the 'special sauce' of my Big Mac. To the native, the surface packaging has foreign , exotic appeal , and the ubiquitous Golden Arches are even parodied in a work here in this exh ibition by a Japanese artist. But the content, the deep structure of the experience, is adjusted for local, for Japanese, taste. What about export? Some Japanese cuisine, such as sushi, has become popular with outsiders, while others like natt6 (fermented or rotten soybeans in a gooey bitter syrup) do not share widespread popularity with the non-native. Speaking of Japanese taste, there is a whole genre of painting, N ihonga, soft imagery i n mineral colours on paper, wh ich i s avidly practiced , widely exhibited and seriously collected in Japan, but rarely acknowledged by the international art scene. It is embarrassing, but perhaps fitting, that I have no slides in my personal collection of any N ihonga paintings. The work 1 1 4