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

SPEAKER: Jen Webb I'm here neither as a curator nor an art historian, and so I'm in the pos ition of being an amateur among professionals. The panel discussion chaired by Al ison Carroll to address the question of whether or not Asia­ Pacific art exists is necessarily pred icated on the underlying question of whether or not Asia­ Pacific exists. My professional reflex is to answer that (implicit) question by saying: No; and Yes . Of course Asia-Pacific doesn't exist in any 'real' sense - all divisions between regions, communities or nations, as has been comprehensively established in the work of writers like Benedict Anderson , Edward Said and Arjun Appadurai, are arb itrary constructs, and neither necessary nor inherent. There is no more reason , for instance, to conflate Asia and the Pacific than there is to group the sub-continent and Eastern Europe; nor are there any 'real' connections between Rarotonga and Malaysia, or between New Zealand and Pakistan. Having said that though, it is also val id to state that Asia-Pacific (and by extension Asia­ Pacific art) does exist; and this is because 'we' {that is, experts , governments , multinational corporations) say it does, and behave as though it does. For instance, the Alta Vista search engine on the Internet returns some 236 1 20 responses to the query 'Asia-Pacific', the majority of wh ich appear to be web pages for IT companies, finance houses and government agencies. A combination of language and authorised practice thus works to reify the idea of Asia-Pacific, to construct it as a geopol itical place, one that has a firmly established, if a virtual , identity. So though we can say confidently that Asia-Pacific doesn't exist in any 'real' sense, because it has been constructed in language by powerful agents - major national and geopolitical entities, major trade and economic entities - there is an effect of Asia-Pacific which allows us to talk about it as a Real thing. This can operate as a neo-colonial ist gesture, synthesising all that is 'not-Europe' or 'not-USA' into an homogeneous entity that is available primarily for the delectation of (or exploitation by) what John Clark refers to as 'Euramerica'. And for artists from the Asia-Pacific, who may be selected to stand in for and represent their community and/or region, there is the risk that they present in 'Euramerican' venues simply as a typology of the Other. In other words, their personal aesthetic and identity can become subsumed under their status on the one hand as representative, and on the other hand as a 'curiosity', or as 'native'. However, this is not the only possibil ity open . What the Asia-Pacific effect brings into being is not what cultural theorist Michel de Certeau terms a place propre - an authorised , structured and stable site. Rather, it generates what he calls a Certeauan - a �ite (metaphoric or geographic) characterised by the 'intersections of mobile elements', 1 without univocality, without stability, and hence open to being reinscribed by the peoples who are the subjects of this neo-colonial ism . One reason for this openness is that the Asia-Pacific effect is an outcome of processes of globalisation , geopolitical practices that are undoing the stability and national integrity of nation-states, and reframing traditional narratives and values. In this, globalisation can be seen as both post-modern and anti-modern . It is anti-modern because it is eroding the ability of individual nation-states to fulfil their central function - the care, surveillance and regulation of populations - by enabling the unregulated flow of cultural material and ideas across the region , and hence contributing to the permeabil ity of national borders. And it is post-modern in the sense that, through the emergence of virtual texts and the instantaneity of communication , it is eroding the d istinctions between cultures, bringing together d isparate elements, and hence provid ing an environment of mass substitutabil ity of narratives, values and images. So an effect of the enormous traffic in cultural material between communities and nations is to broaden and deepen the visual vocabulary available to artists and writers, and what we're now seeing in many works and words from the region is what Appadu rai calls 'elements of a postnational imaginary' 2 : transnational ly-oriented works that resonate with the possibility of reworking both neo-colonialist cultural flows and the imposed homogeneity of the nation-state. 1 1 6