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

Dana Friis-Hansen also addressed the issue of national and cultural borders, encouraging crossing and destruction wherever he could. Jen Webb spoke of the 'mass of otherness' outside the border. On the third point, 'Models for the future', the consensus was for change, fluid ity and mutability on the issue of regionalism , that the change in the last ten years is enormous, that boundaries will continue to break down . Kanaga spoke of new intra-regional curatorial schemes, and Yasuko Furuich i of how we should move beyond the regional network. It was agreed that Asia-Pacific was a state of mind, and this too can, and is expected to, change. I said we led on from the global/local session . These views on models of regionalism lead well into the next session on models for the future, proving yet again that the regional works as a bridge, though sometimes with a surprising and energising shower of water as we cross . 7.2: Identity: Ethnicity, Mu lticulturalism, lndigeneity, Translocal ity Chair Yao Souchou By the time we came to the parallel session we had already had a day and a half conferencing . All this time when I was sitting over there hearing the Conference program of speeches I could close my eyes and imagine I was in Ch icago at a Cultural Studies Conference, or at a Sydney Un iversity Cultural Stud ies Conference, so when I came to do my session I thought I'd do a slightly (in my inscrutable Ch inese way) remedial action by gently interrogating somebody. So I changed my topic somewhat. The first thing I did in my panel was to make a couple of decrees . The first thing I said is no­ one in my panel is allowed to use Latin ised Engl ish words of more than four syllables . The second th ing I did was to change this rather wordy title, apologies to Caroline Turner, from 'Identity: Ethnicity, Multiculturalism, l ndigeneity, Translocal ity' to 'What do the Natives Want?' So these four topics are partly my gentle subversion of putting my agenda in the mouth of the audience so I really don't know whether these are my points or the points of the audience. Essentially I think the general ethos or atmosphere of the panel had these four points: 1 . Difference in certain locations can be associated with heartache and bloodshed, so difference is not always a good thing, certainly not always good for the natives. I'm really tal king about the situation in Timor and also the situation in Malaysia. It is political difference that makes divide and rule possible, so difference doesn't always lead to ethnic food in Sydney. 2. The second point is the very problematic relationship between the majority culture and minority culture. A lot of things talk about inter-cultural flow, the mutual engagement and influences between one culture and another, and I just want to be different so I would l ike to say sometimes these migrations are qu ite problematic. It can lead to, as one speaker in the panel said , cann ibal isation. 3. The point that there is a politics of difference . The politics of pleasure. To what extent can we middle-class academics or art curators pass judgement on the Third World poor when they spend a month's wage or two month's wage on a Big Mac in Beij ing or Moscow? The fact that we already enjoyed these pleasures - do we have the right to say ·that they do not have that right, that they should behave more rationally and put their money in a savings bank account? 4. The uses of language. Many of us - not only cosmopolitan academics like me - speak different languages . People in India, people in Malaysia, everyone speaks different languages. Part of this comes from regionalisation . We speak different regional languages, partly because our national policy forces us to speak different languages whether you want it or not, and these different languages produce d ifferent kinds of subjectivity in all of us. So transnationalisation , translocalisation may not be that kind of dramatic a process, one that we deal with day to day as a process, and on the whole I would say that the ambience of the panel is really to say that in some of the orthodoxy we cosmopolitan people celebrate a lot we should really be cautious by having a sense of ambivalence about marking the difference between different 1 35