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

of a heightened or pronounced sense of identity. Arguably one of the artists here who is seen as amongst the most Japanese is Nakahashi who is responsible for the zero fighter at the top of the escalators in the Gallery. Nakahash i felt that while he didn't make art for a non­ Japanese audience - he made it for a Japanese audience - certain works can be regarded as more easily understood by non-western aud iences . Secondly, one then asks 'how is it that Japanese art ever does get made', given what Nakamura and Osaka showed was a lack of engagement of contemporary art in Japan and lack of engagement on the part of art education as well with everyday Japanese life. For example, Nakamura spoke about how art students even today spend several years drawing very intricate drawings of plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculpture . Despite undergoing that sort of training Nakamura attempts to extract the beauty of everyday life in bustling Tokyo. He suggested in his talk that when viewers are exposed or alerted to this in art (Nakamura was responsible for the Golden Arches of McDonalds in the APT), that by alerting people to the beauty of everyday life through his art, perhaps they may see their surroundings in a new way. The third point I'd like to make was how Osaka explained that despite the boom in museum construction from the 1 980s in Japan, the lack of engagement in contemporary art with everyday Japanese l ife may perhaps be symptomatic of how in Japan Japanese contemporary art is seen within the context of western contemporary art and its introduction in the late nineteenth century. Again, my mind goes back to Marian's paper regard ing the nineteenth century. Fourthly, lwai, whom you may remember from the video installation entitled Dialogue, said that he felt most Japanese when using language. Like Dialogue, art too rel ies on an audience, a second party to engage with . My tentative conclusion is that the works included in this APT, this expo, can be interpreted as Japanese art in two ways. They are Japanese in the way that they respond to the local and urban environment and keenly felt local issues such as language and communication and multiculturalism . But they can also be viewed as Japanese in the more trad itional sense. This is especially so in the case of Nakahashi, who draws on local h istory, traditions and cu ltural resources and re-negotiates them in new forms . 7. 5 : Bahasa Session Chair Laine Berman The I ndonesian group was more of a d iscussion than a panel, and we focused mainly on the meanings and issues of contemporary Indonesian art. Our three main areas of focus and contention were as follows: The first point was the significance and the degree of the l ink between art and politics. Social, pol itical and economic problems have been at the centre of th is debate in Indonesian contemporary art since its origin back in the 1 930s, but today we find that many feel the violence and inequality must dominate art . Yet we also have other groups that find that this focus on violence is extremely boring and trendy, and they also claim that they resent the commodification of tragedy. The second point that came up was the location of the social environment in art, wh ich is also a big cause for concern . This is specifically that of the urban Javanese male hegemony. Contemporary art is almost entirely l im ited to men in three centres - Jakarta, Bandung and Yogyakarta - and the centrality of urban Java emphasises, in fact re-emphasises, point 1 and that's enhancing the issues of inequality, including issues of a monopoly of the ability to define cultural and national identity. The third point touched upon how all of the above is grounded in the psychology of modern art and artists which appears in the recent tendency to mock society, the environment and the artists themselves . These criticisms flow both outward at the world , the government and the 1 37