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

the new technologies - are incommensurable and what people have to say doesn't fit in coherently, but let me try to summarise what happened . Fion Ng from Hong Kong, a new media artist, spoke of the huge gap between the commercial sphere of cinema in Hong Kong and the sphere of artwork created with the new media. I-Lann Yee from Malaysia spoke of the difficulty of not having any public funding for activist-based work with youth and sex workers, and both Fion Ng and I-Lann Yee spoke of the complete absence of public fund ing wh ich makes work very difficult in those places . But in Hong Kong, through the Hong Kong Film Festival and so on, the new med ia artists using new technologies have been able to gain access to public exh ibition . Feng Membo from China, a painter and someone who discovered the new media later in his life, spoke of the importance to him as an artist of using popular culture, especially video games, and showed us some of his work. Shiralee Saul, a new media artist and academic from Australia, implied the need for a kind of ecology of discourse on the Internet wh ich seems to be a kind of endless utopia while the real urban space is declining and the public sphere is shrinking. Ray Lagenbach , as a performer, surprised us by not giving the paper that he had prepared but showing us a video that he made in 1 996 in Kuala Lumpur at an NGO meeting on the Asia-Pacific Conference on East Timer and gave us a history of ASEAN and US foreign pol icy and the complicity of US capital in creating East Timer as a discardable zone for its own well being, and how this d iscarded zone continues to bleed as a wound that will not heal . I'm very grateful to the APT for offering us th is space, however it is the first effort to introduce a screen culture component so naturally it's not as well articulated as some of the other panels have been. I want to suggest that in the future the museum will have to play an enormous role in being a home to certain kinds of film-makers - the film-makers whom we will refer to as the modernist film-makers such as Kumar Shahani of India whose work is State­ funded and then censored by that very State and never exh ibited in India but only at Rotterdam, Pesaro and wherever in the West. These film-makers may continue to make films because they get foreign awards, but the State has no interest in screen ing them. So the museum in the future, and this would have to be a long-term plan, would have to have 35mm facilities to show this work because these are film-makers who are working with l ight, colour and individuating very complex trad itions, injecting it into the contemporary modern, and they do not want this work shown on video. It's like showing a painter's work on a sl ide at the APT. So you have to think of this as a long-term thing otherwise these film-makers will d ie, there is no public cinematic sphere for them . I'll leave you with two other general ideas from Miriam Hanson who says that cinema's importance for us now is as a repository of memory, of time itself, of the non-synchronicity of temporality to experience different temporalities as time itself is being transformed by the new media into a kind of infinite stretchabil ity so that cinema can make us collectively experience the non-synchronicity of time and of its multiplicity. If I can give you an image of Jackie Chan in his latest film because it echoes what M ichael Mel said . In his film called Who am I he falls off an aeroplane and he lands among an African tribe. He has amnesia. He wakes up and scratches h is head and says 'Who am I? Who am I?' and the African tribe surrounds him and wants to know his name and they think that's his name and say 'Ah , Whoaml. That's your name!'. This is l ike M ichael Mel's point that in meetings such as this there should be some sort of creative encounter where subjecUobject relations and one's certitudes about aesthetics and other things are set adrift. 8.2: South Asia Chair Suhanya Raffel The South Asia parallel session drew out a number of issues, and I will table just three. To preface these comments, we framed the region as Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India since it is the APT participation that has drawn this particular configuration. 1 39