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

Art will have diverse channels of communication with other creative genres such as fash ion , arch itecture, etc., and the boundary of art will become more obscure . In th is sense, an increasing number of artists wi l l play the role of a producer. The 'artist' may be defined as a person plentiful in ideas and visions but not necessarily good in using his hands nor particularly skilful in terms of traditional techniques. A conceptual approach and objective view of ourselves will become important in the creation of art. This may not only be the case with those works that use high technology but even with manually-painted pictures, for example. To view the matter in another l ight, everyth ing will change into art if people work with a high spirit of creation and, as Joseph Beuys once said , everybody can become an artist. Thus, art and the museums will dissolve into daily life and finally d isappear if we are lucky. 2. Meanwhile, identity will no longer be an ethn ic, cultural trad ition to which each artist is committed, but will be made into one of the materials of expression . In other words, artists will venture to use any local materials as one alternative for their expression . It will also be possible to combine the world's different local cu ltures and to arrange them in a new transcultural syntax and semantics . Identity may be regarded and util ised as an important part of an artist's publ icity and marketing, since an artist with a distinct identity is recognised in the market sooner than one who produces diverse works each time. Also, the term 'exoticism' may be used in a non-derogatory sense. Art has always taken up anything new and strange. If this is the unchangeable nature of a rt and the aud ience, artists may venture to adopt exoticism as their strategy. (Anyway, there has never been a pure and simple or single identity for ind ividuals) In short, identity may overcome its original role and become a matter for the individual artist, sometimes in a deeper and more defined way. And people may real ise it is another way to reach a global standard of expression . 3. As for the exh ibition, the international exhibition will become more common and occur more often and in more cities in the world, but will be organised not on national, regional, or ethnic groupings but on the thematic and redivision istic concept, including a lot of non-western artists naturally. Small exhibitions will also include different nationalities, d ifferent races, and d ifferent ethnic groups because it becomes more natural than now. Also technology issues will be replaced by ecology issues and art will start to care for its material and energy sources . 4 . A new global base of knowledge will be established without denying the variety of local elements, through many international exhibitions and new media, and a common visual language might be developed from a fine type of nonverbal, cross­ cultural communication . It may consist of well-known common icons, expressions, images and vocabularies, all of which will be understandable to people in every country and every local ity. By these means, everybody will easily be able to understand the meaning of those works, even those that have a background in a foreign culture. It may be cal led a global standard of new art. Some people may oppose this idea and I do not say that this is either good or bad but I predict it may happen in the com ing information explosion . The more extensive such a common base of knowledge of art will be, the longer the tensions will continue between the local and global. The tensions will serve as resources or energy 1 50