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

who have - and who are - cal ling this process into being. It would be naive to do otherwise . The high-tide of transnational economies has touched the shores of the most remote and arcane cultural practices . And yet many of those artists and critics and curators and writers present here use the site of the international exhibition to re-fuel interest in cultures and ways of life that are as fragile and interdependent as ecosystems. Many of them straddle the international stage and the local communities to access change in positive ways - to foster an exchange of ideas, materials and items that addresses the vast gulf of inequality that provides the bedrock for the international monetary system . Models For The Future We are fascinated by prospects for the future. Many of the question times at this Conference have been peppered by prospects of how the model for the Triennial might be in the future. Perhaps anticipation and pred iction is always less d ifficult than deal ing with the present. For the first two months of this year I spent time in Hanoi on an Asialink residency. It was a richly rewarding time that brought me into contact with people and experiences that were predictably unsettling and seductive. During that time, wandering the congested streets of the old quarter, I was struck by the proliferation of fashion mannequins that had erupted out of Vietnam's government pol icy of doi moi - its embrace of change. These mannequ ins emerged from beh ind the glass of humble shop-fronts like a tribe of mutant, trans-cultural sirens. Moulded in the East, modelled in the West, interpreted somewhere in that never-never-land of mistranslation , these models for the future are the enshrined embodiment of too many desires; they are the perplexing hybrids of cultural miscegenation . Despite the total ity of international capitalist exchange, the fear of m iscegenation - or interbreeding - strangely persists across cultures. It is a fear of either breed ing infertile mutants (like the mule, wh ich is a product of the horse and the donkey) or of weakening the direct l ine of trad ition and authenticity. Yet in art exhibitions l ike this one we are aware of the positive ways in which cultural interactions can provide new patterns for practice, and offer new ways of understanding and interpreting the tribes for the future that have yet to emerge. Between the images of the models are images of a child's face. The child's features also bear influences of other racial features . Yet the child's face does not offer any template for change as such. The features fail to offer a model; they are less d istinct, more mutable. Perhaps we should be wary of the reductive fixity of models for the · future . The Triennial has offered a workable model to date, and what it has thrown up are all kinds of questions about identity and inclusion and what kinds of cultural practice constitute art. But perhaps in our search for future models and our embrace of the future we should be mindful of some of the lessons of the recent past, and the fact that there are still issues surviving that cannot be covered over by the epithet 'post'. Despite the term post-feminism , the representation of women's art in this exhibition still remains at a mere one-th ird of the total figure, and the forum of women's art seems marginalised on the peripheries - as a kind of tea-room chat-show that was, nevertheless, bursting at the seams; despite claims of post-colonialism , imperial ist imperatives survive, and cultures and ecologies are being eroded and destroyed as the Conference progresses. Within each of the countries represented at this exhibition there are a range of what Graburn has termed 'fourth world cultures' - cultures whose survival is contingent on the national boundaries and techno-bureaucratic administrations of the First, Second and Third Worlds - and whose presence is often overshadowed by the spotlight that falls on the dominant cultural practices within these boundaries. Despite claims of Postmodernism , the tendencies to value art and to organise art-history according to Euro-American ideals and outcomes persists , as we have seen in the proposed exhibition described by Jean-Hubert Martin, where the bones of peoples from Oceania - 1 53