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

The theme of this Conference is ' Beyond the Future'. It follows from the first Triennial Conference theme of 'Identity, Tradition and Change' and the second Conference, Present Encounters'. There are over 700 delegates here today, representing over th irty countries . At the first Conference speakers (many of whom are here today) stressed the need to canvass new ideas which cross national boundaries. I bel ieve the APT has always crossed borders and yesterday amid discussion of events on our borders in East Timar one of the artists said that the APT is about reach ing out to others in ways that remain critical for all of us. At that first Conference Geeta Kapur talked of context. Redza Piyadasa talked of cultural exchange over the centuries and resistance to western cultural impositions since the nineteenth century. David Elliott made a plea for complexity. Xu Hong noted : 'When you look at a leopard through a piece of bamboo, you can only see one spot': Marian Pastor Races called for a new cal ibrated language for d iscussing the art of the region and also outlined her unease at the possibility of forcing another mega-narrative, echoing Apinan Poshyananda's comments at John Clark's important conference at the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University two years before: 'How long do you in the West think that you can own the ides of Modernism and Postmodernism?' The First Asia-Pacific Triennial Conference saw speakers emphasise centuries of soph isticated cultural exchange and development long before western engagement with the region , as well as overlapping territories, local traditions, the need to expose marginal ity and tensions rather than to try to impose sameness and homogeneity. The Triennial, it was agreed , should not be seen as 'decontextualised exotica' from the margins. At the second Conference in 1 996 wh ich was attended by 600 people - the largest art conference ever held in Australia - speakers again stressed the need for contin ued appreciation of long histories, cultural engagement over the centuries, and of present-day complexity and d iversity. There was a certain note of euphoria about the second APT, after the popular success of APT1 . It seemed then that it could safely be asserted that the continu ing Trienn ial project, 'sustained by the principles of engagement and enquiry', was 'noth ing less than a revolution in art history' . As I stated in my paper at that Conference, 'the narrow concl usions of western art h istorians are shattered by the reflection of a mirror which is increasingly seen to reflect, not an image of the West, but entirely different features'. In the almost ten years that the Asia­ Pacific Triennial has been in process of development, the world has changed dramatically. We have seen the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1 989, the end of the Soviet Union in 1 99 1 , and with in the region the passing of many leaders and a changing political, social and economic context. In the first Triennial , the Thai artists' work was a cry of anguish at the recent coup. In the third Triennial, Indonesia emerges as a fiery symbol . These issues have been reflected in the Asia-Pacific Triennial, and , looking back, we can see that our world was experiencing what John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, described last year in his work False Dawn as 'one of the moments of historical discontinu ity at which rul ing parad igms in policy and theory are abruptly abandoned'. At the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial Conference some doubt was expressed as to how such an historical process might be described . Kanaga Sabapathy noted the necessity of new ways of looking at the history and art writing histories of the reg ion . Hou Hanru argued a wal l could not exist around the region . He stated 'What we should consider a s the real challenge today is how to re-inscribe the post-colonial "text" in order to weave a new textuality' . But he noted as well that the future could be 'a prey of the central power's 'postmodern strategy' which 'turns everything into ephemeral fashions and hence cuts off the connection with cultural engagements in real life'. Furnia Nanjo reminded us that 'As with everything, art has to begin from reality and real ity is never simple'. Jim Supangkat pointed out that it was not true that 'Modernism outside the West' was j ust an adaptation of western modern ideology. And he proposed a future understanding of the modern art of this region based on a more sophisticated principle which he identifies as 'multimodernism' wh ich is Modern ism seen through plural ist principles . 2 1