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

myself to d iscuss our playful plunder (through purchase) of the two red Hua Biao decorated pillars that now stand outside the Gallery. Of course, ours is a most direct commerce in signs. The result is what many would call a 'visual gag', but I would like to think that the Hua Biao are more like a 'sight bite' rather than simply being a 'sight gag'. I would argue that a 'sight bite' exists in relation to the 'sound bite', those snappy yet magisterial one liners exuded by all manner of pundit on a designer topic of current affairs that are so beloved of the mass media. The sound bite is a sl ight-of-hand statement of moment with but ephemeral significance. The sound bite is, above all, favoured .. by those who crave to have the last word first. To my m ind therefore the artistic 'sight bite' is like a mannered visual gag, a superficial hint at profundity in which the surface is the full measure of a work's depth . For those of you who want to investigate the weighty import of the Hua Biao, of course, you will d iscover that in it lingers a plangent history of frustrated expression , nagging doubt, warning, awareness and alertness . But what is the future of wh ich we want to talk about, edge past or transgress against? It is not I suggest some cliche thought up in a fit of fin-de-siecle ennui and boredom . The future that many have imagined or still imagine is one in wh ich there is an end of history itself. It is a future that is proffered as being a utopic realm of market democracy and freewheeling capital , unfettered consumption, collapsed boundaries and joyful border crossings. It is a future in which, to quote a friend, we will finally all be able to be different in exactly the same way. Perhaps a future then of faux plurality, disingenuous hybridity and legislated heterogeneity. In other words, it is a future that we have in many ways and in many guises clearly met in the past. Many of us have seen that future, one propelled by a Promethean energy in a linear trajectory of pre-ordained and uncontestable change. Many of us know that all roads have forked paths. For many it is already a future of failed promise, a global-sized myth often with sobering and painful local ramifications for those who are not true bel ievers. The Hua Biao that stand as sentinels outside the Queensland Art Gallery today are what I would call a comic exclamation mark, one with a Cherry Ripe-coloured Chiko Roll effect. But the Hua Biao in Beijing are no jokey 'toon, they are a marble construct positioned outside Tiananmen Gate, a frustrated and repressed symbol of sign ificance, one that used to mark the need to express freely d ivergent opinions, one long ago overcome by imperial afflatus. Perhaps our Hua Biao loom at the entrance of the APT as a self-deprecating, though undoubtedly inflated , signal , a warning to us all that it is too easy to assume imperial pretensions. After all the Hua Biao in Beij ing stand outside an imperial city where emperors held court for some eight hundred years . These Hua Biao stand outside a gallery that locates itself within a realm of value-creation, perhaps there is even a little imperial pretension as it seeks a privileged position on the peripheries of the grand cultural empires of Euro-America and East Asia. Australia itself allows for the creation of spaces that can be both liberating and limiting, freeing creativity from one set of protocols while seducing the creative with another. Perhaps then the Hua Biao should be taken as standing there as a breezy warning that whomsoever would gaze out to encompass 'all under heaven' should remain m indful that there is a lot they are missing . Ours is a cartoon exclamation that pricks at the pretensions of its own sign. Mikhail N. Epstein, After the Future: the Paradoxes ofPostmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture, translated by Anesa Miller-Pogacar (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1 995), p.xi . 2 These paragraphs are a modified version of some material that appeared in my introduction to China Beyond the Headlines, ed ited by Timothy B. Weston and Lionel M. Jensen (Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) 3 Epstein, Beyond the Future, p.30 1 et passim . 27 1