The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

FORKING TONGUES Hannah Fink in email conversation with Brian Castro, Hetti Perkins and Nikos Papastergiadis on the occasion of the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 2002, March 2002 It is no small irony that the de facto Australian national anthem, 'I Still Call Australia Home', is a song about expatriation - a song about being Australian elsewhere, a virtual Australian, an Australian in mind only. In many ways Australia has always been a virtual nation, from its ancient imagining in terms of Tjukurrpa, or Dreaming, or as a seventeenth-century utopia of hermaphrodites. 1 The Australian identity is a perennial topic in our literature, a subject mostly posed as a question mark, something that is negligible, unmade as easily as it is made up - part of the eternally adolescent Australia who travels abroad to find herself, and has yet to decide who she will be when she grows up.This Australia is protean, self-creating and limitless - an imaginary that might well disappear into thin air, becoming, in the indelible words of Manning Clark, 'a Kingdom of Nothingness'. The problem with such prevarication is that she may well wake up one day to discover that through indecision she has become fat, myopic and middle-aged. The position of Australian art in the Asia-Pacific Triennial has always been indeterminate, and a little arbitrary. Where the selection criteria for other nations has been more circumscribed, the Australian component has had shifting requisites - one year to demonstrate multiculturalism, another to give a wider platform to regional artists, yet another in response to criticisms of the kinds of Indigenous art previously represented. Like Australia itself, the foundations for the Australian representation rest on shifting sands. This is, in many ways, because Australia is the odd one out. Australia is not an Asian nation; but is Asian and Pacific in intricate and complex ways. Brian Castro has pointed out elsewhere that the letters that spell Asia' are found in the word Australia and, as the histories of Kanak, Chinese and Afghan Australians testify, Australia has a relatively deep Asian past for a nation with such a shallow history. Australia is perhaps more easily defined as a Pacific nation, not least because like many of the nations of that Ocean it is a country of indigenous peoples.There are shared histories of colonisation and, in terms of art, of deflected modernisms (with particularly striking parallels with twentieth-century Indian art); but outside this, probably the most obvious thing that Australian, Asian and Pacific contemporary art have in common - with occasional outstanding exceptions - is obscurity. In order to see contemporary Australian art in a global context it has been necessary to stage exhibitions of international art in Australia. In this sense, the APT is as much an exercise in self-realisation as an attempt to inhabit other kinds of cultural meaning. 112 APT2002 September 25, 2000 Cathy Freeman of Australia celebrates winning Gold in the 400m at the Olympic Stadium on day 10 of the Sydney Olympic Games Photograph: Mike Powell, Allsport So much - and so little - has changed since the Triennial was launched in 1993. Although well-rehearsed, the history bears repeating. Paul Keating had been in office for a little over a year and a half, and had less than three years to serve as Prime Minister. The lynchpin of Keating's foreign policy was the process of engagement with Asia. As an expression of this, 50 per cent of the funding provided by the principal government arts body, the Australia Council, was dedicated to projects that involved Asia. Many were sceptical that the focus on art was a gloss on the real ambition, which was the promotion of trade, but the results were indisputable. Fostered by the establishment and activities of organisations such as Asialink and the Asia-Australia Institute, and by public art galleries such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and the Queensland Art Gallery, the effect was an extraordinary efflorescence of cultural exchange between Australia and the many nations of Asia and the Pacific, and the incipient development of a regional community of artists, scholars and intellectuals. Simryn Gill Malaysia b.1959 Forking tongues (details) 1992 Assorted cutlery with dried chillies Purchased 2001 Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery