The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Much of this commitment has fallen away, without even a cursory gesture towards the idea of culture in the region. In this sense, the current APT seems to be happening out of time, a revenant from another era. In this lonely context, the exhibition risks having to carry a burden of lost political and bureaucratic hopes, when of course it is not a political event or a diplomatic exercise but a speculative forum for imagination, creativity and ideas. Because the APT is the product of a public institution it is easily conflated with the idea of the nation itself; nevertheless, like Australia, the APT is composite, diverse and sometimes conflicted, full of both error and aspiration. Against this sense of untimeliness, one may plot the slow-time of the Queensland Art Gallery's development of a major collection of contemporary Pacific and Asian art, providing a wider and wiser perspective beyond the moral panic of the moment. Although it originated in self-interrogation amidst doubts about its authority, the APT is now an expected, even celebrated, chapter in the international art calendar. This APT is happening in a time riven by contradictions, in which it seems difficult to say anything with certainty about Australia or its place in the world. Since the last Triennial in 1999, Australians have shown their best and their worst: a great sense of imagination and hospitality in the staging of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games; tremendous courage and camaraderie in the troops of volunteers who quashed the bushfires which raged in New South Wales around Christmas 2001; and the optimism of the hundreds of thousands of people who marched in support of reconciliation . 2 At the same time, in the same mirror, we see the reflection of a hard-hearted people, suspicious and xenophobic. The central and most confronting issue has been that of racism, and the slow realisation, to those who disavowed it, that rather than being buried with the White Australia policy it is a quite ordinary part of Australian life. 3 As the last year has taught us, everything can change in an instant. Like the fleeting mask of the tragi– comedienne, the face of Australia vacillates between abjection and celebration, cruelty and generosity.The challenge lies in discussing this confusion constructively, without the dead hand of theory or the hyperbole of political prejudice. In order to think about these ideas, I invited Nikos Papastergiadis, Hetti Perkins and Brian Castro to participate in a discussion by email - in itself an interesting exercise not only in the pitfalls and blind spots of cross-cultural exchange but in the cracks and crevices of any kind of conversation. 114 APT2002 Sally Morgan Australia b.1951 Taken away from 'The Bicentennial folio' 1987 Screenprint on Arches 88 paper Purchased 1989 Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery Hannah Let's begin by asking what it means to be staging an Asia-Pacific Triennial now - when it seems there is no public discourse for it to attach to, or at least in a climate so very different from the one in which the project originated. The very words Asia-Pacific' seem clunky, somehow dated - belonging to a treatise that has been superseded. While the APT has evolved since its inception in 1993, and carries its own cultural memory, the circumstances in which the 2002 event is being staged can only be described as retrogressive. In other words, the political and cultural context that enabled the APT no longer exists. So many of the things that seemed inevitable or self-evident - the principles of multiculturalism, the possibility of reconciliation with Indigenous Australia, even the idea of Australia as an intelligent nation - are now in question. Brian One of the things I've always asked myself is why people speak of the Asia-Pacific' from an Australian standpoint, as if Australia was the centre of this world, which it isn't. The question would be less brutal if Australia had not absented itself from the region, which it seems to have done over the last half-dozen years. Australia's image has been remade into a more homogeneous, white, lower-middle-class entity, and other cultures are seen as composite, diverse and sometimes conflicted. I think another question might be 'Where is the Asia-Pacific?' Isn't it just another funny foreign place? Do people from Korea and Malaysia think of themselves as Asian– Pacific? In all my years living in Hong Kong, I have yet to meet a Chinese person who refers to himself or herself as Asian'.