The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

MAPPING CONTEMPORANEITY The missing subject is sometimes identified as the artist himself. Sui Jianguo's site-specific installation The relocation of the Central Academy of Fine Arts 1995 is arguably the best example of this type. The Central Academy of Fine Arts, China's number one art school during the past fifty years, was located near Wangfujing, the most famous commercial district in Beijing. In 1994, the school was informed that it had to move to a new location within a few months, because the city's government had sold (or 'rented') its campus to a Hong Kong real estate developer. There were some protest attempts by teachers and students, but before long the school's northern section, where the Department of Sculpture had its classrooms, was demolished. Sui Jianguo, an assistant professor in the department at the time, cleared and paved the ground of a non-existent classroom and arranged rows of chairs, a desk, and two bookcases filled with broken bricks. 'This is not a protest', he told me in an interview, 'because we are no longer there'. 5 Like Zhan Wang's work, the content of Sui Jianguo's installation is the absence or disappearance of the subject. Rong Rong's photograph has a related but different focus: he fills the vacancy and replaces the missing subject with images that originally decorated an interior, but which have now become the exterior. But the viewer is still clueless about the missing owner of the pin-ups, they are too superficial to help recognise any individuality; this is exactly why they were left behind. In other words, ruins in this and similar images do not register a specific past, nor are they associated with the present or future. What they help construct is a breakdown between private and public spaces. Ruins in Beijing are places that belong to everyone and to no-one. They belong to no-one because the breakdown between private and public space does not generate a new kind of space. Captured by artists, their images represent 'non-spaces' outside normal life. The breakdown of the conventional spatial dichotomy between private and public spheres is linked to the breakdown of a conventional temporal scheme. The contemporaneity of these ruin-related art projects should be distinguished from the concept of the present, conceived as an intermediary, transitional stage between the past and the future. As the subject of artistic representations, ruins break the logic of historical continuity, as time simply vanishes in these black holes. The past of these sites has been destroyed and no-one knows their future; they are simply identified as 'demolition sites'. Nalini Malani India b.1946 Remembering Toba Tek Singh 1998-99 20 min. video installation comprising 17 VCDs, 5 data projections, 12 television monitors, 12 tin trunks, blankets, sound Purchased 2000 Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant Collection: Queensland Art Gallery Nalini Malani Hieroglyphs, Lahar Chaw! (detail) 1990-91 Five books, each with series of photocopied collages on parchment and sunlit buff paper, acrylic, watercolour and ink, wooden stands 23 x 28 x 2cm each Collection: The artist The concept of demolition is deeply troubling, because it justifies destruction but does not guarantee construction. Demolition becomes distinction when a promised construction is never realised, or when an act of destruction is so enormous that no construction can ever justify the human sacrifice it has entailed. No single destruction in human history is more monstrous than the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. But the tragic event - the bomb wiped out almost an entire city and its population within a few minutes - has been rationalised as a victory of modern science, and democracy over autocracy and evil. Both the degree of violence and the effort to justify it have propelled artists around the world to expose the bombing's moral fallacy. Nalini Malani's video installation Remembering Toba Tek Singh 1998-99 (Queensland Art Gallery Collection) again takes the nuclear mushroom cloud of Hiroshima as a central figure. We can trace the suffering human images in this work back to her 1990-91 Hieroglyphs, Lahar Chaw/. Deeply interested in the phenomenon of shadow, she transforms these images in the video into animated figures undergoing gradual disintegration. Although the bombing of Hiroshima took place more than half a century ago, it resurfaces in our contemporary consciousness whenever the memory of it is brought back with new force. Like Song Dong's Breathing, Malani's Remembering Toba Tek Singh realises contemporaneity through rediscovering and refashioning memories: the work forces the viewer once again to face 'ground zero' - a traumatic moment when nothing is left from the past, and nothing is imaginable for the future. 23