The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

MAPPING CONTEMPORANEITY Heri Dono Indonesia b.1960 The chair 1993 Performance, September 1993 The First Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery MAPPING CONTEMPORANEITY IN CONTEMPORARY ASIAN ART Monument and ruin are antithetical - one is supposed to last forever while the other sign ifies continuous decay. A work of contemporary art acquires contemporaneity by defying the farmer's immortality and by transforming the latter into representation. Monument and ruin as spatial signs are also imbued with temporality, as both are linked with historical events and evoke memories. Furthermore, monument and ruin are both connected with people's collective and individual identities, w hich are constructed and contested around these sites of history and memory. In this way, these two types of architecture provide a nexus of space, time and identity, revealing a conceptual triangle that underlies any construction of contemporaneity in art. This conceptual triangle supplies a grid for mapping contemporaneity in contemporary Asian art, a critical endeavour that can be exercised on different levels and on different scales. Numerous works of art reflect on globalisation, a phenomenon that concerns not only geopolitics but also histories, memories and identities. Globalisation has different meanings and impacts for different countries, even in the Asian region . For many Chinese artists who have witnessed the end of the Cold War but still find themselves subject to a Cold War mentality, globalisation is often perceived through the relationship between 'East and West'. This relationship offers them a powerful paradigm to relate their work to global problems, as their thinking about this relationship is deeply connected to all aspects of their art - medium, image, style - and also to their personal lives and political outlooks. Some of the most powerful works of contemporary Chinese art are the result of such intense thinking and experimentations. Two representative artists in this tradition are Xu Bing and Cai Guo Oiang . Xu has invented a type of English writing that can be practised as oriental calligraphy - a perfect fusion of different cultural heritages. Cai's installation Cry dragon/Cry wolf: The ark of Genghis Khan 1996 alludes to Western paranoia about the 'yellow peril '. On a more abstract level, commonsensical temporality and geography is contested . Nam June Paik's TV clock 1963/1989, for example, consists of eighteen televisions in a half-circle, each showing the moving hands of a clock. The mismatch between the television-turned-choreographers and the hourly divisions of a day generates confusion, subtly subverting the received standard of temporal measurement. If Paik bestows the television set with a particular subjectivity in his many installations, Michael Ming Hong Lin's bold floral patterns are dematerialised, pervasive images freely traversing the walls and ceilings of any interior space. Retaining a strong folk look and flavour, these patterns increase their visual impact when they transform a Rococo palace or a modern exhibition hall into a new, hybrid appearance. Not only images, but art materials themselves can also signify identity. To Heri Dono, for example, multimedia art has a different meaning in the East than in the West: Artists [in Europe and America] are exploring multi-media and computer technology. Multi-media in Asian art means something different. At Cities on the Move in Helsinki, I used a toybox powered by a flame, and also the machine with the slides in the mannequin, using a Chinese alarm clock for its mechanical system. This is the kind of multi-media in Asian countries. 6 On a more specific level, some Asian artists define the contemporaneity of their art in relation to the rapid transformation of the city: the city is contemporary and constantly challenges them towards reinvention . With its urban ruins as well as its new skyscrapers, the city attracts artists whose ambition and superficiality stimulates escalated novelty in visual representation. There are also artists who determine to act locally against any form of colonial and imperial dominance. Tsang Tsou-Choi, otherwise known as the 'King of Kowloon', has continued inscribing calligraphic graffiti in Hong Kong's public spaces since China took over in 1997, only altering his sites from Victoria Park to the Ban k of China. While Tsang's graffiti reveals contemporaneity through their changing locations, Desmond Kum Chi-keung's Transition space 1995 questions the meaning of Hong Kong's changing political identity. As David Clarke observes: [here] the handover itself was addressed, in straightforwardly allegorical terms. Mechanical birds are represented as moving from one cage to another identical one, a clear comment on the absence of any independence for Hong Kong at the end of its colonial era.' 25