The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

120 Mapping the Mekong The source In 2005, I received the Martell Contemporary Asian Art Research Grant through the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong. My project involved studying the relationship between economic development and civil society, and their combined influence on the development of contemporary art production in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), which includes the nations of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar (Burma), Thailand and Vietnam. Using the Mekong River as a metaphor for the flow and re-flow of arts knowledge, the project — entitled Mediating the Mekong — was intended to be a starting point not only for my personal investigation into emerging contemporary arts communities in South-East Asia, but also to provide a guide, if incomplete, for future curators, artists and scholars. 1 At the time of my initial research, the Japan Foundation had published two editions of the guidebook Alternatives: Contemporary Art Spaces in Asia , and Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar were unrepresented in both. 2 Much has changed in the few years since the publication of the last Alternatives guide in 2004, and Mediating the Mekong in 2006. The apparent art vacuum, then, has now been replaced with vibrant art communities, their programming and spaces increasingly well-organised. In August 2009, the Japan Foundation published an updated guide focusing exclusively on the Mekong region, with contributions from each of the GMS nations. GMS artists are more frequently represented now in international art exhibitions, fairs and galleries. Recently established spaces, such as the New Zero Art Space in Yangon (Rangoon), the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, and San Art in Ho Chi Minh City, continue to encourage and support local emerging arts communities. Downstream The Mekong River, one of Asia’s longest rivers at over 4000 kilometres, begins in the Tibetan plateau in China and ends in the southern deltas of Vietnam. Among the richest regions in the world in terms of biodiversity, the zone south of China has historically been a site of the complex interweaving of cultures, particularly in terms of its assimilation of, and resistance to, religious, political and cultural influences from India and China, spanning many centuries. As a distinct region, the Mekong is a construct in which definitions have largely been created for convenience or specific utility: Although the concept of ‘the Mekong’ as a region . . . appears everywhere in documents on development cooperation, the term requires critical analysis because many fundamental questions remain about what it connotes . . . More fundamentally, do the societies in the geographical area we refer to as the Mekong region possess any distinct cultural identity? 3 The Mekong region is often referred to through a variety of organisational frameworks including historic–cultural areas, sociolinguistic zones, and by the borders of the nations themselves. It has always been a shifting territory — an ebb and flow of conflict and cooperation, modernisation and preservation, exploitation and conservation. Each struggle can be found documented in the arts, whether in historical artefact or in the contemporary work featured in APT6. In APT6, The Mekong project features work by eight artists in the GMS, including internationally established, locally significant and emerging practitioners. It is also the first time that the APT will present works by artists from Cambodia and Myanmar. Looking back in order to move forward seems to be one element common to each of the works in The Mekong: from the use of traditional materials and references to historical figures and events, these artists have used their cultural and intellectual inheritance to apply individual interpretations to works that clearly and powerfully speak to a contemporary audience. The Mekong as a concept is one that we have looked at broadly. Akin to the Mekong River itself, life in this region is complex and changes quickly. Even since the last APT, in 2006, a world of change has occurred, fundamentally shifting the Mekong’s social, economic and cultural dynamics. Thailand seems to be at an internal political stalemate, while externally at loggerheads with Cambodia over contested land at Preah Vihear; 4 Myanmar has announced its first elections in over 20 years, despite the continued incarceration of Aung San Suu Kyi and 2007’s violent crackdown on public demonstrations; and while Vietnam continues toward its goal of integration into the global community, it remains firm in its domestic policy of cultural and political control. The artists in this project have confronted regional and global change — sometimes turbulent, often subtle — in terms of their individual connection to place by creating works that can be read, understood and appreciated by local communities and international audiences alike. Through the documentation of the everyday in the photography of Manit Sriwanichpoom and Vandy Rattana, we begin to appreciate the tensions beneath the image that are frequently obscured by stylised media representations — clichéd scenes of teeming global cities and grinding poverty on the one hand and, on the other, of charming rural life promoted by the nations themselves. In a way, the artists challenge representation itself. Artists and married couple Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu of Myanmar have chosen a unique strategy in their photographic series ‘Blurring the boundaries’; they speak about the process of creating work in an environment often hostile to the creative process. They have created a series of photographs of models for exhibitions that have yet to, and may never, be realised. The simulacrum reaches full maturity in that the models replace the need for physical space and become