The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

200 Building bridges: Ten years of Kids’ APT Andrew Clark This year we celebrate a decade of outstanding achievement through the children’s component of the Asia Pacific Triennial series — Kids’ APT. The inaugural Kids’ APT in 1999 marked a major breakthrough in children’s programming at the Gallery. For the first time, artists were invited to develop projects and art works especially for children (and the grown-ups who accompanied them), to be exhibited alongside and within the main exhibition as a hands-on component of APT. From its inception, the program attracted a great deal of attention — 150 000 people visited APT3 in 1999. Since then, Kids’ APT has grown exponentially, with each exhibition engaging the keen and curious interest of many of the exhibiting artists. In total, over 55 APT artists have been involved in Kids’ APT and the associated Summer Spectacular festival, which has helped to attract more than 1.1 million visitors to APT since 2002. 1 The first Kids’ APT in 1999 proved a revelation to all of us. The Gallery commissioned several major international artists, such as Xu Bing, to design activities for what was then considered a ‘niche’ audience. In those activities, children worked directly with the artists themselves or with trained facilitators. Without hesitation, these children committed both to the physical tasks and the meanings associated with them: they wrote their names with brush and ink in a brand new language; they relaxed (and communed with goldfish) in a structure meant to replicate the openness to nature of a Thai pavilion; and they watched one of the Gallery’s most expansive walls as it was gradually taken over by outlines of their own footprints, while they heard stories about how powerful that simple human image is in the religious lives of millions of people. Of course, the impulse to be active and involved, to engage firsthand with art works, is not confined to children. Since the beginning of the APT series in 1993, the appetite and aptitude of Gallery audiences for contemporary art have expanded in a way we welcome, but did not fully expect. Remarkably, from December 2006 to April 2007, more than 700 000 people attended APT5. A lot of intellectual, financial and creative resources were mobilised to achieve that outcome, and to ensure the exhibition was replete with potential for meaningful interaction. Over the years, we have found that visitors of all ages are fascinated by the processes underlying and informing an art work, by evidence that its making involves real labour, and that its production can be affected by all the constraints of a working life. Underpinning Kids’ APT are two core viewpoints — firstly, that contemporary artists’ ideas are an authentic and appealing means through which children can learn about art and its importance in the lives of millions of people around the world; and secondly, and perhaps most importantly, that the experience a child has in an art museum is as valid as that of any other visitor. Through Kids’ APT, children engage with the diverse cultures of the Asia Pacific region, encountering different beliefs and experiencing firsthand the manifold methods artists employ in art-making. Delivering a postcard to the top of futon mountain as part of Tsuyoshi Ozawa’s Everyone likes someone as you like someone for Kids’ APT 2006 / Photograph: John Gollings