The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

58 The world and the studio Russell Storer To make their ‘Blurring the Boundaries’ series, Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu transposed a set of exhibitions into their studio, and then sent them out into an exhibition again. In other words, they carefully constructed tiny exhibition models to house their paintings, video works and installations, photographed them, and now present them in the Asia Pacific Triennial as a sequence of digital prints. A complex network of objects and images is formed in which the original, the copy, the real and the fictive have become utterly entangled. Further complicating matters, some of the models contain little versions of Wah Nu’s works, others feature Tun Win Aung’s — yet the creative process is a collaborative one, and the work is attributed accordingly. On close viewing, what might appear to be a hermetic, relatively modest project begins to speak volumes about the nature of making and exhibiting art. Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu live and work in Yangon (Rangoon) in Myanmar, which, as the artist and curator Chu Chu Yuan has written, is: . . . a country where if one is not interested to produce the kind of art that is saleable in the galleries in Myanmar, then there is little other possibilities except to make art for oneself, or for one’s partner; rare as it is to find alternative support structures for art or to be able to express the sense of connections between art and society. 1 In an environment in which access to information, audiences and other artists can be seriously limited, the dialogue the artists have with each other is essential. Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu’s immaculate models can be read as proposals for the kind of public discourse for art that a gallery exhibition offers. These exhibitions may never be realised in real space, but are made available to those visiting the artists’ studio, and now to audiences in Brisbane via photographs. In most societies, art-making has traditionally been a group undertaking, from artisanal communities to guilds and formal studios. Artists all over the world often band together when a need is felt, to create support structures and opportunities for themselves and for others. These can be thought of as spaces, both physical and conceptual, for making, discussing and exhibiting art. Some early forms of critical collaboration were avant-garde collectives and societies in Europe, established in opposition to existing forms of artistic production and circulation. The conservative salons of late nineteenth-century Paris and Vienna gave rise to Gustave Courbet’s Fédération des artistes and Gustav Klimt’s Vienna Secession, which organised their own exhibitions to advance the cause of artistic innovation. The early twentieth century Avant-garde is synonymous with artist groups formed to challenge art and society — the dadaists, constructivists, futurists, surrealists, and De Stijl, for example. Collective practice responds to specific conditions, and has often been evoked at times of great political upheaval, with groups able to achieve more than individuals in mobilising change. From the Charwei Tsai Taiwan b.1980 Earth mantra 2009 Performance, Taipei, Taiwan 2009 / Image courtesy: The artist