The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

An archive is generally understood as a repository for conserving specifics about the world, a tool for locating the present, which, in time, becomes an integral way of reconstructing and interpreting the past. Recognising the potential wealth of information therein, Singaporean artist Heman Chong has made the Australian Centre of Asia Pacific Art (ACAPA) archive the medium for his APT7 installation Asia / Pacific / Triennial 2012. ACAPA was established in 2002 as a research arm of the Queensland Art Gallery to host professional exchanges and public events, and preserve the scholarship amassed through the Gallery’s engagement with Asian and Pacific contemporary art. Teasing out descriptive elements from publications catalogued and preserved in the ACAPA archive, held in the QAGOMA Research Library, Chong has sought to test, reinvent and activate the considerable store of insights into the last 20 years of contemporary art practice across the region in an installation that is both reflective and fertile. Chong’s experiment first required that Gallery staff photocopy and forward excerpts of the archive to the artist, their selections guided by personal attachment and professional engagement with the content. This abridgment reduced thousands of publications into a workable volume, and — imitating the very processes that museums follow in collecting and interpreting — served to humanise the stream of information by constructing a particular perspective and understanding via inclusion and omission. Chong then radically condensed the archive, selecting thousands of single words and short phrases, thereby freeing the rudimentary elements from their source structures. These words and phrases have been collated to form 1000 passages comprising a script to be read aloud. As the artist explains, there are multiple consequences and concerns resident within this process: In picturing the archive, uncertainties for the artist begin to emerge. How does one position one’s own practice in the face of these histories? What kind of negotiations can one take in order to start to make sense of the archive? Who then legitimises these strategies and acts of engaging with the archive? 1 The raw elements were subsequently recorded by popular Singaporean stage and television actor Janice Koh. 2 Reconstructed to form a complex soundscape, the fragments of text are played across a suite of 20 speakers in sets of 50 verses. None of the tracks are synchronised, effectively ensuring the work forms a free arrangement in which new combinations continually yield new meanings. The fluidity of this study demonstrates and aggravates Chong’s anxieties relating to the role of the artist and their relative context, acceding the creation of meaning to the chance encounter and the audience’s own associations. Asia / Pacific / Triennial and its fragments of history explore new sets of allusions and become contemporary all over again. This generative composition is housed in a purpose-built space located outside the entrance to the Gallery’s Research Library — Asia / Pacific / Triennial is therefore an antechamber for its source. The entrance to both spaces is a rupture, or tear, in the plasterboard sheeting, boldly defined by an internal red light that signals a presence from a distance. Making potent associations with emergency beacons, safelight darkroom photography, a sky lit by fire or rampant street lighting, the red glow announces the activity therein as a dialectical event of creation and destruction. This dramatic scene plays out against ideas of institutional stability and authority, and recasts the archive as something plastic, like the viscous mantle of rock made liquid by heat and pressure, or transformative, like a power station converting raw materials into energy. The later notion compelled the work of German artist Joseph Beuys, who believed: If you want to express yourself you must present something tangible. But after a while this has only the function of a historic document. Objects aren’t very important any more. I want to get to the origin of matter, to the thought behind it. 3 Chong’s attunement to the ‘the origin of matter’, however, is perhaps more in line with science fiction themes, a deep and ongoing interest for the artist. His work Calendars (2020-2096) 2004–10 was a speculative projection into the future, consisting of 1001 photographs of empty public spaces in Singapore, which were printed with calendar boxes below each image and exhibited en masse in a non-chronological order. Time — ordered, gridded and given ample space to unfold — was coupled with dry, nondescript imagery suggesting limitations to the degree of viable change. The emptiness portrayed in each image also hinted at a forthcoming and, in all likelihood, man-made disaster that has removed life from the ‘future’ equation. Heman Chong’s Asia / Pacific / Triennial is a stratagem for the generation of new understandings. Like a cinematic climax, the history of the APT is projected from a radiant core, to be redrawn in the present. Abstracted, detached and fluctuating in form, the installation voices many possibilities and stimulates a sense of possibility. The work represents and becomes an active, productive space in which intellectual and emotional trajectories intersect to describe, affirm and embody its historical source, all the time pointing towards a radical future taking form within the institution, the event, the artist and, of course, the audience. Peter McKay 1 Heman Chong, email to the author, 20 August 2012. 2 Janice Koh is an appointed Nominated Member of Parliament (NMP) in Singapore, selected by the President based on her achievements in the arts to contribute an independent view. This variation on the Westminster system, embodied by Koh’s presence, strengthens the work’s agenda for reinvention. 3 Joseph Beuys, interviewed by Willoughby Sharp, in Carin Kuoni (ed.), Energy Plan for the Western Man: Joseph Beuys in America , Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, 1993, p.85. HEMAN CHONG Institution, event, artist and audience 256