The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

I’m drawn to the way that MAP Office explores the conditions of where you live through humour and imagination. How has living and working in Hong Kong over the past 16 years influenced your work? Hong Kong is a very special city/territory. It concentrates all the ingredients of the perfect place to live and work. First, its complex geography has produced a unique form of urban density from where one can escape into the jungle or the beach in no time. It also functions as a network of villages where local culture and values still have a true meaning. Finally, it is at the centre of our exploration of Asia, and one of the few well-connected global hubs facilitating travel and efficiency. Your work in APT7 is connected with a residency you undertook at the Asia Art Archive (AAA) in Hong Kong from February to July 2012. Our residency was a unique opportunity to produce a new work. We started with a total immersion in the archive for the first few months and explored the collection as a new territory. In this sense, what we observed at the AAA is very much in line with the organic growth of the city, with its general and special collections, alleys of books, open platforms and public activities. The online component of the archive is now an essential element, available for all from anywhere, at any time. So, as an extension of the physical exhibition, we designed the Atlas website <www.aaa.org.hk/atlas >. I’m particularly interested in how you came to the idea of the Atlas of Asia Art Archive 2012, and your process for developing the various ‘territories’ via contemporary artists. Our process was essentially to work with books and texts about contemporary artists. The Atlas , which focuses on 111 artists, has no images, only words and drawings connecting a work to another, reassembled in 12 categories. One logic was to read each art work as a new territory; not to write a description or a critique but to construct an extended narrative based on the category we made each belong to. Discussion and exchange became a fundamental direction that we explored following the residency, starting with a two-day series of discussions, readings and performances with eight artists in October 2012 in Hong Kong. How do you think the Atlas might extend to the Pacific and Australia? We consider the Pacific Islands and Australia as an evident extension of Asia. The liquid element — Asia as an archipelago — partly shares the same waters. We saw an installation and lecture by Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan in Sydney a few years ago and found their approach as a ‘family on the move’ very interesting. The Atlas also presents Dinh Q Lê’s Erasure 2010 and Guan Wei’s Dow Island 2002, both addressing issues surrounding refugees and the politics of migration through Australia. New Zealand-born, Hong Kong-based Yuk King Tan’s portraits of a group of Chinese workers in the Cook Islands address new economic and cultural boundaries between the two countries. Finally, Simryn Gill’s Inland 2009, a photographic survey along a road trip from Northern New South Wales to South Australia, balances the large collection of islands comprised in the Atlas. You state that the Atlas is ‘a new categorisation of the region, charting artists and the territories they invent, use, appropriate, and transform much like Jorge Luis Borges’s reference to the ancient Chinese encyclopedia Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge .’ Could you share how you blur fact and fiction, using Borges’s example? We started the residency with the dual reference of Borges on territories and his system of classification. The map — as big as the territory — and the Chinese Encyclopedia gave us an initial framework to work with. Then, we slowly moved towards the specifics of cartography and relational geography as a principle, working with a Patrick Geddes ‘thinking machine’, which could be considered a survey tool for understanding complex entities, navigational charts such as Portolan charts and more recently Édouard Glissant’s poetics of relation on migration, diversity and difference. 1 As a result, the Atlas is a platform in which one can start to question and recognise the logic of cultural production within a definition of a territorial entity. On the relation between facts and fictions, we started to understand that the very thin line between one and the other is constantly fluctuating and mainly depends on various levels of interpretation. We somehow need the fiction to better evaluate and understand the reality in which we live. That is why atlases and maps are the first tools for beginning a new journey. Interviewed by Donna McColm, August 2012. 1. MAP Office commenced their research with the sociologist, biologist and town planner Sir Patrick Geddes in mind. They suggest that ‘a survey of the archive started first from the physical place and its spatial dimension; then, its content extended to the artistic narrative constructed by various art practices; and finally the temporal accumulation of the archive and the cultural strategy covered by the collection. In a similar approach to Geddes, in his understanding of characteristics and complex relationships between cities and territories, the result of this initial mapping positioned artwork and artistic practices at the centres of the organisation and therefore became the focus for approaching ‘Asia’, ‘Art’, and ‘Archive’ and, furthermore, artists’ territories . . . Like the pieces of a puzzle, the atlas works on the relational geography where no territory could exist without those surrounding it. They work as a network of territories connected by the complex system of portolan . This navigational measure using the compass and triangulation, originally developed in the thirteenth century around the Mediterranean Sea, uses the relational logic for defining the contours of a specific geography. (MAP Office, email to the author, 10 September 2012.) MAP OFFICE An interview 260