The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

So, what is the APT? It is a recurrent exhibition of contemporary art that is defined by the geography of Asia and the Pacific, a sometimes nebulous geo-political construct with shifting borders and ethnicities, a network of contacts, a series of different curatorial models driven by a unique collaboration between an institution, curators and artists, and it is the catalyst for a groundbreaking collection. There are few other biennials and triennials that are actually lodged within an institutional framework. While this can be restricting on some levels, it also provides high-level, ongoing resources, bringing to the Triennial a range of professional creative skills. Architects, graphic designers, editors, educators and public programming experts, engineers and building workshop staff engage with specialist institutional curatorial knowledge across the visual arts, film and many aspects of the performing arts. This institutional underpinning has fostered a culture that involves the whole Gallery in the event. On the one hand, this provides an ongoing ethos of commitment and belief; on the other, it generates the space to question and argue, to develop new models, to look at contemporary art that is inside, outside, and elaborates on the normative Euro–American paradigms. The APT has explored, experimented with and developed several curatorial models. During the 1990s, the first decade of the Triennial, the Gallery recognised two key issues — both of which were shared by many in the non-Western world. First, there were few institutional structures in the region with the support systems or capacity to sustain an engagement with contemporary art and culture. Second, locally relevant theoretical and art-historical frameworks were often internally focused and ignored globally. The growing influence of Postmodernism, with its articulation of the death of the centre and the rise of the periphery, assisted in breaking down the hegemony of international styles and theories, allowing critical space for the voices that continue to chorus in each APT. With the APT, the Queensland Art Gallery initiated and facilitated significant platforms for on-the-ground collaborative network building by developing a model that was considered radical at the time. This model was framed around multiple voices and points of view located within the local artistic communities of all of the participating countries in the early Asia Pacific Triennials. Consequently, over this first decade we worked with a number of curators, academics, artists and advisors from within Australia and internationally. These early collaborators worked with Gallery curators to frame the art, the issues, the exhibition and our Collection. At the time, this model was keenly debated and often criticised. There were suggestions that the project would not be focused or coherent enough, framed by a lack of hierarchy and no single authorial artistic director. A collaborative model was important because we had to be cognisant of the diverse nature of politics, economics and artistic developments across the countries and cultures with which we engaged. We had to develop knowledge, understanding and relationships — in both directions. Our neighbours comprised many cultures, ethnicities, political systems, economies and histories — a single authorial voice was felt to be the wrong model for this engagement. The ongoing need for knowledge, curatorial expertise and access was only possible through collaboration. At that time in the early 1990s the field did not have the wealth of formal and informal platforms that have since developed. The challenge, then, was how to find our way to artists and the work they were doing, to curators working with these artists, to critics and writers thinking about their contemporary condition. In some countries and art forms, there were well-established art practices and very active curators who reasoned, persuaded and focused attention on the groundbreaking work taking place in Asia, Australia and the Pacific. 6 Many of these individuals continue to actively contribute to a number of international forums while developing local platforms. Collaborative models still persist in the development of the APT. The large country-based, co-curatorial model used in the 1990s APTs was replaced. In the new millennium, APTs have been driven by a team of in-house curators working together. Discrete curatorial projects, realised with external co-curators, are now structured under the umbrella of the larger exhibition. The culture of collaboration, within the institution and with others external to it, is an essential element and has ensured stability for the APT while providing a strong platform from which to build such a mutable project. Over time the APT has developed different iterations of this curatorial model. In 2002, for example, the APT selected four of the most internationally significant artists of the post-World War II period (Yayoi Kusama, TOMOKO KASHIKI Japan b.1982 Reverberatory furnace (detail) 2012 Synthetic polymer paint, linen on plywood / 227.4 x 145.4cm / Image courtesy: The artist and Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo 29