The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

digital effects makes a large part of film production today a form of animation, while, at the same time, the action represented generally aims for extreme realism. In terms of small-budget film, a good example of the intertwining of realism and artifice in visual style is found in documentary film’s increasing use of animation in combination with live action, re-enactment and archival footage. The fusion of the artificial and the real allows filmmakers to create a heightened experience of events so that invention and observation may work together — perhaps engaging with a particular historical and social context, but bringing aesthetic and philosophical dimensions to bear. Animation as a cinematic form remains close to the hand of the artist, but also participates in the interpretive recording of things in the world. Chen Shaoxiong has created five short animations since 2005 based on ink wash paintings that are copies of digital photographs taken by the artist or found on the internet. Ink Things 2007 is made up of paintings of objects in the artist’s world, which function to solidify them in memory, while also omitting superfluous details found in the original photographs. In the resulting animated catalogue, Chen points to the links between personal things and identity and asks ‘what are the connections and relationships among a passport, a water faucet and an art magazine?’. 11 His most recent ink animation, Ink History 2010 brings together paintings based on found internet images of China’s modern history that ‘function as key points of reference in the collective consciousness’. 12 The work raises questions about how we look at fragmentary historical materials, how they relate to everyday events, and what has been left out and lost to memory. Qiu Anxiong is another artist represented in Mountains and Waters who engages with the longstanding artistic tradition of ink wash painting in order to reflect on contemporary life and the dark side of modernisation. In handmade animation, each thing is painstakingly recreated and configured with others in what constitutes more an atlas of the everyday than an archive, where an atlas is conceived as an arrangement of related images. Such an atlas, rather than deriving from a precisely defined area of knowledge, is more associative, relying on patterns of thought or visual logic. Where an archive suggests gradual accumulation according to predetermined parameters — what has been called the ‘dynamic of gathering and suspension proper to the archival function’ 13 — the figure of the atlas suggests montage, that is, meaning created through careful juxtaposition. The atlas brings us back to the museum and the experience of a precisely arranged montage of works. 14 Pamuk points out that the archive evokes the complex web of words and gestures surrounding objects which is not preserved in the museum; the atlas, on the other hand, suggests a pared back attention to things in themselves. Both figures productively transform our sense of how films gather together, configure and hold suspended within them elements of the everyday. 1 Change is curated by José Da Silva, Senior Curator, Australian Cinémathèque. 2 Orhan Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures , Penguin Group Australia, Melbourne, 2011, p.130. 3 Pamuk, p.130. 4 Pamuk, p.130. 5 Jonathan Eburne, ‘Breton’s wall, Carrington’s kitchen: Surrealism and the archive’, Intermédialités: Histoires et Théorie des Arts, des Lettres et des Techniques , Special issue: Archiver/Archiving, no.18, 2011, p.17. 6 Pamuk, p.145. 7 Michel Ciment, The State of Cinema , 46th San Francisco International Film Festival, San Francisco, 2003, see <http://web.archive.org/ web/20040325130014/http: /www.sfiff.org/fest03/special/state. html>, viewed 4 September 2012. 8 Tilman Baumgärtel, ‘Lav Diaz: “Digital is liberation theology”’, see <http://www.greencine.com/central/lavdiaz> , viewed 7 September 2007. 9 See ‘Interview with Apichatpong Weerasethakul by Kent Lambert’, Mysterious Object at Noon , Plexifilm DVD, New York, 2003. 10 See Sam Adams, ‘Interview: Apichatpong Weerasethakul’, AV Club , 2011, <http://www.avclub.com/articles/apichatpong- weerasethakul,52635/>, viewed September 10, 2012. 11 See ‘ Ink Things statement’, Chen Shaoxiong , <http://www. chenshaoxiong.net/?p=1024 >, viewed 6 September 2012. 12 See ' Ink History statement', Chen Shaoxiong , <http://www. chenshaoxiong.net/?p=225> , viewed 6 September 2012. 13 Eburne, p.43. 14 See Georges Didi-Huberman, Atlas: How to Carry the World on One’s Back [exhibition catalogue], Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2010. QIU ANXIONG China b.1972 Production stills from Temptation of the land 2009 / AVI file, digital hand-painted animation, black and white, stereo, 13:24 minutes, China / Images courtesy: The artist 57