The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

WEDHAR RIYADI Indonesia b.1980 Noise from the Fertile Land no.4 2012 Oil on canvas / 250 x 180cm / Purchased 2012. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / Image courtesy: The artist and Ark Galerie, Jakarta PREVIOUS PAGES DAYANITA SINGH India b.1961 Go Away Closer 6 2001 Gelatin silver print / 96 x 96cm Sybil and Sunanda (from ‘ Privacy/Ladies of Calcutta ’ series) 1997 Pigment print / 46 x 46cm / Images courtesy: The artist and Nature Morte, New Delhi The 20 years that form the last decade of one century and the first decade of the next are seedbeds of political, economic and social forces that shape the world. Three epochal forces that define our world became manifest between 1790 and 1810: an Industrial Revolution, a democratic revolution and the birth of independence of the new world in the Americas. Between 1890 and 1910 they were joined by three more: mass consumerism, mass political action and mass communications. Between 1990 and 2010 there occurred, astonishingly quickly, one massive change: the surge of Asian societies into the front ranks of global wealth, power and dynamism. This was the result of the reversal of the ‘great divergence’ brought about by the Industrial Revolution. Until the 1790s, a society’s contribution to global productivity was approximately equal to their proportion of the global population. Then, as Europe discovered how to use inanimate power and science to increase production, there occurred a great divergence between productivity and population. By 1975, Europe and its offshoots in the Americas and the Antipodes, with less than one-quarter of world population, were responsible for almost three-quarters of world production. China, with nearly one-quarter of humanity, produced less than one-twentieth of global output in 1975. The divergence between productivity and population drove 200 years of history: a dramatic surge in Europe’s and America’s wealth; the massive expansion in their destructive power; the abrupt imposition of their dominion over most of the rest of humanity; and a never-before-seen gulf between the rich and the poor. So relentless were the forces unleashed in the 1790s that by the 1970s, the productivity-wealth-power gap came to be seen as inevitable, inexorable, irreversible. But it wasn’t. As the millennium approached its end, the productivity and dynamism of Europe and America began to fall, even as it surged in the peninsular and insular societies on Asia’s eastern coasts: Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore. Then at century’s end, while Europe and America were distracted by their own unexpected boom and Asia’s sudden plunge, the surge made its way inland to Asia’s sleeping giants. First China, then India, each with a population larger than any of the earth’s continents other than Asia, began to register faster growth rates than ever seen before. Other countries followed: Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand. The great divergence was narrowing quickly, and Asian countries were starting to elbow European countries out of the world’s largest economy rankings. By the end of the first decade of the new millennium, a world in which population and production are again in proportion was entirely imaginable. The transcentury convergence — the reversal of two centuries’ divergence in just 20 years — is a profound and important rebalancing that will define the rest of this century and beyond. But just how it will define the coming decades will depend on four interrelated transcentury trends: urbanisation, the rise of the middle class, mobile internet connectivity, and the reconnection of Asian societies. Each of these trends will have a marked impact on how Asia’s societies define themselves and their place in the world. ASIA’S URBANISATION The Industrial Revolution drove a profound social re-ordering in societies that embraced it. The concentration of economic activity, an escalating demand for labour, and an eclipse of agrarian and artisan production, created cities with powerful gravitational pulls. As they got larger, so did their gravitational fields. The world had never seen concentrations of people such as this and modern cities gave birth to new politics, new economics and new societies. Asian societies have followed this path as the great convergence makes its way westwards. Rapid urbanisation has been a constituent part of the industrialisation of societies; the correlation between urbanisation and economic growth is inevitable. The urban population of China, which has seen the most sustained economic growth, has leapt from just over a quarter of its people in 1990 to just under one-half today. Over the same period, Indonesia’s urban population has grown from 30 per cent to 44 per cent; Malaysia’s from 50 per cent to 72 per cent; and India’s from 25 per cent to 30 per cent. TRANSCENTURY MICHAEL WESLEY 60