The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

of disconnection as the British bits of Asia became part of the British empire, the French slices part of the French empire, the Dutch with the Dutch empire and so on. When the empires broke apart, the Cold War’s ideological and strategic force-fields dragged Asia’s sub-regions in separate directions — North-East and South-East Asia towards North America, South and Central Asia towards the Soviet bloc, and the Middle East towards Europe and America. The last decade of the twentieth century saw the Cold War end and the tendrils of connection begin to re-establish. The dynamics of development in Asia’s big countries meant that for the first time in centuries, the economic exchanges among Asia’s societies were more important than their exchanges with non-Asian societies. Japan’s, Korea’s, China’s, Taiwan’s and India’s economic growth give them a thirst for energy that only the Middle East’s vast deposits can slake. For the Gulf sheikhdoms, Asia’s insatiable demand for oil allows them to plan a future built on royalties with which they can placate their subjects. In return for the energy, Asia’s industrial giants produce the manufactured goods fuelling a consumption revolution across Asia. People are a growing part of the tendrils of reconnection. Asia’s middle classes are exhibiting one of the classic markers of middle-class behaviour: holidaying. China’s outbound tourism grew by 212 per cent between 1999 and 2004; Korea’s by 187 per cent over the same period; India’s by 78 per cent between 2004 and 2009; Malaysia’s by 21 per cent between 1999 and 2008; and Thailand’s by 57 per cent between 1992 and 2001. The figures show an overwhelming proportion of Asian holiday makers travel within Asia, broadening their cultural horizons to encompass other Asian societies. These four trends — urbanisation, the rise of the middle class, mobile internet connectivity and reconnection of Asian societies — will shape relations within and among Asian societies, with powerful impacts on the rest of the world. Each introduces a powerful churn through societies, removing hundreds of millions of people from the small, traditional communities where they and their forebears lived, bringing them into contact with people they would never have seen or thought about previously. These contacts are both actual and virtual; they can be profoundly disorientating and unsettlingly exhilarating; they bring with them both liberation from the fatalism of circumstance and frustration at the boundaries that remain. AN-MY LÊ Vietnam/United States b.1960 Clearing trip wires, Indonesia (from ‘Events Ashore’ series, 2005–ongoing) 2010 Archival pigment inkjet print on 380gsm Harman Professional Inkjet paper mounted on sintra, ed. 2/5 / 101.6 x 143.5cm / The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 2011 with funds from Michael Sidney Myer through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery 63