The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

PAST AND FUTURE Asia’s newly connected middle classes confront anew a dilemma with a long history: how to reconcile modernity with tradition. These are the people who most eagerly embrace modernity in its three manifestations: the material, the social and the cultural. With material modernity come new forms of consumption, new comforts of existence and, most importantly, new forms of aspiration. Social modernity offers new freedoms, accepts greater individualism and requires lower thresholds to acceptance of others. Cultural modernity constructs new frameworks of meaning and stimulates more insistent ways of composing and consuming. But in the twenty-first century, modernity poses the same nagging question to Asian societies as it posed in the eighteenth century. Asian societies then, as now, saw modernity as something imposed from the outside. As Western modernity threatened to supersede their own material, social and cultural ways of life, Asian societies faced the agonising question about what this meant for the value of their own traditions. Was modernity so demanding and totalising because it was superior? Or could Asian societies find a way to salvage their pride in their own traditions? Their strategies were various. Some societies attempted partial modernisation, trying to either separate Western ways from their own traditions; accepting external modernisation while remaining internally traditional, convinced of the superiority of one’s own spiritual inheritance. 3 Others advocated outright rejection, believing that a return to the original purity of their traditions and beliefs would spark a rejuvenation that would allow them to throw off Westerners and their modernity. Yet others believed that only by learning Western ways could Asian societies regain their dignity and independence. The surge in Asian societies, and the confidence that comes with the surge, has remade these options. While fundamentalism still feeds off a revulsion to modernisation or the frustrations of those unable to access it, the automatic link between modernity and Westernism has dissolved. Asian societies now co-author modernity, with their own cultural takes on the present and future spilling back into Europe and America. Asian modernism is now avidly mining the art and symbolism of the past, building a powerful intellectual bridge over the colonial interlude, connecting pride in past greatness with pride in current achievement. Modernised tradition provides a sense of distinctiveness and continuity in a world of flattening flows and constant instantaneity. It provides frameworks for thinking about the future to cultures that do not share the West’s belief in steady, linear progress. But the updated past also brings with it nightmares: of rivalries revived, hierarchies asserted and resisted, prejudices emboldened. Asia’s burgeoning arms race, its unresolved disputes and militarised frontiers remind us that neither modernity nor tradition is necessarily rational. POLITICS Such rapid change in Asia’s societies cannot but have placed major strains on their politics. Asia’s increasingly connected urban middle classes are generating greater social demands and more insistent political participation in ways that are testing the flexibility and responsiveness of political institutions. Outbursts of resentment have flowed onto the streets in many of Asia’s biggest cities. Some reports count up to 300 000 civil disturbances in China every year. The struggle between the newly empowered and the entrenched elites virtually closed Bangkok down on repeated occasions between 2007 and 2009, and has resulted in large street protests in Malaysia. In India, mass support for anti-corruption hunger striker Anna Hazare has forced the national Parliament to rush through corruption legislation. As the pace of change increases, political systems will struggle to process social demands and the changes in values they face. The rise of the mobile internet has multiplied awareness and resentments among its mainly young, middle- class users. Once the power of governments was based on massive informational asymmetries; now these are vanishing as citizens are accessing information as easily as governments. Governments of all stripes have been forced to become more open, but perversely have become less and less trusted by their citizens. The Arab Spring showed that people who feel that they have missed out on the rapid economic development that they can see all around them can become a potent force for political ferment and change. In the Middle East, the internet and mobile phones have been used as instruments of liberation and perhaps democratisation. But in Asia, this may not be the case. The internet and mobile telephony have largely mapped onto the urbanising human landscape, sticking closely to entrenched topographies of demographic, cultural and economic pre-eminence, as well as existing patterns of trade, movement and finance. 4 In most of Asia’s emerging powers, internet users are predominantly young, highly educated, urban middle-class males, the main beneficiaries of the liberalising reforms that have brought dynamic growth to their countries. In a 64