The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

FIELD AND STREAM: THE TERRAIN OF CONTEMPORARY ASIAN ART JOAN KEE One of the most important developments in contemporary art since the early 1990s is its acknowledgement from East, South-East, and South Asia by institutions and markets both within and outside these areas. Efforts to historicise such art tend to emphasise its visibility in exhibitions organised in western Europe and the US; witness, for instance, the frequency with which a country’s participation in the Venice Biennale is cited as a major milestone in its history of contemporary art, or the voluminous references to ‘Magiciens de la Terre’, the mammoth 1989 exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Parc de la Villette in Paris that attempted to present non-Western art on par with its Western counterparts. Yet the visibility of contemporary Asian art owes much more to the formation of a distinct contemporary Asian art discourse. Such discourse extends beyond oppositional models of West versus non-West, or even to the renewed prominence of certain nation-states in a world order based on the untrammelled flows of economic capital. Rather, it turns on multiple streams of action and belief, a brief identification of which might help us navigate its vast and rugged terrain. Consider, as a matter of course, the deployment of culture as a significant political instrument during the Cold War, particularly in the 1950s and 60s. Following the end of World War II, numerous artists and galleries were directly supported by US institutions and individuals eager to secure East and South-East Asia from Communist encroachment, including the Asia Foundation, founded in 1954 in connection with the CIA, as well as the Rockefeller Foundation. 1 Equally, if not more noteworthy, were Asian states’ initiatives as seen in events like the Saigon International Festival, whose first and only edition took place in 1962, just before the onset of the Vietnam War. 2 Patterned after ‘the examples of Venice, São Paulo, and Paris’, 21 countries were invited to send artists to participate in what was basically a communion of anti-Communist countries ‘friendly’ to the Vietnamese government, then under duress from insurgent Communist forces. 3 Not only did the full title of the exhibition read, ‘First International Exhibition of Fine Arts Saigon 1962: An International Exposition by Artists of Vietnam and Friendly Countries’, the foreword to the exhibition catalogue prominently mentioned a visit from a Korean delegation that travelled to Vietnam in hopes of establishing a recurring international exhibition that would move between New Delhi, Bangkok, Manila, Taipei, Saigon, and Seoul. 4 The counterpart to this mode of international exchange was one that revolved around Socialist Realism, the embrace of which in China, North Vietnam, and North Korea amounted to a de facto pledge of allegiance to a unified Communist visual imaginary. The dynamics of the Cold War endorsed a polarised world that struck many as distinctly inadequate and frankly oppressive. Even states adamantly wedded to one side of the Cold War equation supported other kinds of cultural production that suggested alternative forms of internationalism; consider, for example, the Chinese government’s promotion of such ‘indigenous’ forms as guohua and woodblock prints amidst the context of the Sino–Soviet split in 1960. 5 One of the most important streams catalysed in the wake of the Cold War was what might be called the rise of a Third World internationalism, evidenced by occasions like the Bandung Conference of 1955 or by the founding in 1961 of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in a Soviet- weary Belgrade. Perhaps the most ambitious manifestation of Third World internationalism vis-a-vis the visual arts was the Triennale-India. Established in 1968 and organised by the state-run national academy of art, the Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi, the Triennale was intended to address the situation in which ‘many Asian, African, and socialist countries have not been able to establish a platform where the desired images of the oldest and youngest continents (youngest in the sense of secular achievement in the arts) may be seen together with the achievement of the dynamic West.’ 6 The Triennale benefited from the Indian state’s careful negotiation of a fraught political climate in which it aligned itself with neither the Soviet Union nor the US, a status acknowledged by the exhibition’s participants. Yet despite managing to preserve a measure of political neutrality that enabled a level of inclusiveness unmatched by any other visual arts event of that time, the Triennale attracted substantial criticism for its endorsement of what critic Geeta Kapur described as the ‘cult of internationalism’. 7 It was suggested that the Triennale only repeated the kinds of exhibitions it hoped to challenge, with the sole difference being that it embraced what the Euro–American art world considered peripheral. Still, the drive to push forward AI WEIWEI China b.1957 Boomerang (installation view) 2006 Glass lustres, plated steel, electric cables, incandescent lamps / 700 x 860 x 290cm (irreg.) / Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2007 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery 66