The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

alternative internationalism persisted both in Asia and in certain parts of western Europe. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, some influential Japanese art critics looked to certain examples of Korean abstraction as a means through which to visualise a distinctly ‘Asian’ approach to contemporary artistic production. 8 By the 1980s, this interest developed into a systematic approach to thinking about contemporary art in Asia as a stand-alone discursive field. Established by the Ministry of Foreign Relations in 1972, partly in the wake of Japan’s rise to economic superpower status, the Fukuoka Art Museum’s attempts to promote a discrete body of contemporary Asian art through its series of Asian Art Exhibitions coincided with the efforts of the Japan Foundation, an agency for cultural exchange. 9 Such efforts to cultivate a distinct pan-Asian regionalism seemed to imitate the centre-versus-periphery dynamics that, until the 1990s, excluded non-Euro–American art from the so-called international art world. One might trace this, as critic CJ Wan-ling Wee does, to Japanese imperial ambitions as encapsulated in Okakura Tenshin’s famous declaration of 1903, ‘Asia is one’. Wee has claimed that the resurrection of this statement upon the occasion of the first part of the ‘Asian Art Exhibition’ at the Fukuoka Art Museum in 1979 suggests ‘an inability to transcend or obviate the older moment of the modern’. 10 In the mid 1990s, the Japan Foundation took an especially active lead in sponsoring some of the exhibitions and conferences that helped cement the formation of a distinct contemporary Asian art field. 11 Taking its cues from postcolonial theory, which had begun to command a significant following in the Asian academy, many discussions turned on constructs of hybridity and nomadism, ideas that might overcome what Fukuoka Art Museum curator Kuroda Raiji observed was the ‘serious problem’ of ‘cultural, geographical and political classifications’ obviating the physical and psychological mobility of artists and art works. 12 Along these lines, institutions in other countries — namely in South Korea, Australia, and Singapore — established their own large- scale arts events which emphasised the formation of intra-Asian networks. Of the Queensland Art Gallery’s first Asia Pacific Triennial in 1993, curator Julie Ewington observed that it tried to be ‘determinedly inclusive’ by delegating some curatorial duties to various country specialists. 13 Such inclusion also supported the efforts of the Triennial and other similar events to secure a central position in a newly recalibrated geography of artistic circulation. Some of the most vigorous proponents of an alternative internationalism on which the idea of a distinct contemporary Asian art gained further traction were based in Great Britain. These included the journal Third Text , established in 1987 by the Pakistani–British artist and critic Rasheed Araeen, and the Institute of International Visual Artists (InIVA) established in 1991 by the Arts Council of Great Britain, the latter a promotion of what was described as New Internationalism in the face of state-mandated multiculturalism. But these endeavours, conducted mostly in prosperous countries with neoliberal market systems, tended not to acknowledge the emerging paradox of what was being heralded in both Asia and the West as DO HO SUH South Korea b.1962 Fallen Star 2012 Stuart Collection, University of California, San Diego / © Do Ho Suh / Image courtesy: The artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York / Photograph: Philipp Scholz Rittermann 68