The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

the global turn: the larger and more inclusive exhibitions became, the more likely it was that art works from countries perceived as both non-conducive to the open expression of an individual subjectivity and economically disadvantaged would be routinely excluded. The Indonesian critic and curator Jim Supangkat pointed out as much in his essay for the catalogue accompanying the Asia Society, New York, exhibition ‘Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions’, one of the first major exhibitions of contemporary art from Asia, that toured to various venues in 1996 and which featured art works from Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, the Philippines and India. He wrote that the international art world appeared divided between art works from ‘developed’ and democratic states, and those that were not. 14 This created a quarantine effect, not unlike the predicament described by art historian Hans Belting in 1991, of similar exclusions of eastern European artists in western European exhibitions: ‘There was little opportunity for comparison . . . [Western art connoisseurs, in order] to protect their own superiority, would retreat into a smile in order to keep their own standards and expertise.’ 15 Especially prominent from the mid 1990s to the mid 2000s for his role in bringing contemporary art from Asia, and particularly China, to Western audiences through loosely configured exhibitions designed to encourage viewers to consider the relationships, as opposed to differences, between art works, the Chinese curator Hou Hanru put matters more witheringly by insinuating that the interest in what was sometimes called ‘unofficial’ Chinese art coincided with renewed Western interest in China after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. 16 He implied that it was only after such an exemplary demonstration of a will to democracy and against authoritarianism that Western institutions could finally accept certain forms of contemporary Chinese art. What might thus be deduced from remarks such as those of Supangkat and Hou is the fomenting of a stream of inquiry less concerned with celebrating the expansiveness of globalism than with the urgency of asking whose norms would govern the rate and terms of this expansion. Throughout the late 1980s and 90s was a marked emphasis on what many critics regarded as a profoundly troubling insistence on the part of Western curators and institutions for authenticity. ‘Magiciens de la Terre’, for example, was vilified by Rasheed Araeen for pursuing the ‘authentic’, which the exhibition seemed to define as imagery recognisably non-Euro– American in origin. 17 Similarly, the main goal of ‘Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions’ according to its curator, Apinan Poshyananda, was ‘to challenge preconceived notions that only traditional, and not contemporary, art flourishes in Asia’. 18 If contemporary Asian art was partly meant to be a sociopolitical intervention, one of its main concerns was to construct a platform on which to consider cultural difference without reiterating modernist distinctions pitting the authentic against the derivative. In the early 2000s, this stream of inquiry took shape around the idea of what it meant to be ‘contemporary’. In his essay for the catalogue accompanying the fourth Asia Pacific Triennial in 2002, US-based Chinese art historian Wu Hung implicitly proposed recasting contemporary Asian art through the notion of contemporaneity, a concept which he understood primarily through his work on Chinese, and specifically, mainland Chinese, art of the 1990s, just after art journals and symposia featured several writings centred on the problems and characteristics of what was newly identified as ‘contemporary art’ ( dangdai yishu ). For Wu, contemporaneity was a theory with a distinctly reactive dimension, defined as the art work’s self-conscious reflection on what he termed the ‘conditions and limitations of the present’. 19 He singled out the concepts of the monument and the ruin, which he implied were responses to abstract forces of epic scope, like the tyranny of power, the passage of time, or what Wu euphemistically referred to as ‘social changes’. In bringing the concepts of the monument and the ruin into his discussion, Wu attempted to bypass the inordinate stress put upon regionality in other discussions of contemporary Asian art taking place around that time. 20 Others were less sceptical about the heuristic value of the ‘contemporary’. Discussing the role of the museum in Asia in a broadly circulated article first published in 2000, the Kolkata-based writer and dramaturge Rustom Bharucha asserted that ‘the addition of a new body of work from Asian countries that can compete with ‘the best in the West’ — is this ‘new Asia’ not another exoticisation of the contemporary?’ 21 In similar fashion, Filipino art historian Patrick Flores wondered whether the rubric of the ‘contemporary’ should be entertained at all, lest it permanently subordinate the art work to synchronous forces with a much larger reach and impact; the example he gives is globalisation. 22 From his own experience curating and writing about contemporary Asian art in Asia, the risk may have felt especially real for Flores, even more so as ‘virtually all Philippine media platforms’ heralded the record-breaking 1999 auction sale of Anita Magsaysay-Ho’s portentously titled 1955 painting In the Marketplace . 23 Likewise, an increasing number of Asian artists in the 2000s no longer made work only for domestic collectors, but also found themselves in the position of having to consider international demand. Defining contemporary Asian art as a dilemma borne out of its own eagerness to respond to the conditions of the present, Flores suggested that art’s ultimate purpose is related to our capacity to think whether ‘radicality or a radical engagement [is] still possible within the structure and among the agencies of the art world’. 24 69