The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

The admonitions of critics like Bharucha and Flores notwithstanding, much commentary on contemporary art in Asia remained focused on probing the meaning of the ‘contemporary’. 25 The focus has only intensified as a growing number of cities have embarked either on building or rethinking museums ostensibly devoted to contemporary art. 26 The discursive turn reads as both a strategic alignment with discourses popular in some sectors of the Anglo–American academy and as an equally tactical disavowal of cultural difference as the prime index by which to justify contemporary Asian art’s inclusion in an expanded history of art. A vivid instance of the latter was the provocatively titled 2008 Guangzhou Triennial, which took as its theme ‘Farewell to Postcolonialism’ in hopes of drawing ‘attention to the “political correctness at large” that is the result of the power play of multi-culturalism, identity politics and post-colonial discourse’. 27 In the past few years, contemporary Asian art discourse has taken a decidedly entropic turn as numerous institutions and organisations have radically expanded the kinds of work included under the contemporary Asian art rubric. As demonstrated in the themes and content of recent biennials and triennials, the mission of archives like the Asia Art Archive (established in 2000), and the coverage attempted by specialist magazines like ArtAsiaPacific ’s annual Almanac (first published in 2005), ‘contemporary Asian art’ now includes artists and art works made not only in East, South-East, and South Asia, but Central Asia, the South Pacific, Australia, and even the Middle East. It also includes works by artists of Asian national or ethnic origin living in Europe and the US. On its face, redrawing the parameters of contemporary Asian art suggests an intention to facilitate a beneficial kind of globalism based on a more democratic view of the international art world. Yet its expansion verges on the point where the idea ceases to have any real meaning. One wonders whether this expansion is in fact an indirect expression of doubt regarding the utility of contemporary Asian art as an idea. Is it still necessary, or has it run its course? The question resounds more loudly when one considers the exceptionalism of contemporary Chinese art, from which both Taiwanese and Hong Kong art works are pointedly excluded; the remarkable growth in both the number of artists and in the prices at which their works have sold in the past decade have all but demanded that it be treated as its own category. John Clark, one of the first scholars to trace a history of modern Asian art, has recently argued that modern and contemporary Asian art relativises all other modernities, so that the idea of world art is no longer about the mere accumulation of works or the reification of political and economic boundaries as the basis upon which ‘world art’ should be structured. 28 He nevertheless adds that ‘world art will only be definable as “world” by its ability to incorporate and re-topologise itself via the national and other unit projections’. 29 One thus asks whether the embrace of the ‘contemporary’ is, in fact, a symptom of having to deal with rapidly conflating scales of operation. This was particularly felt in countries like Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, and South Korea where rapid rates of economic development, combined with significant changes in political governance, blurred the divisions between such formerly sacrosanct spatial markers as region, nation, city, neighbourhood, and street. Witness, for instance, the number of artists who looked to materiality as a means of recreating a sense of places forgotten, vanished, or otherwise left behind — one thinks of the unexpected soft-toy cuddliness of Yin Xiuzhen’s portable cityscapes (2001–present), the futility of Sara Wong’s attempts to walk a straight line in the dense Hong Kong metropolis as recorded in Local Orientation (2002), or the awkward scale of Suh Do-Ho’s Fallen Star 1/5 (2008–2011) which evokes in viewers the sensation of being perpetually out of place, not unlike that experienced by Suh living and working between Korea, the US, and now Europe. Although it is too early to imagine what this conflation of scales might eventually produce, one senses its presence in such phenomena as the renewed interest in artistic collaboration as a response to the breakdown of social hierarchies on which the ideas of nation, city, or state once depended. 30 One might also predict the eventual obsolescence of contemporary Asian art discourse as a necessary step towards realising a less divisive and more critically inclusive history of art than is produced at present. But the conflation of scales that allows an artist to speak about the nation from the vantage point of cosmopolitanism might also help explain the defensive recuperation of national frameworks in some quarters; one recalls the Chinese state’s continuous and recent harassment of Ai Weiwei as an apparent reflection of the state’s reactionary efforts to reclaim its authority in the face of mounting challenges to its pre–eminence. How the discourse of contemporary Asian art will fare amidst this conflation of scales will critically depend on how its creators navigate its ever-shifting currents. 70