The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

1 Ross Bowden, ‘Is “Art” a universal category? Some implications for museums’, Pacific Arts NS , vol.2, 2006, pp.36–43, 38. 2 Some carvings, however, are preserved. For example, those made for the Yena and Nogwi ceremonies are individually named and handed down for generations bringing status to the owner. 3 Alfred Gell, ‘The technology of enchantment and the enchantment of technology’, in Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton (eds.), Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics , Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992, pp.40–63, 44. 4 Hans Belting, Art History After Modernism , The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2003, p.194. 5 For an explication of this historical ‘constellation’, see Okwui Enwezor, ‘The postcolonial constellation: Contemporary art in a state of permanent transition’, in Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor and Nancy Condee (eds.), Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity , Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2008, pp.207–34. 6 Albert Wendt, ‘Towards a new Oceania’, Mana Review: A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature , vol.1, no.1, January 1976, Mana Publications and South Pacific Creative Arts Society, Suva, pp.49–50; and Epeli Hau’ofa, ‘The Ocean in Us’, The Contemporary Pacific , vol.10, no.2, 1998, pp.392–410. 7 See Benedict Allen, Into the Crocodile Nest: A Journey Inside New Guinea , Macmillan, London, 1987. My thanks to Ruth McDougall for this reference and helpful commentary in general on the Papua New Guinea references in this essay. 8 See ‘Collector in the tropics: Jac Hoogerbrugge’ in Raymond Corbey, Tribal Art Traffic: A Chronicle of Taste, Trade and Desire in Colonial and Postcolonial Times , Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute, 2000, pp.141–54. For more recent developments, see Nick Stanley, ‘Can museums become indigenous? The Asmat Museum of Culture and Progress and Contemporary Papua’, in Nick Stanley (ed.), The Future of Indigenous Museums: Perspectives from the Southwest Pacific , Berghahn, New York, 2008, pp.190–205; and Ursula Konrad, Alphonse Sowada and Gunter Konrad, Asmat, Perception of Life in Art — The Collection of the Asmat Museum of Culture and Progress , K. Kuehlen Verlag, Mönchengladbach, 2002. 75