The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

A regional identity anchored in our common heritage of the ocean does not mean an assertion of exclusive regional territorial rights, for the same water that washes and crashes on our shores does so on the coastlines of the whole Pacific rim from Antarctica, to New Zealand, Australia, Southeast and East Asia, and right around to the Americas. The Pacific Ocean also merges into the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans to encircle the entire planet. As the sea is an open and ever-flowing reality, so should our oceanic identity transcend all forms of insularity, to become one that is openly searching, inventive, and welcoming. In a metaphorical sense, the ocean that has been our waterway to each other should also be our route to the rest of the world. Our most important role should be that of custodians of the ocean, and as such we must reach out to similar people elsewhere for the common task of protecting the seas for the general welfare of all living things. This is no more grandiose than the growing international movements to implement the most urgent projects in the global environmental agenda: the protection of the ozone layer, the forests and the oceans. The formation of an oceanic identity is really an aspect of our awaking to things that are already happening around us. The ocean is not merely our omnipresent, empirical reality; equally importantly it is our most wonderful metaphor for just about anything. Contemplation of its vastness and majesty, its allurement and fickleness, its regularities and unpredictability, its shoals and depths — its isolating and linking role in our histories — excites the imagination and kindles a sense of wonderment, curiosity and hope, that could set us on journeys to explore new regions of creative enterprise that we have not dreamt of before. In short, in order to give substance to a common regional identity and animate it, we must tie history and culture to empirical reality and practical action. In much the same way our ancestors wrote our histories on the landscape and the seascape; carved, stencilled and wove our metaphors on objects of utility; and sang and danced in rituals and ceremonies for the propitiation of the awesome forces of nature and society. Twenty years ago, Albert Wendt (1976) in his landmark paper, ‘Towards a new Oceania’, wrote of his vision of the region and its first season of post-colonial cultural flowering. I belong to Oceania — or, at least, I am rooted in a fertile part of it and it nourishes my spirit, helps to define me, and feeds my imagination. A detached objective analysis I will leave to sociologists and all the other ‘ologists’. . . Objectivity is for such uncommitted gods. My commitment won’t allow me to confine myself to such a narrow vision. So vast, so fabulously varied a scatter of islands, nations, cultures, mythologies and myths, so dazzling a creature, Oceania deserves more than an attempt at mundane fact; only the imagination in free flight can hope — if not to contain her — to grasp some of her shape, plumage, and pain. I will not pretend that I know her in all her manifestations. No one . . . ever did; no one does . . . ; no one ever will because whenever we think we have captured her she has already assumed new guises — the love affair is endless, even her vital statistics . . . will change endlessly. In the final instance, our countries, cultures, nations, planets are what we imagine them to be. One human being’s reality is another’s fiction. Perhaps we ourselves exist only in each other’s dreams. 2 At the end of his rumination on the cultural revival in Oceania, partly through the words of the region’s first generation of postcolonial writers and poets, Wendt concluded with this remark: [t]his artistic renaissance is enriching our cultures further, reinforcing our identities, self-respect and pride, and taking us through a genuine decolonisation; it is also acting as a unifying force in our region. In their individual journeys into the Void, these artists, through their work, are explaining us to ourselves and creating a new Oceania. 3 This is very true. For a new Oceania to take hold it must have a solid dimension of commonality that we can perceive with our senses. Culture and nature are inseparable. The Oceania that I see is a creation of countless people in all walks of life. Artists must work with others, for creativity lies in all fields, and besides, we need each other. These were the thoughts that went through my mind as I searched for a thematic concept on which to focus a sufficient number of programs to give the Oceania Centre a clear, distinctive and unifying identity. The theme for the Centre and for us to pursue is the ocean — the interactions between us and the sea that have shaped and are shaping so much of our cultures. We begin with what we have in common, and draw inspirations from the diverse patterns that have emerged from the successes and failures of our adaptation to the influences of the sea. From there we can range beyond the tenth horizon, secure in the knowledge of the home-base to which we will always return for replenishment and to revise the purpose and the direction of our journeys. We shall visit our people who have gone to the lands of diaspora, and tell them that we have 81