The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

they portray a public agency that would soon be erased, protests that will never be heard and voices that were silenced during the subsequent regime. While Dalena depicts the protesters, the messages in her works, like those executed by Sharon Chin and Yelena Vorobyeva and Viktor Vorobyev, are devised from small gestures to disrupt assumed meaning and identify potential for change. Chin’s protest is discreetly personal, imaginatively transforming national political party flags that suddenly appeared in her hometown of Port Dickson in the lead up to national elections in late 2012. These flags, collected from Chin’s neighbourhood, became the foundation for a series of drawings of weeds from her garden Weeds/Rumpai 2012–15, a creeping infestation overlaying political insignias. The weeds conjure a sense of the uncontrollable and overpowering, yet their natural beauty conveys authenticity and strength contrasted against the sophistry of political rhetoric. Simon Soon has described the motif as ‘taking flight, invading and creeping into the sacrosanct symbols and spaces that represent the ambitions, structures and strictures that make up our political landscape today’. 14 The weed, a simple, natural motif, becomes an object of dissent, symbolic of a public that can only be superficially spoken for by politicians. It can be cut back but will gradually regrow and overcome. Like Chin’s subtle impositions, Yelena Vorobyeva and Viktor Vorobyev’s work involves playful illustrations overlaying their own identity photographs in the series ‘Necessary Additions. Home Archive’ 2010. The Vorobyevs also manipulate a politicised symbol imbued with personal memory and national identity. Both cases prove how protest can operate as a simple subversive gesture rather than a mass public outcry. In the vast Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan during the Soviet era, the Vorobyevs were once obliged by the state to use these photographs on official documents. Devoid of any expression, they are a sombre reminder of a bureaucracy that recorded individuals as quantifiable and anonymous units. Overlaid with comical manipulations, they present a whimsical and simple disruption, inverting objects of authority to place power back in the hands of the individual. The Vorobyevs show how simply the representation of the body can be afforded new meaning while acting as a metaphor for the structure of power. Such actions test national representation and suggest that the distribution of power can shift through simple, community-driven change. The Vorobyevs’ defiance of power structures between citizen and state implies that the role of individuality within society is a key aspect of identity. Like Chinese artist Liu Ding, the Vorobyevs appropriate historic modes of representation and assign them new meaning. Liu is specifically interested in the role of socialist realism in Chinese visual culture. Enquiring into the aesthetic implications of China’s socio-political history and the effects of political imagery and idealisation associated with the Maoist era, he reflects on China’s past in the context of its rapid economic growth, manic capitalism and inflated art market. He revisits symbols of politicised social realism, such as the ideal citizen, master artists, and official histories to explore shifts in their meaning over time. Through these he addresses some of the contradictions of the genre, where realism is manipulated by rhetoric, and the body remains a central motif while individuality is substituted with ideals. Liu contemplates the wavering psychological, political and market conditions that affect artistic approach in a country with an art history defined by drastic changes — from a classicism admired throughout the world and a period of intense state control, to emerging as one of the most lucrative and fluctuating international art markets. In certain cases, extreme changes in government policy and violent upheavals in society have ultimately led to total recalibrations of national identities. Where oppression exists, individual experience and shared memory