The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

their practice, with its inclusion of props, cross-dressing and irony; their installations are often likened to stage sets. In contrast to these monumental installations, Audition 2015 by Lawrence English focuses on the immaterial, quotidian form of sound. English is based in Brisbane and used field recordings of local environments to capture sounds beyond normal hearing or that exist on the periphery of attention. English has then unified these sounds in a composition, playing it back through an architectural device that amplifies and contains the sound. This field of heightened listening offers a site-specific experience as the recorded composition mingles and interacts with the Gallery’s own sonic environment, bringing the sounds made within GOMA back into the space of the work, and implicating the viewers in the forming of the experience. The lack of arts infrastructure under the political and social conditions operating in their home country has caused Myanmar artists Po Po and Min Thein Sung to think about art and vernacular experience in different ways. Po Po is a pioneer in the field of conceptual and performance art and has been practising as an artist since the late 1970s. Po Po examines a ubiquitous component of vernacular, public passage — the bus stop— in his VIP Project (Yangon/Dhaka) 2010–15, comprising photographs, video and installation. Po Po documented his curiously placed VIP signs in public bus stops in the cities of Yangon and Dhaka, recording the politics of how public space operates under very different political conditions and the effect of elitist, exclusionary signs on people using these everyday spaces. ‘Another Realm’ is a series of humble, playful works by Min Thein Sung that draws on the experience of daily life in Myanmar. The artist was interested in the simple handmade toys that people created as copies of foreign toys seen on TV and in books at a time when Myanmar was restricted from international trade and commercial mass-production. He recreates these toys in linen and shan paper (a handmade paper common in Myanmar), both as small and intimate sculptures and large- scale installations. Another Realm (horses) (from ‘Another Realm’ series) 2015 celebrates creativity and adaptability, and is also symbolic of the slippage that occurs between image and representation when a population is isolated from the world. Collective visual inheritance informs the work of Mamu/Ngadjonji artist Danie Mellor, Nepalese-born Tsherin Sherpa and Maria Taniguchi, who is based in the Philippines. Danie Mellor’s monumental drawing Deep (forest) 2015 immerses viewers in depictions of the artist’s ancestral home in the rainforests of north Queensland. Mellor was inspired by the Girrugarr legend, a sequential narrative that describes the journey of an ancestral figure who ascribed language and symbolic meanings to the environment. Tsherin Sherpa was trained in the art of Tibetan tangka painting by his father, and his scrolls and large paintings deconstruct and disintegrate this precise discipline, while maintaining the refined techniques and rich textures. 12 His images of deities and spirits are often fragmented, placed in unusual contexts, or broken up into a swirling composition, acting as a metaphor for the feelings of displacement experienced by the Tibetan diaspora. Maria Taniguchi was born into a family of sculptors and has a strong interest in the relationship between sculpture and the local, vernacular history of clay pottery in her hometown of Dumaguete City. The dense, sculptural quality of her towering black paintings is emphasised by her method of displaying them leaning against the wall. They are based on the simplest repeating pattern in masonry, used as a façade on buildings. Like Taniguchi, Nakamura Yuta’s practice straddles disciplines. He began as a ceramicist and retains a strong interest in the history of ceramics and modernisation in Japan. Nakamura’s Tiles, Small Shrine and Tourism 2014–15 comprises photographs and sculptures relating to a perambulatory passage through Kyoto’s streets, which are dotted with small, often unnoticed Jizo shrines indigenous 190—191 AWORLD UNFOLDS