The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

and consumerist modes and in many cases the mainstream contemporary art system is turning to a corporate way of operating and a profit-driven logic. The success of artists is measured by this logic, while different values communicated by a small number of artists, institutions and practitioners are being heard less and less. What stays the same is that artists need to stay alert to their own position and reinvent strategies for how to temporarily occupy the public sphere and open spaces for discussion. The critical role of artists within society is questioned more than ever when more and more the artist’s role has been pushed towards that of cultural entertainer. YIL As Biljana states, identity is a political question and will always be present to both the individual and society at large, and is thus of concern to artists. Identity was a major national issue in the postcolonial years following Independence, the formation of Malaysia, the rise of nationalism and the preoccupation with ideas of nation-building, including cultural production and the arts. Identity was seen through racial, religious, cultural and national lenses. Rather than moving away from a preoccupation with identity per se, I think there has been growing resistance to state-sanctioned dictates and a desire to shake this off. Far more complex personal realities and a desire to be conceptually and contextually relevant to lived realities, and to time and place, are given greater urgency. You see this being exercised by our most persistent performance artists, Intan Rafiza, Aisyah Baharuddin and Mislina Mustaffa. These artists all fight against the oppression and silencing of Malay women and the homogenising image of who she is expected to be. Organisations such as Seni Pusaka have been working hard to revitalise traditional performance arts. Some of these, such as Kuda Kepang and Mak Yong, have gone underground and are banned in parts of Malaysia for their pre-Islamic elements. This salvaging of traditional arts is also, ironically, a sociopolitical act reclaiming wider considerations of ‘Malay-ness’. These more complex, resistant approaches to identity have been assisted, at least in part, by forces of globalisation, particularly new forms of communication and connectivity—a process that has become well established over the past two decades. Much of the world is now