The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

The art scenes in Sabah and Sarawak cannot be compared with the region’s art centres, but that does not mean peripheral regions should not be given opportunities to take part. What biennale critics do not see are the effects of such participation on the art scenes at home, and their ensuing vibrancy. Several artists from Sabah flew to Singapore in 2013 to see the exhibition, the first biennale they had visited, and told me what an eye-opener it was. Early in 2015 I attended an exhibition at the Sabah Art Gallery and for the first time a curator, Harold Egn Eswar, was named on the poster with artists from Sabah, the Philippines, Indonesia and Japan. There were no paintings included in the exhibition containing sculpture, video, performance, installation and woodblock prints. It was the first time video and installation were being shown at the gallery and only the second time I had seen the term ‘curator’ used at this state institution. (The first was at an exhibition curated by Valentine Willie in 1994.) The Japan Foundation had sponsored curatorial workshops in Kuala Lumpur and Tokyo in 2014, which Egn attended soon after visiting the Singapore Biennale, and this exhibition, ‘Being Maphilindo’, was the result of that. Curators from the Mori Museum in Tokyo and the Japan Foundation Malaysia were at the exhibition opening at the Sabah Art Gallery spending time with artists — this was an indirect result of the Singapore Biennale. You both make strong cases for the importance of the local. However, there also appears to be a growing emphasis on regional identity in recent exhibitions within Asia. This is interesting, as it’s been said in the past that regional categories such as ‘Asia Pacific’ and ‘contemporary Asian art’ have been devised outside Asia and are rarely used inside it. Regionally-based exhibitions that have taken place in Asia in the last few years include ‘Discordant Harmony’ at Art Sonje (co-curated by Sunjung); the ‘Great Crescent’ at ParaSite in Hong Kong; various Japan Foundation exhibitions that look at pan-Asian identity; numerous South-East Asian exhibitions; and the imminent opening of the institution where I work, the National Gallery Singapore, which will have a regional focus. There have also long been pan-Pacific exhibitions in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere.