The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

GABRIELLAMANGANO Born 1972, Stanthorpe, Australia SILVANAMANGANO Born 1972, Stanthorpe, Australia Live and work in Melbourne, Australia Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano studied drawing before they began making video works together. Using improvised choreography and working with their own bodies and simple materials, they emphasise gesture, process and sculptural form. There is no there 2015 was inspired by the Blue Blouse theatre collective (1924–32), which created a type of performance called Living Newspapers based on topical news events. Expanding their concept of performance, the Manganos have designed an installation space featuring a video projection and geometric platforms upon which dancers will perform carefully choreographed gestures and movements referring to current news events. Extending the notion of community engagement, they are collaborating with local QUT dance students to activate the space during the exhibition. DAVIDMEDALLA Born 1942, Manila, the Philippines Lives and works in London, UK David Medalla is a unique figure in the history of twentieth-century art. His unpredictable and playful approach to art-making has made him difficult to categorise, but he is increasingly recognised as a significant figure in the development of installation, kinetic and participatory art. His practice deconstructs the idea of sculpture as solid, timeless and monumental by creating objects and situations that can never be repeated and are continually changing form. Medalla moved to London in 1960, where he has been largely based ever since, and took part in some of the 1960s and 70s exhibitions that defined minimal and conceptual practice in the United States and Europe. In 1963 he began to produce what have become his signature works, the Cloud Canyons or Bubble Machines . With their erotic, pulsing and sinuous forms, sculptures such as Cloud Canyons No.25 1963/2015 stand in contrast to the tenets of abstraction, embedding sculpture in the sensual world. DANIE MELLOR Mamu/Ngadjonji people Born 1971, Mackay, Australia Lives and works in Sydney, Australia Danie Mellor’s multidisciplinary practice often engages with the histories of Australia’s Indigenous, colonial and settler communities and is informed by his Bama heritage. For APT8 he has developed a monumental, three-part work capturing his strong connection with his ancestral home in the rainforests of north Queensland. Towering above the viewer, the work depicts a tangle of palms and ferns in two mirror images. On one side is a positive daylight scene; on the other the same image has been inverted and solarised to become unfamiliar and uncanny. Facing both images is a curved multi-panelled work in solid blue, merging positive and negative fields and creating an environment that encloses viewers. 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. Mellor’s installation speaks of this sense of place and locality and also its converse — the mysterious, unoccupied rainforest which exists as a powerful entity beyond naming. MIN THEIN SUNG Born 1978, Mawlamyine, Myanmar Lives and works in Yangon, Myanmar Min Thein Sung creates playful and personal works that draw on daily life in Myanmar. His ‘Another Realm’ series, by focusing on the simple handmade toys that people created as copies of foreign toys seen on TV and in books, references the years that Myanmar was restricted from international trade and commercial mass-production. He recreates these toys as soft sculptures in linen, with giant horses, elephants, tanks and guns that hang like makeshift puppets, or smaller objects fashioned out of the local handmade shan paper. His work for APT8 Another Realm (horses) 2015 is a large, multi- headed horse sculpture displayed against a wallpaper of comic book pages. ‘Another realm’ is symbolic of the slippage that occurs between image and representation when a community is isolated from the world, but also celebrates a spirit of creativity, imagination and adaptability. MORIMURA YASUMASA Born 1951, Osaka, Japan Lives and works in Osaka Since the 1980s Morimura Yasumasa has been known for his transgressive self- portraits identifying with art-historical images, famous film actresses and iconic twentieth-century figures. White darknes s 1994 (printed 2008), part of his ‘Rembrandt Room’ group of works, is an unsettling and powerful image, showing Morimura next to a flayed bovine carcass, naked apart from an incongruous pair of high-heeled shoes and a Renaissance-style beret. The work refers most explicitly to the Bœuf écorché tradition in art, a visceral crucifixion metaphor with origins in the parable of the prodigal son, and with a lineage extending from Rembrandt, to Francis Bacon, to Damien Hirst. Through a series of subtle subversions and allusions, Morimura’s multi-layered image confronts notions of a fixed national, cultural and sexual expression, standing as a metaphor for a number of important narrative threads running through APT8. NAKAMURA YUTA Born 1983, Tokyo, Japan Lives and works in Kyoto, Japan Trained as a ceramicist, Nakamura Yuta’s practice traverses the discourses of art history, architecture, archives and sculptural installation. Nakamura’s Tiles, Small Shrine and Tourism 2014–15 engages with the small, often unnoticed Jizo shrines indigenous to the neighbourhoods of Kyoto, Japan — a subtle yet continual reminder of traditional Buddhist faith and the routine of personal devotion in the busy streets of the city. Nakamura has produced non-sacred versions of these small shrines —made to hold everyday items such as books and photographs. He focuses on the material form of the shrines, their properties as 248—249 ARTIST PROFILES