The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

1 In the introduction to his mammoth study The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (2004), Wang Hui reminds us that Benedict Anderson’s celebrated formulation of nationality as an ‘imagined community’ is not the same as an ‘imaginary community’. 1 This is to say that the nation-state is not a form of false consciousness, however much blood myths of a unifying character forged in the founding traumas of war or revolution may try to convince us otherwise. For all its inequities and exclusions, the nation-state remains a community in the process of becoming, evolving along with the imaginations of its members; the nation-state is effectively an aestheticised state, hinging on collective creativity and desire. It is here that art offers a signal register for the tensions at play in a given locality and moment, as a manifestation of the cultural imaginary; and it is here that, in its exalted status as fetishised commodity and cultural exception, art provides an extraordinary platform for creativities and desires that might exceed the framework of nation. Among the practices in APT8, this emerges in the pronounced sympathy between artistic modes that are predominantly performance-based and figurative, but also kinetic and kinaesthetic, and recourse to the human body, language and vernacular expression as sites of negotiation and struggle. Gesture, word and skin — and occasionally the abstract, turbid mass that lies beneath — become liminal points of engagement with the world, of immediacy and mediation, where contamination and recombination may be adopted as aesthetic strategies, and, ultimately, social actualities. 2 Morimura Yasumasa’s White Darkness 1994, printed 2008 is a stark, one-shot exorcism, grasping at the limits of representation, of modernity’s ‘extreme elevation of luminosity’ to a point beyond visibility, where the blinding light of a nuclear blast heralds the arrival of the invisible, a new world of radiation, mutation and recombination, of contamination and infection. ‘[I]t is no longer tenable to regard the world of the naked eye as self-evident, nor the skin as a definite boundary in human relations . . . ’, writes Morimura of the work. ‘Where we’re headed, beyond the peak of luminosity, lies a white darkness.’ 2 The image is unnerving, extravagant. The artist, frontally naked but for a beret, a smear of lumpy white make-up and drolly incongruous high heels, strikes a classical pose beside a hulking bovine carcass, flayed and split in an abattoir whose gritty atmosphere is accentuated by the work’s high-contrast, black-and-white photography. White Darkness is Morimura’s entry into the bœuf écorché or ‘slaughtered ox’ tradition of Western art history, and the climax of his dialogue with Rembrandt, the canon’s exemplar. 3 It is difficult to ignore the photograph’s joyous confusion of gender signifiers, its discomfiting allusion to Japan’s social and sexual others, its deliberate juxtaposition of the bodily functions of desire and mortality, sex and death — body as flesh, corporeality as carnality. But there is more, for in Rembrandt’s celebrated mastery of darkness and light, his technical innovation of painting from a black ground rather than white, Morimura sees not only an attempt to map the contours of ugliness but also the glimmering entry of luminescence into Western painting — later fully realised by the Impressionists at the very point it internalised itself in photography (literally ‘light writing’) — before it evolved rapidly through cinema and television to the atom bomb and our unseeable, recombinant future. In this trajectory, it is difficult not to recall Tanizaki Junichiro’s equation of illumination with modernity and Westernisation, and his anecdote, 12 years before Hiroshima, about that event’s unwitting progenitor, Albert Einstein, coming across an electric light burning at midday in Kyoto