The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

and remarking, ‘Now that is terribly wasteful’. 4 For many, modernisation and Westernisation are equivalent processes in Japan; given the acceleration of Japanese modernity after the country’s dramatic encounter with the West in the mid nineteenth century, they are certainly entwined. Absent from this equation, however, is the coeval process of nation-forming, Japan’s transposition of its mode of political sovereignty into the logic of the European nation-state, and the attendant institution of regulative mores and behavioural norms at a society-wide level — the production, that is, of a unified national consciousness. Conversely, the proximity of this version of ‘Japanese-ness’ to Westernisation has resulted in certain fundamental tensions, famously characterised by novelist and Nobel laureate Oe Kenzaburo as a powerful and penetrating ambiguity; for Oe, this is the force that drove Japan to war in Asia, and from war to holocaust in Japan. 5 Morimura’s genius is in proposing Hiroshima as the point where the fates of modern art, modern light and modern Japan find their traumatic alignment. Thus his pictorial evocation of those that the nation-state conventionally excludes or relegates to subservient roles: non-masculine gender identities, non-normative sexualities, migrants, outcastes. 6 3 In a sense, White Darkness stands in for a whole range of performative and pictorial strategies from an earlier phase of the development of contemporary art in the Asia Pacific. The body, its limits and symbolic possibilities were defining motifs of the engaged art of the 1980s and 1990s: from the entry of feminist, queer and postcolonial perspectives into Japanese art, epitomised by the hi-tech sublime of the collective Dumb Type, to Indian painter Bhupen Khakhar’s bold pictorial exploration of his own sexuality, to the transgressive actions of Beijing East Village artists and the powerful expressions of Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, MORIMURA YASUMASA Japan b.1951 Doublonnage (Marcel) 1988 Type C photograph on paper bonded to aluminium / 150 x 120cm / Purchased 1989 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery ZHANGHUAN China/United States b.1965 12 square metres (still) 1994 DVD: 3:02 minutes, colour, stereo / Purchased 2008. The Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery 44—45 BACK TO THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE