The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Dadang Christanto and Tran Luong. Artistic dialogues with vernacular expression —whether invoked through ceramist Nakamura Yuta’s field studies of kogei (Japanese arts and crafts) or the invocation of the written and spoken word — find precedents in the textual practices and reconsiderations of international modernism operating during the same period. Consider the avant-garde calligraphic work of Gu Wenda and Xu Bing, or the intersection of language, body and nation-state in the performance art of Arahmaiani or Song Dong, where the vernacular offers a conception of modern art that embraces other fields of human activity. The re-emergence of these modes of expression in current Asian and Pacific practices, across diverse social, political and cultural contexts, occurs at a curious juncture: a time of hypertextualised ‘post-internet’ art and the institutional legitimation of performance as spectacle, typified by the extraordinary media attention garnered by Marina Abramović’s Museum of Modern Art, New York, project in 2010. 7 However celebrity culture and the language of public relations may have clouded the conditions of presentation and reception, recent uses of the body, speech and gesture in art in the Asia Pacific region are characterised by a renewed commitment to exploiting their critical potential. 4 In a Kyrgyz factory churning out Western fashion labels (Gap, Nike, H&M), a Russian-speaking robot tells a jobseeker that it really doesn’t matter what language they use, as long as they do their work. Pages of Mongolian script, proscribed in favour of the Cyrillic alphabet under Soviet influence, play mute witness to a trio of deities binding Ulaanbaatar’s cramped urban geography with a tangle of electric wires. Wallpapered pages from a Burmese comic book form the backdrop for an outsized makeshift toy, attesting to a youth spent in isolation from foreign influence and the persistent nostalgia for children’s capacity to ARAHMAIANI Indonesia b.1961 Handle without care Performance with audio and video components, 11:00 minutes / 27 and 28 September 1996 / ‘The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane / Courtesy: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Research Library Archive SONG DONG China b.1966 Stamping the water 1996 Type C photographs on paper / 36 photographs: 120 x 80cm (each, irreg., approx.) / Purchased 2002. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery 46—47 BACK TO THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE