The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

transcend their circumstances through imaginative play. A Bidjara man paints his skin white, dons an outrageous wig and invokes Polari, the erstwhile cant of London’s gay underground; later, without make-up, he sings in trembling tones a song written in Bidjara, the language of his ancestors, now classified extinct. The stake of language in social change is substantial, particularly when it comes to the constitution of collective identity. It is a natural concern for artists of the Asia Pacific. China may be the byword for economic acceleration in global journalistic patois, but throughout the region societies that are emerging from longstanding political and economic structures are working to assert their distinctive character in a competitive world system. In the Mongolia of Nomin Bold and her fellow artists Baatarzorig Batjargal, Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu and Gerelkhuu Ganbold, economic liberalisation has precipitated rapid urbanisation, with nearly half the country’s population concentrated in the capital, presenting significant social, infrastructural and environmental problems for a habitually nomadic people. For the Kyrgyz collective STAB (School of Theory and Activism, Bishkek), ethnocentric language hegemonies go hand-in-hand with impoverished labour relations. Min Thein Sung’s dramatically up-scaled playthings perform the double imaginary of Myanmar’s opening up and reform, where great expectations meet a more personal desire for escape. Even within established and ostensibly stable states like Japan, Australia and New Zealand, globalisation — with its colonial heritage — is experienced as a process of homogenisation, particularly by marginalised communities, to which Christian Thompson’s articulations of sexuality and indigeneity attest. 8 In societies undergoing accelerated transformation, language becomes a contested site and subject, particularly when the modern nation-state acts as the framework for political discourse. In Japan, Korea and Vietnam, for instance, national scripts based on vernacular pronunciations were devised to contest imperial Chinese hegemony. The rise of print capitalism and technologies of mass reproduction accelerated this process wherever it appeared, which by the eighteenth century, as Kojin Karatani affirms, was more or less everywhere. 9 Within China, the standardisation of written language as a means of unifying the country’s vast numbers of spoken dialects played a significant role in the creation of a Han sensibility; later, agitators for language reform, mobilised by the May Fourth uprising of 1919, sought to replace classical Chinese with written vernaculars to give that sensibility a modern, republican aspect. While enabling both national and counter-imperial identities, this process also tends to elevate writing over the spoken word, marginalising dialects whose works have not attained a canonical level of institutional popularity and devastating languages that are primarily or exclusively oral in character, along with the cultures and communities they cement. Thompson’s melancholic rehabilitation of Bidjara language in song alludes to this process and, in the artist’s quavering enunciation, to the fragility of using identity as a form of resistance. STAB’s simple cut-and- paste, stop-motion animations, produced in their Critical Animation Workshops, parody the contradictory aspects of linguistic hierarchy — the acquisition of ruling-class language being no guarantee of freedom from the service of its members, or the bio-deterministic tendency within multilingual societies such as the Kyrgyz Republic to equate language with ethnicity. The Mongol bichig writing system of Nomin’s painting Tomorrow 2014 is an instance of such contradiction: in widespread use in Mongolia until the adoption of Cyrillic under Soviet suzerainty in the 1940s — written Kyrgyz was codified in a similar way — Mongol bichig was proposed for reintroduction after the Democratic Revolution of 1990, but shelved due to the difficulties it would cause for older generations.