The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

base. Through pornographic conceit and the exotic imagery of Okinawa’s ongoing tourist boom, the work illustrates the island’s cultural feminisation in ongoing negotiations between the United States and Japan over the sovereignty of a territory that was, until 1879, an independent state. 15 Duan Jianyu pursues a similar strategy in painting, channelling the syncretism and incongruousness of the visual field that is contemporary China through a nuanced treatment of tensions between European and classical Chinese painterly styles to produce witty, uncanny, erotically loaded parodies of a masculine, colonial vision. In one of her recent works from the ‘Sharp, Sharp, Smart’ series 2014, for instance, a faux-naive picture of two rural peasant women, rendered in a style somewhere between Barbizon school and Maoist romantic realism, is animated by the snaking necks of two fantastically coloured geese, both tentacular and phallic, which protrude from crop baskets strapped to the women’s backs. Like Yamashiro, Angela Tiatia deploys markers of sexual availability, in this case a body suit and high heels. Her 2014 ‘An Inventory of Gestures’ videos detail brief endurance exercises, attempting to stand tiptoed for as long as possible, or to walk up a wall with her shoulders pressed to the floor, back arched, pelvis thrusting upwards, the artist’s bare legs revealing a Samoan malu (tattoo) that details her genealogy. Distinct and specific though their subjects may be, each of these works establishes a degree of equivalence between representations of the ethnic and the feminine. Yamashiro, Duan and Tiatia return the gaze with what Shinjo describes as ‘the physical entanglement of the body’ in the implicit violence of colonial subjugation and the social relations mediated by the act of looking. They assert the presence of a sexuality that operates independently of the privileged viewer and an eroticism that refuses to be reduced to biological reproductive capacities. Like Morimura, they invest the corporeal with carnality. Of this terminological distinction, anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli offers: DUAN JIANYU China b.1970 Sharp, Sharp, Smart No.4 (from ‘Sharp, Sharp, Smart’ series) 2014 Oil on canvas / 140 x 180cm / Image courtesy: The artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou / Proposed for the Queensland Art Gallery Collection