The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

He responds by constructing fragmented painted arrangements of darkly ambiguous imagery, enabling the creation of new narrative possibilities. Painting, in its inability to convincingly ‘fake’ reality in the way photography can, becomes a means for flooding an image with an excess of reality, of operating figuratively and metaphorically at the same time. Thus, the dreamlike atmospheres of Chen’s canvases, their visual approximation of the oneiric processing of lived experience through mechanisms such as wish fulfilment and trauma rehearsal: reverie tends to confuse dichotomous structures, and to reinvest the world with a desire absented in the process of representation. Duan Jianyu is similarly emphatic about painting as a type of language while, for Chilean–Australian artist Juan Davila, painting is anything other than a screen-based medium, a means by which to test the limits of established sexual, social, ethnic and cultural divisions, particularly, as with Morimura’s project, those erroneous absolutes instituted in the framework of the nation-state. In the hands of these artists, painting is a sensuous, dialectical medium, where looking is an act predicated on reciprocation, and where tactility, the touch of a brush to a canvas, always anticipates the canvas’s pushing back. As Yamashiro’s butcher woman descends into the subterranean body of her island home, she encounters multiple versions of herself, limbs intertwined: this plurality is then photographed underwater, rising up from the sea floor. The touch of skin to skin provides an instance of Shinjo’s space of ethics where bodies are ‘constantly redrawing each other’s boundaries’. 17 6 In reducing the work of art to its formal elements, abstraction often enables levels of experiment that correspond with creative desires in the social sphere. Conventionally regarded as a purely visual mode of artistic activity, abstraction’s finest works are in fact sophisticated explorations of materiality, experiments with forms of organisation in time and space, propositions advanced from positions of engagement and speculation. The penetrable, sinuous columns that pulse from David Medalla’s Cloud Canyons No.25 1963/2015 have such an erotic aspect — physical form as psychological suggestion for a mindscape embedded in the sensual world. So, too, with Len Lye’s fabulous kinetic sculptures, for which technical expertise is diverted from rational ends to create machines whose sole product is sensuality and joy: witness the orgasmic thrashing of Blade 1959 (2015 reconstruction). In both cases, the outputs of the machines are always unique; no mass of bubbles or metallic composition will ever be replicated. Such are the possibilities proposed by the artists in APT8. The confusion of signifiers is more than playful; it is an assertion that identity is not fixed or essential, as simplistic representations propose. When Julia Mage’au Gray films her sister walking down a Darwin roadside in a grass skirt and heels, she is picturing a hybrid reality, a symbolic recombination that reflects a lived subjectivity. A Papua New Guinean woman living in Australia, but working within the broader South Pacific, Mage’au Gray invokes code-switching — a linguistic shift between vernaculars based on the receiving audience and typical to multilingual and migrant communities — and extends the principle to encompass social behaviour. Along such lines, the confusion of gender and ethnic markers in Morimura’s work, and that of Christian Thompson, not only resists or returns a problematic, privileged gaze, but also embodies a desirable state. It will be no surprise, then, that drag features prominently in APT8, fromMing Wong’s pan-sexual, pan-ethnic cinema pastiches, to the various personas adopted by Richard Bell. Bell’s primarily satirical assumption of characters extends to the level of farce in the figure of globetrotting Aboriginal gallerist and impresario ‘Larry’, 68—69 BACK TO THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE