The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

1  Wang Hui, ‘Introduction’, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought , inWang Hui China from Empire toNation-State , trans. Michael Gibbs Hill, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2014, pp.104–14. 2  Morimura Yasumasa, Remburanto no heya , Shinchosha, Tokyo, 1994. 3  The bœuf écorché as visceral crucifixion metaphor was exploited not only by Rembrandt, but by a lineage extending from Isaac van Ostade through to Chaïm Soutine, Marc Chagall and Francis Bacon, and more recent figures like Hermann Nitsch, Mona Hatoum and Damien Hirst. Rembrandt himself produced two Bœuf écorché paintings, in 1643 and 1655, when the image was already an established trope of religious art, with its origins in the parable of the prodigal son. 4  Tanizaki Junichiro, In Praise of Shadows , Vintage, London, 2001, p.54. 5  Oe Kenzaburo, Japan, the Ambiguous and Myself: The Nobel Prize Speech and Other Lectures , Kodansha International, Tokyo, 1995. 6  The slaughterhouse evokes Japan’s traditionally untouchable under-caste, the dowa or burakumin. Members of buraku communities included leatherworkers, tanners, undertakers, executioners, butchers and slaughterhouse workers, undertaking occupations that were socially necessary but stigmatised as impure or tainted by death and defilement. Though effectively liberated with the beginning of the Meiji era and the end of the caste system, discrimination against people of buraku heritage has lingered, particularly in employment and marriage situations. 7  The highly contested character of ‘post-internet’ art is best described in the catalogue for the exhibition ‘Art Post-Internet’, curated by Karen Archey and Robin Peckham for Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, in 2014, available from post-inter.net (viewed 9 June 2015). Marina Abramović’s retrospective ‘The Artist is Present’ has become widely known for its eponymous performance, in which visitors were invited to sit silently opposite the artist, for the celebrity participants the work attracted. It coincided with the appropriation of ‘performance art’ as a term and practice by popular musicians and actors, most notably Lady Gaga, James Franco and Shia LaBeouf. 8  On the roots of globalisation in sixteenth- century mercantile capitalism and European expansionism, see Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction , Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2004, and Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of our Times , Verso, London, 1994. These accounts have been significantly enhanced by Wang Hui, The Politics of Imagining Asia , Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2011; and Kojin Karatani, The Structure of World History , Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2014. 9  Kojin Karatani, ‘Nationalism and écriture ’, trans. Indra Levy, Surfaces , vol.201, pp.5–6. See also Karatani’s notes on Luther, Herder, Fichte and the formation of a German linguistic sensibility in The Structure of World History , pp.220–4, p.331 fn.1. 10  STAB, Critical Animation Workshop Manifesto, www.en.art- initiatives. org/?page_id=6513, viewed 9 June 2015. 11  Shinjo Ikuo, ‘The ethics of ecstasy: The art of Yamashiro Chikako’, in MAM Project 018: Yamashiro Chikako [exhibition catalogue], Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2012, p.50. 12  The foundational texts in this area are Laura Mulvey’s 1973 essay ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ (reproduced in Visual and Other Pleasures , Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1989, pp.14–26) and E Ann Kaplan’s later study Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film and the Imperial Gaze, Routledge, New York and London, 1997. 13  Chen Ching Yuan, correspondence with the author, 26 March 2015. 14  Shinjo Ikuo interviewed by Kondo Kenichi, ‘Open wounds: What Chikako Yamashiro portrays’, in Fukuda Naoko (ed.), Chikako Yamashiro , trans. Pamela Miki, Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo, 2012, p.70. 15  The territory corresponding to present-day Okinawa Prefecture largely constituted the Ryukyu Kingdom, a tributary state of China and later Japan that was a significant maritime power in East Asia from its fifteenth-century consolidation until its formal annexation by Meiji Japan in 1879. The islands were occupied by the United States from 1945. Sovereignty was returned to Japan in 1972, on the condition that the US retain its military bases. These currently occupy around 20 per cent of the main island and remain a source of political tension in Okinawa. 16  Kim Turcot DiFruscia, ‘Shapes of freedom: A conversation with Elizabeth A Povinelli’, e-flux journal , no.53, March 2014, www.e- flux.com/journal/shapes-of-freedom-a- conversation-with-elizabeth-a-povinelli, viewed 9 June 2015. 17  Shinjo Ikuo, ‘The ethics of ecstasy’, p.50. 18  Quoted by Darryl Wee in ‘Ming Wong stages sci-fi opera at UCCA Beijing’, Blouin Artinfo , 4 June 2015, au.blouinartinfo.com/ news/story/1173658/ming-wong-stages- sci-fi-opera-at-ucca-beijing#sthash. Mjmw6F5J.dpuf, viewed 9 June 2015. 19  Gerald Raunig, ‘Monster institutions: institutional critique, next phase’, in Reuben Keehan (ed.), Spaces of Art: Institutional and Post-Institutional Practices in Contemporary Art , Artspace, Sydney, 2009, pp.70–1. 20  Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses , trans. Peggy Kamuf, Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif., 1996, p.69. 21  Morimura, p.77. SIREN EUN YOUNG JUNG South Korea b.1974 Act of Affect (stills) 2013 Single-channel HD video projection, 16:9, 19:34 minutes, colour, sound / Images courtesy: The artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul