The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

than idyllic places of escape, islands are sites of imminent threats in the twenty-first century: ‘If we die, we’re taking you with us,’ a bee promises in a poem addressing the effects of climate change on Micronesian islands by Kathy Jetñil- Kijiner. 24 In her essay ‘Islands: Some kind of paradise’, curator Diane Moon discusses how subjects from environmental pressures to popular culture inform the ancestral practices of artists Lola Greeno, Margaret Rarru and Helen Ganalmirriwuy, and collaborators from Erub/Lifou. Moon’s discussion of artists from Australia’s maritime borders have interesting associations with several APT9 artists from other island contexts, including Kapulani Landgraf of Hawai'i, Taiwan’s Idas Losin, Singapore’s Donna Ong and Robert Zhao Renhui, and Martha Atienza, Nona Garcia and Kawayan de Guia from the Philippines, while Mao Ishikawa’s photography reflects her continued advocacy for the separatism of Ryukyuan people in Okinawa from mainland Japan. These artists work with perspectives grounded in place to convey the complexity of their unique histories, which often include colonisation and exploitation. Such works also have a wider intercultural resonance, especially when they reflect struggles for sovereignty, or highlight issues of indigenous mobility. EVOLVING DIALOGUES The many discrete connections between APT9 works reveal the artists’ interests in traditions, processes and histories across time and cultures, as well as the importance of materials and language. Pannaphan Yodmanee, who explores the history of Thai temple painting, is one artist whose contemporary work has a foundation in distinctive traditions. Aisha Khalid’s textile techniques draw on Persian miniature painting, Sufi music and philosophy, and Mughal architecture and garden design, while Vuth Lyno, Zheng Guogu, Tcheu Siong, Htein Lin and Soe Yu Nwe investigate language, rituals and customs that have migrated across borders and which have consequently been inflected with local and contemporary aesthetics. Transcultural dialogues evolve when artists work globally or in places far from their place of birth, as curator Tarun Nagesh considers in his essay ‘To define myself, I must define others’. Nagesh focuses on artists who address the vagaries of nationhood and borders of various types in their works, such as Sawangwongse Yawnghwe’s attempt to map the political machinations of contemporary Myanmar, and Rasheed Araeen, whose work has been informed by cultural displacement. He also highlights Boedi Widjaja’s architectural intervention in the Queensland Art Gallery and its exploration of the cultural intersections of housing from Indonesia, Singapore and Queensland. 25 As Nagesh reinforces, many works in APT9 demonstrate cultural dialogues that traverse or challenge borders in relation to form, content and ideas. Dialogues are also interwoven in the narratives of historical and contemporary art. Kushana Bush melds Persian miniature and Renaissance painting, Iman Raad employs the highly decorative aesthetics of South Asian truck painting, which also has roots in Mughal and Persian miniature traditions, while the historical Indonesian concept of lukisan (painting) is significant for the form and narrative of Zico Albaiquni’s imagery. Joyce Ho humorously reshapes international minimalist and conceptual art, and Kim Beom’s images are absurd depictions of urbanism that play on the conventions of Western conceptual art. Similarly, Yuko Mohri experiments with precedents in kinetic and sound art to create dynamic contemporary forms. This continual evolution of form and language in the region is one reason why art histories find themselves in a liminal zone, according to art historian Florina H Capistrano-Baker. 26 Conceptualism and Minimalism operate within Asia, Australia and the Pacific, but need to be considered in terms of their own histories, contexts and modernisms. Materials, forms and colours, for instance, possess distinct cultural coding in different parts of Asia and the Pacific, and the language of art can be influenced by various religious and vernacular systems. In this way — as curator Reuben Keehan argues in his essay ‘Material world’ — materiality and structure offer a form of realism distinct from figurative expression. Although abstract forms may be familiar in the context of international contemporary art, artists like Peter Robinson and Handiwirman Saputra give new syntax to objects in space, including new cultural content. In a different way, the vocabulary of text and voice is formed into a systematic structure by Shilpa Gupta in For, In Your Tongue, I Can Not Fit 2017–18 that then allows the incarcerated and the voiceless to be heard. In their use of idiosyncratic local materials, the minimal, non-objective paintings of Mongolian