The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Material world Vincent Namatjira’s rendering of seven Aboriginal elders alongside portraits of Australia’s last seven Prime Ministers and seven richest people are encountered on entering the installation of APT9 in GOMA. A concise, witty summation of themes of knowledge, power and wealth that thread through the exhibition, Namatjira’s work draws its poetic force from its loose painterly style and clever reconfiguration of measures of civic seniority, but also from the arrangement of its 21 evenly sized canvases into a cool 3 x 7 grid. Long associated with modernist rationality in art, the grid allows a ready comparison of types, disposition, race and gender, and its neutrality effectively levels the hierarchies involved. Here, artistic structure becomes a means of reflecting on social structure, with all of the metaphorical possibilities that this implies. Across APT9, the concrete materiality of the work of art — its formal arrangement as much as its component materials — is of as much relevance to its social context as explicitly political content. This is true of the robust rings of the Gunantuna (Tolai) people’s shell money that coexists alongside the kina, Papua New Guinea’s official currency, as well as Nona Garcia’s modular details of a beloved pine tree and Vuth Lyno’s tower of domestic shrines from a single community, both of which fell victim to the unyielding forces of development. The notion of abstraction as the pursuit of artistic autonomy — where the work of art is concerned only with itself, at a remove from everyday life and politics writ large or small — is at odds with the practices surveyed by the Triennial. 1 This can be seen in works by Rasheed Araeen, Roberto Chabet and Hassan Sharif, which diverge significantly from international orthodoxies of minimalism and conceptualism, in their use of shapes and textures that resonate strongly with specific times and places. Similarly, supposed abstract creations by Singapore’s Boedi Widjaja, Mongolia’s Enkhbold Togmidshiirev and Ayesha Sultana from Bangladesh all draw on regional architectures, colours and materials, which connect to cultural histories and experiences of home. As part of the same current of research that would energise the early editions of the Triennial, Fukuoka Art Museum curator Masahiro Ushiroshoji noted in 1992 that social transformations throughout Asia had seen attendant changes in art in three key areas: the emergence of new subjects, new forms and new materials. Installation, performance and the use of materials drawn from daily life, for example, stemmed from a desire among artists ‘to engage in the society in which they live and in the real world surrounding them’. 2 Ushiroshoji was expressly considering recent shifts in South-East Asian art, but by 1994, he had recognised this tendency throughout Asia, summarising it as the title of the ‘4th Asian Art Show Fukuoka: Realism as an Attitude’. This meant a realism not of pictorial style, but a realism expressed through a critical approach, and that could manifest on any level of artistic production, including materiality and form. 3 For Ushiroshoji, it was this criticality that signalled a regionally distinctive contemporary art — an art that was both related to, but qualitatively different from, a fusion of Western Modernism and local custom. The new artistic subject identified by Ushiroshoji was a society based on commodities rather than communities, and its arrival had been hastened by the forces of industrialisation and modernisation — forces synonymous with Westernisation in Asia. For artists, the fusion of Western and local elements was no longer a stylistic device, it was a lived reality. Since the time Ushiroshoji made these assessments, social transformation has only intensified, but the basis of societies throughout the region in the production and circulation of commodities has remained intact and solidified. Where art is concerned, the greatest shifts have occurred at the level of production and circulation through the increasing professionalism of the sector and its integration into the global art market. Audiences for contemporary art have grown immensely, even if censorship and political repression remain persistent spectres. Largely, though, Ushiroshoji’s framework of subject, form and material is still relevant to considering the relationship of contemporary Asian art to its contexts. Context is central to much of the work in APT9. From the brave new world of automated labour and data-driven retail evoked in Cao Fei’s video installation Asia One 2018 to networks of complicity in crimes against humanity detailed in Sawangwongse Yawnghwe’s The Myanmar Peace Industrial Complex, Map III 2018, many artists highlight the social and political context in which their work was created.