Asia Pacific Triennial 2002
fineArt forum, December 2002

The Asia Pacific Triennial currently on at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane runs until the end of January 2003. This event is the fourth: it's much smaller and not a survey of contemporary art practice in the Asia Pacific region like previous events. An unfortunate reading of this shrinkage of the exhibition - for those of us who experienced the other three - is 'smaller budget'. Despite this tendency to cynicism, the APT still has all the accoutrements of a 'block buster' - television advertising, full colour promotional materials, merchandise, a grand opening and a steady stream of visitors. It is actually pleasing to see that the team of curators have approached the exhibition in a different way, rather than settle on a tried and tested formula. They bring into the gallery this year, an unprecedented amount of moving image and screen-based work in order to acculturate audiences for the multimedia galleries and cinematheque in the planned Queensland Gallery of Modern Art.

At the media launch, QAG Director, Doug Hall explained that the objective of APT02 was to show the work of major regional figures in depth. The show pivots on several senior artists - Yayoi Kasuma, Lee U-Fan and Nam June Paik - whose work has been influential in the region. They are indeed an impressive trio of artists and their preoccupations inform the core themes of the APT. The other 14 artists were selected for the manner in which they continued to explore the ideas and issues raised by the central three. The APT's subsequent themes include: the impact of the moving image on visual culture in the 20th century; performance as a form of cultural expression in contemporary art; and the capacity of contemporary art to explore the complexities of globalisation. This approach results in more space being afforded to the participating artists. It also results in a series of exhibitions which are drawn into dialogues and connections within the event itself - artists in dialogue with each other as well as individual artistic practices connecting within those bodies of work. The APT has always been a difficult exhibition to negotiate and absorb because of its scale, so in some ways, this concentration on fewer artists makes it more navigable and comprehendible.

After Hall's speech, I slipped outside to watch a performance, Writing the time with water by Song Dong, apparently the youngest artist to be featured. At 11am sharp, Song dips a gigantic, bamboo stemmed, calligraphic brush into a bucket of water, consults his watch and 'writes' the time in its digital format on the concrete ground - 11:00:04. He repeats this suite of gestures, marking the passing of time for an hour. By 11:15:06 on this humid day, the first watery inscription has evaporated. There's really not that much to watch here, although the laconic subtlety of the work is quite mesmerising. As water dries into air and time slips by, we are reminded of the transformations of the elements and the fleetingness of life itself. These themes of time and memory continue in Song's other works, Writing diary with water project and Stamping the water. The latter is comprised of photographs in which Song squats in a body of water, pressing the surface with a large wooden block stamp. As with his repeated gestures of marking time, his photographs document the repetition of stamping, of pounding the stamp onto the water with a splash and no lasting imprint. It's futile - in fact, an impossibility - but poignant and the artist is imaginably locked in this ritual ad infinitum.

Equally mesmerising with their endless repetitions are Yoyoi Kusama's works. In her Narcissus garden and Soul under the moon, Kusama plays space like a musical instrument. There is a floating, sonorous, harmonic quality to her works through which space is multiplied. The water court of the QAG is filled with 2000 silver balls which circulate around the pool. A couple of walkways with seating have been built over the water and visitors are encouraged to take their time, the see their reflections apprehended in the mercurial swirl. In her catalogue essay, Rhana Devenport describes the work as a "vast sea of mirror balls in which the surrounding visible world is trapped and perpetuated."1 Narcissus garden has held the artist's attention and interest for almost 40 years and she has presented various versions of the work worldwide. Kusama draws the viewer into and through the work, as if through an alternate micro-universe. This sensation is heightened in Soul under the moon where she has created an immersive and mirrored space. Walking in from outside, we know the space to be of limited dimensions, yet once inside, with the play of mirrors, water, small suspended spheres and black lighting, it expands beyond the capacity of the small room into a wonderous, interior cosmos which has redrawn the laws of physics. The artist seeks our self-obliteration, a kind of heightened self-awareness into a becoming with the environment. She has written: "our earth is only one polka dot among the million stars in the cosmos … When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots, we become part of the unity of our environment, I become part of the eternal, and we obliterate ourselves in love."2

Within the Asia Pacific region, politics and protest are unavoidable and the APT curators have never shied away from politically charged work. It's not just the crushing exploitation of colonialism [see Mia Thornton's review in this issue] but also the political agency of those who seek to cast off the mantle of 'other'. The APT does take some risks (or perhaps, it gets risqué) with the inclusion of Pacifika Divas' in the program of opening events. The group of five 'divas' from New Zealand - comprised of Buckwheat, Lindah E, Sha-ne'ne', Shigeyuki Kihara and Phylesha Brown-Acton - work across politics, satire, dance, humour and general extravagance. The Divas are fa'afafine which means 'like a woman' in the Samoan language and denotes an active and creative cultural group within Pacific Islander communities. In a daytime floorshow on the QAG's watermall, the Divas performed a small set of works including original material, traditional dance and a luscious mimed number. However, their work is more complexly located than a 'drag show' and they have been active in HIV and AIDS awareness and education.

Easily, these Divas might also be goddesses, mythical creatures like those in Lisa Reihana's photographic and video works. Both the Divas and Reihana engage performative tropes as a Pacific form of communication.3 Reihana's Digital Marae evokes Maori mythology, constructing her own 'marae' or meeting place. It is a physical and a virtual place, a spiritual and community place. Perhaps like a Borgesian 'aleph', the 'marae' seems to offers untold potential as well as sanctuary. It is a place of becoming and reinvention. Four richly coloured, large-format photographs of female characters dominate the space and they are positioned as descending or looking down from the sky. The figures are luminous and otherworldly with each representing a traditional story which the artist has remodelled. From them, she draws encounters with lust, greed and revenge, rewriting her cultural history in a subjectively meaningful way. The fantastic figures are powerfully and eerily female and her telling of the stories which they represent is transgressive: her telling is both faithful and transformative.

In the works of Pasifika Divas, Reihana, Song and Kasuma, themes of the sacred are tangentially traversed. Nam June Paik too draws his own cosmology through his technologised references to Buddhism and intercultural exchange. Anne Kirker describes his artistic journey as 'indefatigable and adventurous', stating that his "beliefs in a global society where many cultures coalesce, where past and present are in constant dialogue, and where there is no division between art and life or between art and technology have been legendary constants in his work."4 His Dada and Fluxus sensibilities result in work that is ironic and parodic. With his assemblages, such as Baby Buddha, TV Buddha and The elements, he fuses together disparate objects and beliefs, forcing a reckoning between the material and the immaterial, the physical and the virtual, the technological and the spiritual. These are not devoutly spiritual, transcendent or religious works yet in the face of globalised technological and aesthetic change, these artists, like others in the APT (to name a few - Eugene Carchesio, Joan Grounds, Michael Riley and Nalini Malani), consider existence as other than a material experience. Jose Legaspi takes this exploration of the sacred/profane to another extreme where he engages an economy of excess. These artists focus on the minutiae of the everyday and of storytelling, on the nuances of life and living on this planet.

While there is a slightly uncomfortable ring of the 'master' in the arrangement of the three 'senior artists', there remains a resonant intergenerational exchange between those who lived during the horror of Hiroshima, those who burned flags during the Vietnam War and those who work on AIDS and HIV awareness. The crosscurrents ripple across those crisis points at which we sometimes pause for thought, inventing new mythologies. It is apparent from the APT and its address of globalisation that, for artists, there is more than one globalisation and there is more than one world: like the ever-reflecting, gently percussive, silver globes in Narcissus garden. The exchange which forms the APT elucidates an explosion of selves, histories, cultures and technologies which have found in contemporary artistic practice over the past 50 years or so a means of articulation, resistance, reinvention and utterance.

NOTES
1 Rhana Devenport, 'Yoyoi Kusama - It started from hallucination', in APT 2002: Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, ed. Lynne Seear, Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2002. 61
2 Yoyoi Kusama cited in ibid., 61
3 Maud Page, 'Lisa Reihana and The Pasifika Divas - Greed, Lust, Betrayal and Rivers of Fire', in ibid. 88
4 Anne Kirker, 'Nam June Paik - Whimsical encounters without end", in ibid. 78