Art Speaking for Humanity: The Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art - Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia

The Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art ([APT.sub.3]), presented at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia from September 9, 1999, through January 26, 2000, completed a series of three exhibitions initiated in the early 1990s. It has been my privilege to serve as project director for all three exhibitions, which have involved over six hundred artists, curators, and writers from the region in a collaborative endeavor to understand the changing art of the Asia-Pacific today. The multiperspective curatorial selection model, based on mutual respect and genuine inquiry, has been for me the most rewarding aspect of the project, which has been more than an exhibition--it has been a shared journey of discovery.

Seventy-seven artists participated in APT3, a team of forty-three international curators made the selections, eighty writers contributed to the catalogue, and ninety speakers participated in the international conference. An audience of 150,000 is expected to bring the total number of visitors over three exhibitions close to 400,000--2 percent of the population of Australia. New developments in 1999 included a Kids' APT, extensive audience interaction, a Web site at www.apt3.net, an online exhibition and forum, a screen culture component, cross-disciplinary and collaborative art, and works crossing borders with tradition and "craft," such as the fabric creations of the Indonesian Brahma Tirta Sari Yogijakarta Studio, made with the Utopia Batik Aboriginal community in Central Australia.

The Triennial selections focused on art that reveals the dynamic interchange between traditional and contemporary, between past and present, in the cultures of this region, and on art that rejects a future based on a featureless global sameness. Instead, over three exhibitions we have overwhelmingly seen art about enduring human aspirations, in which artists seek to contribute to the efforts of communities to survive the present and construct new futures.

Cai Guo-Qiang's Crossing the Bridge (1999), a 23-meter-long bamboo suspension bridge, serves as a potent symbol for the Triennial. Like cultural engagement, crossing the bridge is not easy, and some turn back when a fine shower of rain descends on them at the bridge's central point. Most of our audience, and especially young people, who have comprised a high percentage of visitors (50 percent were under thirty-five), choose to cross. To cross to the future, one turns one's back on a work by Katsushige Nakahashi, a life-size replica, controversial in Japan, of a crashed World War II Zero fighter plane made from thirteen thousand photographs of a model plane. Returning across Cai's bridge, the visitor is forced to confront the possibility that our future may be as full of war and human suffering as previous centuries. Nakahashi's plane was burned at the end of the exhibition in a ritual of spiritual cleansing. The artist notes that his children know little of the war, and it is clear that young Australians in Brisbane, the city that served as MacArthur's headquarters for the Pacific war from 1942, know just as little.

The Sri Lankan artist Jagath Weerasinghe's Yantra Gala and the Round Pilgrimage (1999)--a Buddhist altar decorated with flowers and birds made in community workshops by women and children--and the Indonesian artist Dadang Christanto's Fire in May (1998-99)--forty-seven fire-blackened life-size sculptures of human figures--reflect those artists' concerns about human injustice today. Weerasinghe invokes two thousand years of Buddhist philosophy in a meditation on the tragedy of the civil war in Sri Lanka, which has taken fifty thousand lives; Christanto's work is a cry of agony at recent events in Indonesia, where forty million people in a country of two hundred million are returning to poverty, and where issues of unity, social justice, democracy, and religious intolerance, as well as the terrible events in East Timor, are shaking every pillar of society.

For Australian artists, the Triennial has had great resonance. For example, Indonesia is Australia's closest neighbor, and Australia is leading a peacekeeping force in East Timor, which may bring us into conflict with Indonesia. As one Australian artist commented to me, the Triennial is more important to Australians now than ever in maintaining cultural contacts and building friendships in the region, which hopefully will continue to cross political divides. Events within Australia have also shaped a personal response so that the new Kids' APT of interactive works for three-to-twelve-year-old children reflects concerns regarding the short-lived conservative political movement in this country that has advocated anti-Asian immigration policies. However, the Triennial is not simply about educating Australians about our neighbors and our own multicultural society. From the first, it was understood that Australia was not attempting to dominate this discourse and was an equal partner in a project designed primaril y as a platform for artists. As the U.S. critic Judith Stein noted in the June 1997 issue of Art in America, "it is clear that the Queens-land Gallery's 'Asia-Pacific Triennial' series is affecting the global discourse of contemporary art.

If this is the case, it is because the contemporary art of this region has much to teach us about how artists can interact with their communities and about the role contemporary art can play in social transformation by engaging with such issues as social justice and environmental degradation. These exhibitions have taught us to review colonial viewpoints and to understand that cultural interaction, adaptation, and change have taken place in the region for centuries, so that Western "influence" may come to be seen as insignificant in the future. They have also taught us about the continuing relevance of religion, spirituality, and tradition, especially for indigenous peoples for whom their past is their future, and about cultural survival, including within nations. For example, as the Australian Torres Strait Islander Tom Mosby has noted, Torres Strait indigenous culture survives in defiance of the theory of evolution, where the weak are supposed to be overwhelmed by the strong. Nowhere is this better exempli fied than in Pacific art, where indigenous artists from a population base of under six million have, through sheer creative energy, won respect among artists from a population base of three and a half billion throughout Asia. The art in these exhibitions cannot be summed up in a few hundred words, but the Asia-Pacific Triennial exhibitions are above all a testament to the power of art to challenge and to contribute to the enrichment of the human spirit.

Caroline Turner was Deputy Director and Curatorial Co-ordinator for all three Asia-Pacific Triennials at the Queensland Art Gallery. She was recently appointed Deputy Director of the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University. where she will direct cultural research projects.

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