Beyond the Future: The Third Asia-Pacific Triennial

The connections between art, identity, and politics in the Asia-Pacific region are very close, but also strained by contradictory and mutually incompatible trajectories. When we think about art in this region, the most crucial, but also the most blurred, questions focus on how artists define themselves in relation to their own cultures--and how, at the same time, they come to terms with the particularly diasporic nature of contemporary global art. These questions open up such issues as the relevance of origin for artists who are constantly moving across national boundaries, not only physically but mentally; the inadequacy of both Orientalist and post-Orientalist perspectives for the interpretation of contemporary Asian-Pacific art; and the possibilities of developing new curatorial paradigms that have the potential to remap the terrain not only of art from the Asia-Pacific region but that of global art in general.

The inauguration of the Asia-Pacific Triennial (APT) by the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia, in 1993 has represented an ambitious and ongoing attempt to develop such new paradigms. The APT is the most important of the large, recurring survey exhibitions that have emerged in the Asia-Pacific region in the 1990S (Fukuoka, Kwangju, Osaka, and Sydney also host important international biennials or triennials). In spite of the negative rhetoric about race, ethnicity, and national origin generated by chauvinist, extreme right-wing politicians in Australia during the mid-1990s, a fiercely supportive Queensland audience has adopted the APT with great enthusiasm, and the Queensland Art Gallery and its provincial government have contributed significant resources to it. APT1, in 1993, attracted an audience of 60,000 visitors, a remarkable number for an exhibition hosted by a city of little more than a million people; APT2, in 1996, attracted twice that number; and APT3, on view from September 9, 1999, thro ugh January 26, 2000, is projected to draw even more (hundreds of visitors from across the region attended a three-day conference coinciding with the opening). More self-consciously and successfully than the Asia-Pacific region's other biennials and triennials, the APT has generated a substantial cross-cultural dialogue between artists, curators, academics, and the general public in the six years since its inauguration.

For APT3, project director Caroline Turner has led a team of approximately fifty curators, divided into four region-based teams and one team focusing on the theme "Crossing Boundaries." These curators selected works by seventy-five artists from more than twenty countries in the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, The Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, and for the first time Niue, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Wallis and Futuna Islands. But in its third incarnation, it is apparent that the APT is being pulled in two different directions, resulting in a tension that usually manages to remain invisible in other, less ambitious exhibitions: the inclusion and celebration of microcultural difference sits increasingly uneasily with the critical interrogation and analysis, both by artists and critics, of the assumptions underlying definitions of that same difference. Another phenomenon is also at wor k: the frenzied selection of a new global artistic canon.

Until recently, even the most basic information on contemporary art from Asia and the Pacific, especially from nations other than Australia, China, and Japan, has not been widely accessible outside of the region. The proliferation of international mega-biennials/triennials in the past decade has not improved this situation as much as one might expect. Although the Second Johannesburg Biennale (1997) included an exhibition organized by the curator Hou Hanru entitled Hong Kong, etc. and the most recent Venice Biennale (1999) featured the work of twenty artists from China, the most from any nation, Documenta X (1997) covered the Asia-Pacific region completely inadequately, and the Sydney Biennale (1998) was marked by a naively unselfconscious domination by European and U.S. art.

Nevertheless, the publication of several more focused books and catalogues during the same period has made information on certain aspects of art from the Asia-Pacific region more available. These publications include Apinan Poshyananda's Modern Art in Thailand (1992); Traditions/Tensions: Contemporary Art in Asia, the catalogue for the traveling exhibition that Poshyananda organized for the Asia Society in 1996; Inside Out: New Chinese Art, the catalogue for the traveling exhibition that Gao Minglu organized for the Asia Society in 1998; and John Clark's Modern Asian Art (1998), among others.

The appearance of these publications, however, poses the question of whether there really is an "Asian-Pacific" art at all, and, if so, can it be differentiated from that found, for example, at Venice or Documenta? In his magisterial new book, Clark traces the ways in which Asian artists have transferred, recycled, and innovated within the avant-garde modernisms received from Europe and the United States. In tightly argued, densely footnoted chapters, he explains how artists simultaneously overcompensated for their peripheral status and reinscribed their marginality within borrowed "mainstream" idioms, even knowingly accentuating, within fabricated neotraditional forms, their cultural difference.