Diversity Down Under: the most recent Asia Pacific Triennial highlighted three internationally acclaimed artists, along with a selective sample of talents from across the region - Report From Brisbane

Art in America, July, 2003 by Felicity Fenner

Lee U-fan and the late Howard Taylor (1918-2001) represented the respective traditions of Eastern and Western abstraction. Lee's calligraphic mark-making involves sparse, deliberately placed brushstrokes that punctuate almost monochromatic fields, creating compositions that are entirely nonobjective. There is a meditative quality to his canvases that adheres to an Eastern tradition. A selection of Lee's straightforward but evocative floor sculptures juxtaposing large, irregular boulders and square iron plates complemented the paintings' simplicity.

Taylor was one of Australia's most interesting but least-known artists, partly because his work is not easily pigeonholed in critical terms, and because he lived and worked in a rural region of Western Australia, thousands of miles from the art centers of the east coast. Like Lee, his practice consisted both of sculpture and painting. Taylor was represented in the show with six major paintings spanning nearly 20 years. His austere compositions--typically a light or dark circle which appears to emerge in three dimensions from a flat background--offer a blend of formal simplicity and philosophical intensity. Taylor's paintings explore the physical characteristics of the sun and the optical experience of gazing at it.

The youngest participant and greatest revelation of the exhibition was Song Dong (born 1966), a Beijing-based artist with a background in performance art. There was a particularly well-articulated link to Song's ritualistic practice and Lee's contemplative approach, and more generally to themes of repetition that recurred throughout the exhibition.

A highlight was Song's Stampimg the Water, a 36-panel record of his 1996 performance that was pinned to the wall in a grid. Large color photographs document the artist sitting in the shallow water of a river, lifting and then immersing a wooden stamp (or chop) and repeating the action for exactly one hour. The performance took place in Tibet and relates to the Tibetan custom of dunking a small statue of Buddha on the spiritual leader's birthday. For Song, however, "stamping the water" conveys a secular rather than religious intent: the impression of the stamp is transient and makes no permanent impact, just as official stamps, used to authorize various activities in China, have no power to influence underlying attitudes and beliefs. Writing Diary with Water, documented by four color photographs, has been an ongoing performance since 1995 that involves the artist writing with a calligraphy brush on a stone tablet, substituting water for ink. Within seconds, the water dries and the imprint disappears. The ritual has a personal as well as political rationale: it represents Song's daily meditation on life and makes a poetic allusion to the danger of private diaries becoming the object of state vilification.

Do-Ho Suh's installations make use of photography and repetition in a very different way. Suh explores the contested space between the individual and the collective. The Korean-born, New York-based artist exhibited a version of the bridge shown at the 2001 Venice Biennale, constructed of thousands of miniature acrylic human figurines. Adjacent to this was his customized wallpaper, Who Am We?, an endlessly repeating pattern of 40,000 tiny photo-portraits scanned from his high school yearbooks. Viewers were enticed to come very close, searching for individual identities in a sea of disembodied faces. Downstairs in the "Kids APT," an instant photo machine allowed visitors to insert their own portrait in a sample sheet of Sub's wallpaper: looking for one's own face within the repetitive pattern was fun but sobering, since everyone was literally reduced to the same nearly anonymous, decorative fate.