Dec 28 2012

Field Trip: Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane

by Michael Young

The seventh Asia Pacific Triennial, currently filling the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, presents new and recent work by 75 artists from 27 countries, celebrating 20 years and seven editions of what acting director Suhanya Raffel claims is “the only recurring exhibition in the region that concentrates on Asian art.” This anniversary encourages reflection on the vast changes that have taken place in the Asia Pacific region over the period, a process aided by the institution’s prescient acquisition policies during these years.

The current edition centre-stages Indigenous art, as well as traditional masks and ritual costumes from Australia’s closest neighbor, Papua New Guinea, which are exhibited separately in the Long Gallery. The latter display could be seen as exoticizing a perceived “other,” without addressing ongoing divisions between anthropology and art, gallery and museum. The visceral nature of much of the art throughout the Triennial, however, hints at an answer.

Even so, the Triennial is confined neatly within the light-flooded spaces of the two galleries, offering no sense that any of the art here is going to break free and inhabit other parts of this temperate, subtropical city. In this regard, this is a conventional exhibition contained within clearly defined parameters. The Asia Pacific Triennial remains a sparkling and uplifting exploration of art from a region whose cultural identity seems at last to be free from any mediation through Western viewpoints, yet this sense of passivity is something to be regretted. It remains to be seen how Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art’s newly appointed director, Chris Saines, fresh from 17 years at the Auckland Art Gallery, will take the event forward.

1. The sublime Reflection Model (Perfect Bliss) (2010–12) by Takahiro Iwasaki seems to float meditatively in its own space. Made from Japanese cypress, the model is based on the Byodo-in, a tenth-century temple near Kyoto.

2. Once a key figure in the Chinese avant-garde, Huang Yong Ping has been based in Paris since 1989. Ressort (2012) is a 50-metre-long aluminium and steel skeleton of a snake metaphorically linking heaven and earth.

3. Indian-born, UK-based Raqib Shaw’s dazzling nine-by-three meter, unfinished magnum opus, Paradise Lost (2011–12), on which he has been working for ten years, is an allegorical world populated by strange animals and hybrid creatures beneath a surface of enamel, glitter and rhinestones.

4. The ground-floor gallery at the Gallery of Modern Art is given over to a variety of Papua New Guinean performance costumes and slit drums, as well as figurative sculptural supports and a towering, decorated ceiling painting by seven Kwoma artists for a Kurrumbu, assembled from 200 panels and using a subdued color palette.

5. Atul Dodiya standing in front of his monumental commissioned work Somersault in Sandalwood Sky (2012) appropriating 20 years of material from the Triennial archive through painting and photocopying. Housed in several large glass-fronted cabinets, close inspection reveals many old friends in an artistic guessing game.

6. Singaporean artist and curator Heman Chong responded to the Triennial’s 20 Year Archive project by creating a 20-channel sound installation made of readings from the Triennial’s archive that, in true democratic fashion, he asked the gallery staff to choose.

7. Iranian-German artist Parastou Forouhar’s installation, Written Room (1999–), fills one room with intricate calligraphy that has no meaning beyond the figurative, but conveys her personal trauma (her parents, who were critics of the Iranian government, were murdered in Tehran in 1998). The artist does not supply answers, merely opens a space for reflection.

8. The World Turns (2012) by Maori artist Michael Parekowhai was recently installed outside to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the institution and 20 years of the Asia Pacific Triennial. The million-dollar work has been described by some sections of the Queensland State government as a “waste of taxpayers’ money” and attracted controversy for its use of Aboriginal culture yet is proving a crowd-pleaser.

9. Ruangrupa is an Indonesian collective that has constructed a narrative surrounding a fictional 1970s rock band, The Kuda. Through memorabilia and archival material the collective has followed the fortunes of the group and its connections to the Brisbane music scene, with spectacularly tangible results.

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