Roaming around the Pacific

Reuben Paterson's Whakapapa: get down upon your knees 2009 contains memory cues drawn from his family. Photo / NZ Herald

The sixth Asia Pacific Triennial (APT6) opened in Brisbane last month, not with an exclusive cocktail function but with a free reggae concert at the Queensland Art Gallery's cavernous new Gallery of Modern Art, attended by more than 1000 people and headlined by O-Shen.

Based in Hawaii after growing up in Papua New Guinea, O-Shen's roots music is a perfect example of complex cultural migration.

Like other musicians featured in the Pacific Reggae section of APT6, this distinctive music has travelled around the Pacific absorbing local sounds but it is inherited from the island of Jamaica, where it is in turn influenced by the Rastafarian movement based on Ethiopian history.

APT6 features 313 works by artists from more than 25 countries, including Reuben Paterson, Campbell Patterson, Rohan Wealleans and Robin White of New Zealand.

Combined with concerts, a children's programme and extensive film screenings, including a 50-year survey of Iranian animation, it is a multi-faceted gallery experience.

Although international biennial or triennial exhibitions have become commonplace, opening every other week somewhere in the world and organised by star curators with celebrity artists, Brisbane's APT, inaugurated in 1993, has a uniquely local emphasis, dedicated to the art and issues of our immediate surroundings.

Since then the APT has continued exploring the dynamics of a region that typically operates at a distance from the traditional art centres of the Northern Hemisphere.

Initially, this included Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, travelling as far west as Pakistan and north into China, well before China's recent explosive development.

For Australia and New Zealand especially, this focus means reconsidering our identity as part of Asia and the Pacific, rather than as a European colony. But this is a constantly shifting perspective and APT6 has expanded into the Middle East and previously inaccessible parts of Asia.

"The APT has always been a project that responds to change," says Lynne Seear, deputy director of curatorial and collection development. "The regions and cultures represented are so complex and diverse; it would not make sense otherwise.

"The inclusion of artists from West Asia this time [from Turkey, Iran and Bangladesh] was prompted by the things artists from the region were telling us. They belong in the exhibition as surely as artists from India and Pakistan. And if there is a place for work from South Korea, why not North Korea?"

By including territories such as Iran, APT6 can consider the origins of Pacific Islamic culture, says Queensland Art Gallery director Tony Ellwood. "Each APT exhibition aims to reach further and deeper into the region and APT6 is a superb example of this ambition."

Blockbuster exhibitions often favour big shiny things that catch the short attention span of hurried travellers and curious locals.

But there is much that glistens in APT6 that draws you closer, with intricate crafting and conceptual layers, defying the stereotype of biennale bling.

An exquisite six-panel abstract mirror mosaic, using variations of hexagonal forms, by 85-year-old Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian is testament to the overlapping influences between East and West. If her complex work, based on Islamic architecture, geometry and beliefs, resembles the American minimalism of Robert Morris, Frank Stella or Sol LeWitt, it is no coincidence.

Farmanfarmaian studied design in New York, where she recalls meeting the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Barnett Newman and a young Andy Warhol, who was still drawing shoes for a living. She also remembers taking Morris to see mirrored Islamic shrines.

A taxidermied elk, bejewelled with glass, crystal and acrylic beads, and displayed in a luminous white room, seems an eye-catching choice for the exhibition's catalogue cover.

But there is something haunting about this displaced Canadian creature, bought from New Zealand via the internet by Japanese artist Kohei Nawa. The transparent cellular bubbles that line the elk's skin are like pixels that distort and amplify the surface of its body while absorbing and reflecting its surroundings, causing us to look more closely.

Many of Nawa's works use objects sourced over the internet from images found on auction sites. He says he is interested in international networks and economies, represented as part of a digital community.

Networks, collaborations and collectives are a significant aspect of APT6. There are the Vanuatu Sculptors and Mataso Printmakers, the One Year Drawing Project from Sri Lanka, and the Mekong Project, which brings together work from a region defined by one of Asia's longest rivers and including isolated countries such as Cambodia and Myanmar.

Also present is a rare display of works by artists from the Mansudae Art Studio of North Korea, employed by the state under direct guidance of Leader Kim Jong Il and usually occupied with education and propaganda projects.

Not all work in APT6 sets out to be overtly regional or political but, as Indian artist Subodh Gupta says, he lives and works in Delhi, surrounded by his own people, culture and objects.

"You may not make political art but, subconsciously, you can't ignore it." His 5m-high mushroom cloud made of brass and copper implements humanises the impact of nuclear devices using common objects such as pots, pans and bells.

With five triennials under their belt, there is a distinct sense the APT has loosened up and is less concerned with defining the identity of the region, allowing more playful works that speak of cultural influences in less direct ways.

"APT is where locality and culture are inherent, rather than a curatorial consignment," says New Zealand artist Reuben Paterson, who has contributed a 16m square painting comprising a kaleidoscopic grid of 2m panels. Each contains a different combination of koru, kowhaiwhai and floral designs, marked out in his trademark medium of glitter and paint. Although some motifs recall wallpaper patterns and op-shop fabrics, Paterson does not see his glam canvases as Pacific kitsch.

"I honour and appreciate history ... in an unconventional way," he says.

"The patterning of these fabrics is organic and fluid in nature, and adept as memory cues variously drawn from wallpaper, Hawaiian shirts, Dad's ties and my kuia's party dresses. With ... them being from the lives of the extended Paterson family, they unify an amalgam of parts, sources and references to ultimately reveal and contain their own independent genealogy," Paterson adds, noting that he is also of Scottish descent.

As part of the APT's evolution, there is a new generation of artists coming through who have quite different ideas and experiences of identity.

Pakeha New Zealander Rohan Wealleans, who is 32, makes no apology for his exploration of cultures in his irreverent works, noting the presence of Japanese paper folding in his "horror-gami" movie posters, the kowhaiwhai-like decorations on his paint-encrusted fibreglass canoe, Paikea Decoy, Seed Collector, and the fact that he lives in the Pacific region.

"Cultural identity is important within the work but is not the main focus, for I am many things other than a Pacific Islander. I feel just as strongly about my role as a sci-fi geologist," he says in reference to the fictional tribal objects he painstakingly excavates from layers of paint.

He clarifies that "the canoe was more historical fiction, which creates its own science-fiction future".

Similarly playful are the video performances of Campbell Patterson, 26, which show the artist hoarding liquid soap from public toilets, creating mountains from masticated chips or, most intimately, seeing how long he can lift his own mother, a ritual he repeats every year. "I try and make work out of nothing, just using what is around," he says of his simple approach. "I wanted to be quite honest with this work", describing it as soft-core performance art.

Queensland Art Gallery's Pacific curator Maud Page confirms a more light-hearted approach in including Patterson's work as an artist from the Pacific. "It doesn't need a lot of background to enjoy it," she says.

Seear agrees there is a pop sensibility to many of the New Zealand artists in APT6, noting that the gallery will host an exhibition of New Zealand work called Unnerved immediately after APT6 that "draws on disquieting aspects within New Zealand culture, hinted at through subtle strains of unease and malevolence, of the Gothic, of arcane knowledge and uncontrollable forces.

"We wanted the artists in APT6 to offer a point of difference to this show."

Having commissioned or purchased many of the works that have appeared in the APT since 1993, the Queensland Art Gallery now claims to have the largest collection of contemporary Asia-Pacific art in the world.

That may seem a strangely hybrid definition within which to make such a claim, but by investing in works for their permanent collection, there is a clear commitment to continue a conversation with these artists and the countries they come from.

In contrast to the temporary glamour of many biennales and triennials, it is clear the Queensland Art Gallery will continue figuring out what it means to live in this region.

Exhibition

What: The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial
Where and when: Gallery of Modern Art, Queensland Art Gallery, to April 5
On the web: www.qag.qld.gov.au/apt6