Asia-Pacific Triennial at GOMA sparks search for genuine article

When searching for meaning at GOMA’s Asia-Pacific Triennial exhibition, don’t read the labels.

Genuine articles

The best way to approach an exhibition such as the Asia-Pacific Triennial is to walk around and simply look at the works, considering what each one is trying to do, what each achieves or fails to achieve, and ultimately what carries conviction. This may seem so obvious as to be not worth saying, but in practice we all too often allow the careful packaging or spin of commentary on exhibition labels to convince us we see what is not really there.

Of course it is useful to know something more of the context of a work and the circumstances of the artist, but curators should consider it a principle of integrity not to tell viewers what they are meant to see or how they are meant to react to a work. Unfortunately, the contrary is the rule in contemporary art, either because the work is obscure or inadequate without this supplement of extrinsic significance, or because the field is so permeated with certain kinds of ideology that curators cannot resist spoon-feeding the viewer with the moral conclusions to be drawn from the work.

Just as a piece of music that does not work before you read the sleeve notes cannot be saved by the blurb, so a piece of art that does not impart a sense of conviction in its own terms will not gain conviction by commentary. Nor can its meaning be changed by telling us the artist was trying to express, or thought they were expressing, a different meaning.

An amusing example here is a video in which we see an attractive young woman with long bare legs and high heels lying on her back and walking up a wall. There is an elaborate explanation on the wall adjacent, informing us of her South Pacific heritage, and assuring us that “Western fascination” with and “stereotypical ideas” about Pacific Islander bodies are here being “powerfully addressed” and even subverted. But one would have to add that they are also being exploited for all they are worth.

More unpleasant is an elaborate video on two walls, mainly showing footage of life in Cambodia, in which the artist appears in a saffron-coloured caterpillar-shaped costume as the Buddhist Bug. There is something ugly about the way this smug and artistically pretentious contrivance is juxtaposed with the real life of humble people, but when we realise the artist is a Muslim in a Buddhist country, it feels even more distasteful. Naturally the label hastens to characterise her work as playful, but nothing in the work supports this assertion, and there is no escaping the stench of condescension.

Interestingly, we learn this woman, though a Cambodian, had grown up in exile and returned to her country as an outsider. She seems to illustrate a broader problem, when Asian and other cultures are seen by compatriots who have spent too much time in the West, have become too imbued with the jargon of gender and postcolonial theory that festers in art schools, too assimilated into the international contemporary art business, and too disconnected from the lived reality of their own cultures.

The most convincing work is almost inevitably that which is closest to its roots and has not been processed through the homogenising machinery of the contemporary, and still essentially Western art world, in which spontaneous cultural expression is canned, packaged and duly marketed as carefully circumscribed cultural difference.

Nge Lay, an artist from Myanmar, is one of the first to strike a more authentic note. Her life-size schoolroom, with a schoolmistress and 26 pupils all made of carved and painted wood — each one an individual with distinctive gestures, posture and attitude — is so straightforward it stops us in our tracks with its simple sincerity. The label, naturally, tries to turn the work into the bearer of an ideological message, because of the fallacy mentioned above.

We are accordingly told the installation is “a call for equal and better education in Myanmar for all children, both rural and urban.” But it is not really a call for anything. It is simply an invitation to see and to ponder something: the vocation of art is to reveal, not to preach. It is up to us to draw a conclusion or infer an imperative from what we have seen.

As a general impression what we see are glimpses of the reality of daily life in poorer countries, in the factories, sweatshops, mines and other industries where men and women work for little to support the throwaway consumer affluence of the developed world. Hit Man Gurung, a Nepalese, evokes the pathos of the imported Asian labourers who do all the work in the rich, indulgent and idle Arab Gulf states. Closer to home, there is a memorable suite of photographs of the landscape blighted by mining in Bougainville.

Sometimes there are hints of political protest, but these are most effective when indirect, as with Kiri Dalena’s photographs of Filipino demonstrators from a generation ago, with their placards whited out, hinting at futility but also at the general nature of their discontent. Po Po, another Burmese artist, has photographed a whimsical yet pointed series of interventions in daily life, when he placed VIP cards on public seating, drawing attention to the habits of a people who have lived under dictatorship.

One of the most effective works is a video installation on five screens by Kasmalieva and Djumaliev from Kyrgyzstan, one of the small, ethnically Turkic central Asian republics until recently part of the Russian empire, and for many centuries part of the great Silk Road that ran across the Eurasian continent.

Independent today, Kyrgyzstan is extremely poor and the work, titled A New Silk Road, chronicles the much less glamorous trade in which the Kyrgyz sell the Chinese the scrap metal from dismantling abandoned Soviet industrial sites, and import in return mass-produced Chinese consumer goods. In the first sequence of the film, we see scrap being loaded on to a huge truck, and shortly afterwards we watch the antiquated Kyrgyz trucks driving from right to left, and shiny new Chinese container trucks coming in from left to right.

The landscape is harsh though beautiful in places and it seems a miracle that the massive but clapped-out trucks can keep rolling. But we sense qualities of courage and stoicism, and a kind of joy when a singer performs a traditional song. At the end, a vignette with a boy on a pony following a truck on the road reminds us of the people’s history as nomadic horsemen.

One of the other outstanding works is also a film and also has obsolete industrial plant as its subject. It is by the north Indian group Desire Machine Collective, on a single screen and unusually long compared with most video works. Indeed 39 minutes is much longer than the attention span of the usual gallery visitor today, and most people who came in while I was there stayed for only a minute or so.

Although slow, the film is captivating, alternating between stillness and carefully planned, unerringly steady panning and zooming. The subject is a disused thermal plant, and it could have been interpreted merely as industrial detritus or even as evidence of environmental degradation, but the attention to framing and composition, and the patience of the contemplation brought to bear on each detail evoke, unexpectedly, a sense of reverence.

Also impressive and absorbing is Koken Ergun’s film of the Ashura ceremonies celebrated by a group of Shi’ites — a minority in Turkey — in a suburb of Istanbul. These ceremonies are the culmination of a 10-day annual commemoration of the death in battle of their hero Hossein ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet, at the battle of Karbala in AD680. The murder of Mohammed’s son-in-law Ali and then of his son and infant grandson eliminated rivalry to the new Umayyad dynasty and lies at the origins of the divisions — so bloody today — between Shia and Sunni.

At first we see a small group of men walking through what looks like an underground carpark. The temperature must be freezing, for their breath makes clouds as they chant a ritual lamentation, following a leader who is reading the text and beating their breasts. Then we meet another group and finally witness a rally filling the street with crying and lamenting figures.

In a second sequence, we watch an elaborate yet amateurish re-enactment of the battle itself inside a mosque, in which, interestingly, some of the performers work themselves up into the imagined rage of their own enemies. Finally Hossein is slain and there is weeping and wailing. In a third sequence, a crowded audience, seated on the floor of a mosque, listens to a ritual narration of the battle and sobs as the reader insists on heart-rending details.

The work is a striking illustration of the way culture works to maintain collective identity. Only humans can rehearse the grief of a battle that took place more than 13 centuries ago, renewing emotions that forge their sense of solidarity and, inevitably, hatred of their enemies. Yet, seen from the outside, this is exactly the sort of murky soup of anger, self-pity and resentment that all traditions of wisdom, from Stoicism to Buddhism, urge us to transcend.

That is why, in the end, one of the most refreshing works in the exhibition is the video of a performance by Georgian group Bouillon, titled Religious Aerobics. They have taken the gestures made by different religions in prayer, from crossing themselves to genuflection, and worked them into a continuous sequence resembling an aerobic exercise routine. Sending up religious belief can be distasteful — as we saw earlier — but in the case of Judaism, Christianity and especially Islam, the most humourless religions in the world, a little light-heartedness and the reminder to keep breathing can only be salutary.

Asia-Pacific Triennial

Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, until April 10