Visual arts review, APT: living cultures fighting for survival

There’s disquet in the way relentless globalisation buffets vibrant cultures but also solace and renewal in artistic traditions

Hikaru Fujii – installation shots - Mujō (The Heartless) 2019

One of the most striking works in this year’s APT, the 10th in the series, is Salote Tawale’s large raft constructed of bamboo, with a kind of cabin on top made of perspex sheets and a tarpaulin covering. Inside is a mattress with some other personal effects and outside are various supplies and a stove rather perilously balanced on the stern. Inevitably, it reminds us of the Kon-tiki, the famous raft that Thor Heyerdahl built in 1947 to test theories of migration across the Pacific, although this one doesn’t convince us that it is quite as seaworthy.

Nonetheless, there is something that touches the imagination in any craft of this sort, akin to what Roland Barthes evoked in his essay on Jules Verne’s submarine, the Nautilus (1957): the sense of being safe and protected in a kind of capsule against the buffeting of the outside world. In this case, the raft is meant as a metaphor of movement between cultures and worlds for a woman who is originally from Fiji but now lives in Sydney, and who, in this age of over-identification, also feels the need to describe herself as queer, as though that added either to the interest of or the need for a raft.

The general feeling in this exhibition is of malaise in a world of relentless exchange and globalisation which favours the contemporary art industry while eroding local, popular and traditional cultures; and the reason that the APT is somewhat more interesting than the usual run of Bienniali and Triennali is that it is somewhat less a product of that sterile industry and more concerned with the survival of living cultures.

The purest expression of malaise, boredom and the sense of futility is in the series Fall in dopamine by an Iranian couple, Maryam Ayeen and Abbas Shahsavar. The couple are seen confined in a small space – recalling the additional strain of living in lockdown over the last couple of years – alternating between depression and experiments with drugs. In one image they are seen making wine, illegal under Islamic law in Iran today, although a ubiquitous theme in classical Persian poetry.

Various artists reflect on the history that has brought us to this point and, as always, the more subtle works are far more effective than the few that are shrill and aggressive: art is for reflection; posters are for slogans. One of the more interesting is the Taiwanese Chia-Wei Hsu, whose video collages use a documentary mode to illuminate unknown corners of colonial history, all in this case related to stories of animals.

It is interesting that Asian artists can reflect on subjects like this without the oppressive tone of scolding, resentment and guilt that we suffer in Australia and in other English-speaking countries. Perhaps it is partly because the history of Asia is so long and complex that no one can become fixated on simplistic narratives of invasion and dispossession. Peoples, conquerors and empires have succeeded each other for thousands of years across the whole Eurasian continent, and it is through this dynamic process that the world’s great civilisations developed.

One of Chia-Wei Hsu’s works is about the history of the Malayan Tapir; the story is told as though by a young zookeeper to an audience of visitors, and reveals the rivalry between Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore, and his deputy Major William Farquhar, later first Resident of Singapore, as natural historians, each wanting to be the first to publish the newly-discovered animal. Another, larger-scale piece tells the story of Farquhar enlisting the help of a local shaman to round up some elephants, and also attempting to destroy a fort built by the Portuguese and since occupied by the Dutch to prevent its falling into French hands.

A third work tells how the Dutch East India Company, in the 17th century, traded spices from the East Indies to Taiwan, which they controlled at the time, in exchange for deer skins, and then traded the deer skins in Japan for silver; their island base at Dejima was Japan’s only point of contact with Europe. Eventually the Taiwanese deer population was severely depleted; the VOC attempted to occupy Cambodia as an alternative source of deer, but were defeated in 1643-44. This story is told by a deer keeper in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. The Formosan Sika deer, meanwhile, was technically extinct in the wild by the 1960s, but has been successfully bred and re-introduced into the wild in recent years.

One of the most evocative works in the exhibition, both personal and nostalgic, is Sumakshi Sing’s installation based on memories of her grandparents’ house in Delhi. Meticulous needlework captures the insubstantial and elusive quality of memory: doorways, fragments of brickwork, staircase banisters are picked out in white thread almost as light as a spider’s web. Behind a door at the back of the installation, the door’s shadow has been rendered in black thread, applied to the floor and wall behind, disconcertingly contradicted by the real but lighter shadow cast by the gallery lighting.

A number of artists deal more explicitly with unhappiness, especially in countries suffering from poverty or political oppression; thus Karan Shreshta’s images of Nepal evoke the squalor behind the picturesque surface, and the shadow of military repression. Jasmine Nilani Joseph’s long drawing The absence of next door evokes the experience of her own family and her evidently Christian community displaced during the Sri Lankan civil war and only just allowed to return to their ruined town 20 years later.

Historically, the religions that have arisen in India have been the most tolerant in the world, but in recent years Hinduism has become increasingly militant, and even Buddhism, traditionally the most peaceful of all religions, has taken more aggressive forms in Sri Lanka and Burma. The 3AM group from Burma has one particularly striking set of photographs in which they picture themselves as university graduates throwing their mortarboards up into the air in the American fashion, but smeared with makeup like clowns and standing in front of wretched huts or in a desolate landscape that make a mockery of unusable qualifications.

Other artists find solace and renewal in their local artistic traditions, such as the Javanese Jumaadi, whom I once had the pleasure of teaching at the National Art School, and who has a suite of subtly painted hanging cloths, filled with figures that are at once whimsical and evocative of perennial themes of fertility, of life and death. The Balinese I Made Djirna has an elaborate installation with strings of pumice stone recalling his island’s great volcanoes, interspersed with rough and primitive carvings recalling folk traditions predating the arrival of Hindu civilisation perhaps two millennia ago.

From Iran and Afghanistan to Pakistan and India, the traditions of Persian and Persianate Mughal miniature painting continue to enjoy a diverse afterlife. Amin Taasha, from the Persian-speaking Hazara people of Afghanistan, has a series of images linked by the inspiration he finds in the great Persian poet Hafez, but weaving in other threads of Afghan history, with Greek and Buddhist motifs, including the Buddhas of Bamiyan, which he saw as a child before their destruction by the Taliban. Adeela Suleman, in a rather different vein, paints intense images of violence and killing, inspired by Mughal battle scenes, on found antique European plates, often making use of the classic device of breaking the border to emphasise the blood shed in the conflict.

The sense of solace found in cultural tradition is particularly strong in Mayur and Tushar Vayeda’s series of monochrome cloth paintings – mainly in white gouache and cow dung – representing in intricate and poetic detail the story of the creation of the world according to the traditions of the Warli people. The Warli are one of India’s Adivasi or tribal groups, whose ethnic origins may be partly Indo-European – going back to the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilisation and partly pre-IE; they speak an IE language, but have animistic beliefs heavily influenced over time by Hinduism.

All cultures face difficulties in dealing with the postcultural ruthlessness of the contemporary world, especially minority and tribal groups. The situation of the indigenous population in Taiwan, in the minority since Chinese immigration in the 17th century, is the subject of several works. These Austronesian peoples are particularly interesting as the presumed ancestors of the Polynesian peoples who colonised the Pacific. Today, like other indigenous peoples, they are faced with the dual challenge of adapting to the modern environment while rebuilding a connection with traditions and languages.

In some cases they can face active government efforts to repress rather than foster their traditions and languages, and Hikaru Fujii’s work considers this in relation to the history of Taiwan, which was under Japanese rule from its annexation in 1895 until 1945 (Japan formally renounced her claim to the island in 1952). During these years, Japan made a sustained effort to develop Taiwan and to instil Japanese culture in its people; indeed the single most memorable thing in this exhibition is a Japanese propaganda film from 1943 which is part of Fujii’s installation.

This remarkable document shows young people in schools, at lessons and taking exercise; children eating lunch in a refectory and older ones learning to calculate using an abacus; or being harangued by a teacher who tells them of the great national purpose to “annihilate Britain and the United States, enemies of humanity” – ironic considering that half a century earlier, Japan had built its modern navy on the British model.

In one sequence, we see young men standing around a pool, first seeming to pray and then carry out an exercise routine before jumping into what we can only imagine must be icy water to build endurance. Physical and mental health, discipline and stamina all seem to evoke a kind of utopia, but the dystopian shadow of all such systems is inescapable.

Meanwhile, on the larger screen adjacent, a group of performers mimic the actions of the figures in the propaganda film. They are Vietnamese students living and studying in Japan and who took part in a workshop by the artist. Fujii’s subject is ostensibly the imposition of Japanese culture in Taiwan, and there is an interesting edge to his use of Vietnamese performers, who are voluntarily assimilating that culture by living and going to university in Japan.

It cannot be lost on any viewer of this work, however, that the greatest effort of deliberate cultural vandalism is being carried out, and has been carried out for decades, by the totalitarian regime in China, which has long sought to destroy Tibetan identity, has more recently gone to extraordinary lengths to oppress and brainwash the religiously Muslim and ethnically Turkic Uyghur peoples, has crushed democratic Hong Kong, and now threatens to invade the democratic and prosperous nation of Taiwan.

Story of the Moving Image

Australian Centre for the Moving Image

New permanent exhibition