World view

Art and ideas from far and wide are gathered under the umbrella of Brisbane's Asia-Pacific Triennial. Christopher Allen explores

Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art to April 5, 2010

THE sixth Asia-Pacific Triennial is not, as the name may lead one to suppose, an exhibition of Pacific Rim artists, but one that starts much farther west, in the land that has always represented the beginning of Asia and is today Turkey. Important contingents of artists come from Iran, India, China and Southeast Asia, and coverage extends to the Melanesian and Polynesian peoples of Oceania.

A generation ago, only a few artists from these countries were part of what remained essentially the Euro-American mainstream of modern art.

In most places, local art schools were divided between age-old traditional styles and European ones that were copied dutifully but at a great distance from their originals, whether European modernism or Soviet academic realism.

Since then things have changed considerably. It is not just that Asian artists have more direct access to Western classical and contemporary models but, above all, that they have become more confident about the use of their own traditional styles and cultural references.

Shows such as the triennial will always be mixed: some things are interesting or inspiring and others indifferent; but the one thing that distinguishes good art in any medium is a combination of motivation and conviction. The kiss of death is to be arbitrary, or to have no deeper raison d'etre than fashion or marketing.

One of the most appealing works in the exhibition - high in authenticity and spontaneity, low in marketing and free of modishness - is Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba's The Ground, the Root and the Air: The Passing of the Bodhi Tree (2004-2007). It is a short film about 50 painting students from the art academy in Luang Prabang in Laos on a painting excursion on the Mekong river.

Each student sits or stands in a narrow traditional boat with his easel, drawing the scenery while a boatman steers. It is an extraordinary sight, a fleet of landscape painters descending the powerful river, and the artist takes his time evoking the students, their work and the beautiful river scenery they are gliding through. Then they pass a sacred bodhi tree within a stone enclosure, and we hear monks chanting.

Suddenly, one boy dives off his boat and swims to the shore. Then others follow, one knocking his easel and his work over into the water in his haste; and others continue on their way. And that is all, but it is enough to make this the only work in the exhibition one could actually call haunting.

There are some works that, if not actually haunting, are certainly memorable. One of these is Charwei Tsai's Mushroom Mantra, in which she has inscribed the Chinese text of a Buddhist sutra in tiny characters on mushrooms; there is something poignant about seeing the sacred characters inscribed on a plant that grows so suddenly but will also perish.

Particularly remarkable is Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian's enormous Lightning for Neda (2009), intricately worked in mirror shard - a craft that originated when Iran imported mirrors from Venice during the Renaissance and some inevitably arrived broken - in fantastically complicated traditional patterns.

The whole thing is brilliantly luminous and indeed resplendent, and its dedication to Neda Agha Soltan gives it a special meaning. She was the young woman who was shot by a paramilitary Islamist thug and died on camera during the post-election demonstrations in Tehran in June. Oddly enough, both the label in the exhibition and the handbook carefully avoid naming her, although the information is available in the exhibition catalogue.

The patterns recall a centuries-old cultural tradition and the idea of lightning may even allude to the pre-Islamic Persian religion of Zoroastrianism. It's a blaze of light in the face of the dark bigotry that holds the country hostage, and the populist tyrant who has made his country a pariah state when it could be a bridge to better understanding between the Muslim world and the West.

The cultural depth and originality of Iranian culture is visible in several other works including a series of animations, one of which is made of sand and pebbles and evokes the trials of a shoot as it grows into a tree. Less convincing, though, is Farhad Moshiri, with his pink paintings covered with cake decorations.

Interestingly, the Indians, not only heirs to a great civilisation, but from a functioning democracy and a tolerant society, do not come off particularly well in this exhibition.

Subodh Gupta is described as among India's most prominent contemporary artists, but one struggles to think what his enormous mushroom cloud composed of brass pots and pans could possibly mean. The brochure may tell us that it "shifts an image of destruction into one of abundance", but that's empty verbiage. There's nothing abundant about pots and pans treated like rubbish in a tip.

As Peter Nagy observes, he's "good at selecting icons and symbols", but arbitrary conjunctions are not good enough. Being big and spectacular is not a substitute for making sense.

Much the same could be said about his brass motorbike. It's interesting to read the history of this machine and its manufacture in India, but that doesn't make the work significant. Even when you add the milk pails, what do we have? A vague suggestion that something used for war or police activities has been converted to kindly nourishment? It's just not cogent enough.

Two other Indian artists who work together, Thukral and Tagra, are also disappointing. They want to comment on the social pressures on young Punjabi men to emigrate in search of success, and if this doesn't sound a very promising subject, it isn't. They end up producing a laboured and ungainly interior, meant to represent the home of such a socially ambitious family. But all this indulgence in predictable vulgarity doesn't succeed in generating much in the way of insight.

Thukral and Tagra's work reminds us of the principle of economy in all art: to do much with little is admirable; to do little with much is lamentable.

Gupta's case is equally interesting because it recalls the fact, already hinted at, that it is from their own world and their culture that artists draw strength. Gupta presents himself as rooted in Indian culture, but this turns out to be quite superficial. The world he really belongs to now is that lucrative no man's land we call the art world.

Another interesting case in this regard is that of Kohei Nawa, a Japanese artist who bought a stuffed elk on the internet and has covered it entirely in plastic and glass bubbles. The effect is very arresting, especially as it is displayed in its own room, under almost painfully bright light diffused through a ceiling screen so there is universal brilliance but no shadows.

You can see the elk through the bubbles, but distorted and enlarged, in some places more than others. The overall effect is disturbing, even sinister, as thought the animal has been attacked by a virulent disease or parasitic organism. The label and catalogue have some absolute nonsense about what it is supposed to mean. In reality the object falls into the super-collectible class - school of Damien Hirst - and it is not surprising to learn it is sponsored by Hermes, the luxury goods manufacturer.

From neighbouring South Korea comes an installation by Kibong Rhee that looks good on paper - it photographs well - but is much less effective in reality: a real willow tree in artificial mist through a diffusing screen. It would be so much better just to do an ink painting in the traditional way.

In contrast, a collection of work from North Korea is an unusual inclusion in a contemporary art exhibition. Some of the Soviet academic style oil paintings allow glimmers of humanity to show through, but there are some dreadful travesties of ink painting; some of the prints are interesting if one can stomach the inevitable beaming peasant or worker. This is a country where happiness is compulsory.

We are greeted at the opening to this section by an enormous mosaic of delighted workers celebrating a productivity competition; the kind of thing that is made for underground stations to cheer up the commuters, apparently.

Now of course the gallery has to be tactful, but it is hard to display such a work without acknowledging that it is kitsch, propaganda and lies. We may think it's camply ironic, but they don't.

Among the Chinese artists, Chen Qiulin is the most striking. She has reconstructed a row of three little peasants' houses that had been demolished as part of the large-scale destruction entailed by the Three Gorges Dam project. They now stand like a miniature ghost town and monument to the very simple lives they once sheltered.

Environmental destruction in China is also evoked in a long animation by Qiu Anxiong, while destruction of another kind, and in Taiwan, is the subject of a striking series of photographs by Yao Jui-Chung.

There are ruined buildings in these black and white images, but also fallen or abandoned religious carvings, old military monuments and propaganda statues, and even the kitsch of mass entertainment.

The label for this work raises a point that is equally valid for many other pieces. It would be desirable for wall texts to confine themselves to providing the background information necessary to understanding the work in question, but to forebear from adding theoretical and ideological spoonfeeding about its meaning and, worst of all, hints as to how we are to respond. The art of exhibition consists, as I have observed before, in making work available and accessible to viewers but without pre-empting their own engagement.

There is a freedom and, literally, a responsibility in the viewer's response.

Tracey Moffatt's Other ventures into territory that is too often beset with ideology and moralising, but manages to do so with verve and good humour. Produced in collaboration with Gary Hillberg, a film editor, the work is a collage of moments in cinema when a European viewer encounters the strangeness of other cultures, mainly tribal peoples and often ones who have themselves never known outsiders.

It is in part the fascination of civilisation with the noble savage: the sense of danger, but also of wonder at a life more intimately involved in the elemental realities of existence. Life, death and sex all seem closer to the surface than they are for the European protagonist, and the difference is often underscored by the contrast of buttoned-up clothing and semi-nakedness. Inevitably, sexual desire is awakened: native women are seen as more innocently open to love, native men as more spontaneously virile.

But interestingly, not all native peoples have appealed to the European imagination in this way. Polynesian women and African men have become sexual archetypes, if not stereotypes, but Australian Aborigines have not.

In any case, Moffatt and Hillberg's film is an entertaining opportunity to reflect on a topic that embraces ethnology, psychology, history, literature, cinema and erotica. We see - and often recall - scenes of massed tribal dancing or ceremonies, then more intimate encounters, moments of recognition, tenderness or desire.

There are close shots of the eyes that are watching all these things; and then there is sexual union and the film ends in an operatic sequence of volcanic eruptions that would be excessive except that it is evoking an experience that is in its very essence one of excess.