The 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art

The 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, even the name of the show is a mouthful.  I had the opportunity to travel to Brisbane to spend a day at the APT7, and to try to take it all in.  There’s no way around the fact that this is a huge show.  Massive even.  Even for a person like me who loves nothing more than looking at art, it was a marathon.  An unbelievably enjoyable marathon.  For those of you who are reading this and are thinking, “What the what are you whatting talking about?” I shall explain a little more.  Every three years, the Queensland Art Gallery and the Gallery of Modern Art puts together a very big survey exhibition with a focus on art from the Asia Pacific region.  It pieces together some of the very best examples of cutting-edge art practice from our home turf and neighbours.  This year, artwork from Papua New Guinea and West Asia were included along with work from Australia, Vietnam, Indonesia and many other nations[1].

The size of the show is mind-boggling.  It fills all of GOMA and a great deal of QAG, with artworks ranging in size from works so small and precariously placed you need to use a telescope to view it, to 30 metre installations and neck-craning architectural pieces.  This is a fact I love about the APT7.  It isn’t a blockbuster exhibition where all the works are ‘regular’ sized and the crowd stays at the optimum viewing distance shuffling around until you’ve seen it all.  You have to walk in and around and up to and away from the art just so that you can experience it properly.  It’s a truly interactive exhibition, without an overabundance of gimmicky, hands-on artworks.  Not only is there the physical interaction though, there’s also a finely balanced mix of intellectual, art history-lovin’ artworks, with emotive response driven works, with just plain old interesting stuff.  Painting, sculpture, installation, film, video, dance, and music all represented well.  All of this together makes for an almost literal tsunami stimulation that’s quite difficult to digest in a single viewing.

   

Large-scale survey exhibitions like the APT7 are a bit like compilation CDs, they’re finely crafted collections that hope to represent a whole year’s (or decade’s or genre’s) goodness.  And just like those albums, there are the big hits and then there are the tracks that you didn’t expect to be so good, but are well worth the listen.  I was pleasantly surprised by a couple of aspects of the APT7.  The amount of site specific and temporary or ephemeral artworks really surprised me.  There are many works that were painted directly onto the gallery walls, or that are built into the fabric of the gallery itself, or that are created from disposable materials.  These fantastic artworks just won’t exist beyond the end of the show.  The fact that there are so many of these types of artworks really gives the whole exhibition a sense of urgency; if you don’t catch it now, you never will. 

It pains me to say this, but I was a little hesitant when I heard about the inclusion of so much work from PNG.  It’s just not a country that has a real contemporary art reputation.  You’ll be pleased to know that my mind has been changed.  When I walked into the PNG section I was greeted by a huge work made up of heaps of traditionally painted panels.  It took up most of the wall, and in front of that were a series of massive totems, and I thought, “I get it.  They’ve blown up the proportions of the traditional work to make it all contemporary-like”, and to be perfectly honest, I was still fairly dismissive.  But when I read the information panels, I was absolutely floored.  The scale of these artworks isn’t exaggerated in any way whatsoever.  They’re traditional, au natural, and stunning.  Sorry, Papua New Guinea, I severely underestimated you.

Like always, this compilation disc has its platinum singles.  Indonesian artist Uji Handoko Eko Saputro (aka Hahan) has delivered a selection of vibrant, street art inspired works focusing on the struggles of being an artist and surviving in the contemporary art scene.  The three painted works and one sculpture are real crowd-pleasers; graphic, funny, and beautifully crafted, although somewhat ironic considering the artist’s gripes about money-grabbing art dealers and cruel critics while being the (literal) poster child of an international art event.

 Less hyped, but equally impressive is the work of Tiffany Chung from Vietnam titled roaming with the dawn – snow drifts, rain falls, desert wind blows (2012).  This enormous herd of tiny glass animals is overwhelming.  It glitters in the light as a huge single piece, but when you get close, individual animals appear all seeming to march as one.  It forces so many heady thoughts through your mind at the same time you’re looking at something so pretty, it’s an odd experience.  Thoughts of religion and pack mentality and emergency migration and peace all swirl around as you start to be able to detect minute colour differences between the figures which brings you crashing back to  thoughts of temperature differences in the manipulation of the glass and logistics of care of so many tiny fragile pieces.

 

For me, the absolute standout work is Canine Construction (2009), by South Korean artist Gimhongsok.  Looking like a balloon animal made of black garbage bags and standing on guard on the middle floor of GOMA right at the escalators, it’s easily dismissed as space filler.  In fact, while I was admiring it I heard at least three people scoff that it was just garbage bags and anyone could make it.  If you bother to spend a little bit of time with the sculpture, you begin to notice that it’s stiff, it’s not rustling in the aircon or moving in any way you would expect a flimsy, garbage bag creature to move.  And it seems to have an unusually commanding presence for a party favour made of junk.  When you give it a closer inspection and read the accompanying information panel, you’ll find that it’s actually cast in very expensive resin, and the artist loves messing with ideas of ‘appropriate’ art materials and viewers’ expectations of art.  His dry wit and impeccable technique can be seen in another sculpture which looks like a pile of cardboard boxes and a rolled camp mattress to form the word ‘love’.  Both works seem like low-rent copies of existing famous sculptures, but twist your experience of the exhibition to make it a wry, intellectual joke.  Gimhongsok is at once a creator of conceptual art objects and a biting critic of his own artistic domain.

 

The 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art is a slick production.  The kids’ area is up to GOMA’s usual super-high standard of making interaction with contemporary art accessible and fun, there’s ready access to guided tours and extra information on many of the works by scanning QR codes with your smartphone, and even the merchandise is good (I bought a Gimhonsok key ring!).  If you can, make the trip to see this behemoth of an exhibition.  If you live in Brisbane and you haven’t been yet, go now.  Right this instant.  The Queensland Art Gallery and The Gallery of Modern Art have outdone themselves with APT7, and I can’t wait for APT8 to arrive in three years’ time!

The 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art is open at The Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art until 14 April 2013. 

---

[1] Qagoma.qld.gov.au (2012) The 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT7)- Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. [online] Available at: http://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/exhibitions/current/apt7_asia_pacific_triennial_of_contemporary_art [Accessed: 12 Jan 2013].