Postcard from Brisbane: The Asia-Pacific Triennial & More

Photo courtesy The Long March Project, Beijing

Long March Project/Qin Ga, "The Miniature Long March (detail)" (2002–05)

Photo courtesy Queensland Art Gallery

John Pule, "Tukulagi Tukumuitea (Forever and Ever) (detail)" (2005)

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First, the Queensland Art Gallery, together with its new neighbour, the wonderful just-opened Gallery of Modern Art, is hosting the fifth Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, through May 27.

This is a huge, huge show of Pacific Rim artists, but, frankly, it promises a lot more than it delivers. Where were the cutting-edge Oceanic contemporary artists, from the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, who I’ve been hearing good things about in London? Not in this show, unless you count the display of (some) contemporary textile pieces in the Queensland Art Gallery.

In that collection, the naive scenes by Samoan and Fijian weavers and embroiderers, such as La Famille Pomare (l991) by Aline Amaru, had a certain charm and energy, but the commercial quilts from Hawaii, though pretty enough, would have been more at home in House & Garden.

The Gallery of Modern Art, meanwhile, curiously devoted a significant amount of its space to India-born, London-based artist Anish Kapoor (who is definitely not from the Pacific Rim). And though Kapoor’s work is always a pleasure to behold, we’ve beheld much of this selection before. The 1981 pigment piece 1000 Names is not new, nor are his two wall-mounted void pieces from a decade later. Two monolithic pigmented stone pieces, made 15 years ago, were very beautiful and worth the journey, but what an opportunity missed! Why couldn’t the organizers have persuaded Kapoor to show some of his marvellous new work? I am sure he and his gallerist Nicholas Logsdail of the Lisson Gallery would have leapt at the chance.

And what about the inclusion of Gordon Walters? This New Zealand-born abstract artist had some wonderful works in this show inspired by Maori iconography, which I found a revelation in their spare and measured austerity, but Walters died in l995, so once again, nothing truly contemporary there, either.

The Chinese art collection in the Triennial also suffered from a curious reluctance on the part of organizers to show current cutting-edge art. The show was mostly represented by a vast assemblage called The Long March, which is a post-Mao piece, granted, but hardly cutting edge, given that it was done almost a generation ago and the two succeeding generations of Chinese artists are not harkening back to this phase in their country’s history. Far from it, in fact—young Chinese artists are now tending to look outward to what is happening elsewhere in contemporary art.

Take, for instance, the work of Ai Weiwei, which occupied a huge space in the watermall level of the Queensland Art Gallery. This second-generation, post-Mao contemporary artist subverts ancient Chinese arts and crafts, painting Neolithic period vases with pastel polymer paint and reassembling Ching dynasty tables in ways never intended by their original makers. He’s been doing that for years, but for the Triennial, he created one new site-specific piece, Boomerang (2006), a huge golden chandelier suspended over the watermall that reminded me of a light fixture I once saw in Las Vegas. I think his piece may have been a comment on Shanghai’s westernization in the l920s and ’30s. Or then again, maybe not.

Emerging from the glow of Weiwei’s chandelier, I found myself completely cheered by the exquisite work of John Pule, a New Zealand artist who was born on the island of Niue, and whose work is inspired by the island’s traditional hiapo (or bark cloth). His intricately drawn and penciled narratives tell tales of the old life on that tiny coral atoll, of missionaries, of a life of airplanes far beyond its borders. Here, at last, was something that really did look like cutting-edge Pacific Rim art.

And the work of Korean artist Yoo Seung-Ho was a revelation. From a few feet away his pieces appeared to be classical Chinese pen-and-ink landscape studies. On closer examination, though, they turned out to be composed of thousands and thousands of tiny penciled Korean hangul characters, which form words that, when spoken aloud, reflect on the content of the painting. Sometimes the words are grouped tightly together and sometimes they are spread out over the canvas. The result, from afar, is awesomely beautiful, and then when you see the seemingly impossible intricate technique, it is almost shocking.