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I’ve just been in Brisbane, checking out the latest Asia-Pacific Triennial—APT9. Since it began in 1993, the APT has presented art from across the region, from developing and developed nations alike. In the early years, it drew curatorial advice from far and wide, but, since APT4 (2002), it’s been largely internally curated. Strengthening in-house expertise, Queensland Art Gallery dispatches its curators to diverse jurisdictions, to uncover new art and artists. 

The curatorial-team approach gives the APT a distinctive flavour. Although it is never a particular curator’s view, the APT has developed a particular voice that transcends its iterations. It may promise a patchwork of difference, but it is always a patchwork, never so different. Every three years, we return to enjoy a new lineup of artists but largely the same set of concerns, the same frame. The APT finds it hard to ‘move on’.

The APT seeks to create a level playing field for diverse artistic and cultural practices, ranging from the contemporary to the crafty and customary. But, in the process, it can decontextualise things, fudging and flattening distinctions. You see this in the way it clusters craft objects to accord them a contemporary-art ‘installation’ look and in the trouble it occasionally has distinguishing the ‘primitive’ and the ‘primitivist’—pardon my French. Interestingly, Jonathan Jones brilliantly exploits this in his APT9 project.

A question that the APT continually poses but never answers: What is the difference between art and culture, art and artefact? We can certainly appreciate the amazing formal qualities of Tolai shell-money wheels from Papua New Guinea—one of the hits this time. But would the APT consider exhibiting Australian paper money in this fashion, so we can appreciate its iconography and print quality?

Walking through the show, we are prompted to make correlations between works and whereabouts, pigeonholing works as signs of the cultures from which they come. This time, the folly of this was revealed when I saw Kushana Bush’s work. The New Zealand artist’s paintings look like Indo-Persian miniatures. Her aesthetic is not symptomatic of New Zealandness, but, in the context of the show, if you knew no better, it would be easy to imagine it was. (This certainly made me revisit my snap judgements about other works I’d seen.)

The APT is ambitious. The size of the Gallery’s spaces prompts artists to upscale—it can feel like art on steroids. However, it’s the intellectual, cultural, and artistic territory the project covers that is truly daunting. The APT addresses an imagined viewer sufficiently versed in and concerned about the region’s many local histories and conflicts, religions and philosophies, and art traditions to get it. In this, it is forever exposing shortfalls in its actual viewers’ knowledge of their neighbours.

That, in itself, may be a good thing, but a paradox underpins the enterprise. As much as it celebrates art and artists embedded in specific local conditions, the APT constructs a viewer who is just the opposite: a privileged cosmopolitan who—like APT curators—presumes to encompass, bridge, and transcend specificity. Of course, in the end, the APT is no neutral frame, but itself a highly specific product of its own local conditions and histories—a unique cultural artefact. Polished.
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