It’s like he wants us to be liked by everyone. I mean, Led Zeppelin didn’t write tunes everybody liked. They left that to the Bee Gees.
—Wayne Campbell, in Wayne’s World (1992)

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Robert Leonard talks to Gina Fairley, Jacqueline Millner, David Teh, and Lee Weng Choy about APT6.
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Robert Leonard: With its spectacular, crowd-pleasing, interactive, G-rated exhibits, its reggae concerts, and ‘happy robot’ kids’ art activities, APT6 clearly embodies a post-critical turn in art and museology. Do you think that, in this form, the APT is still doing important work with contemporary art? And if not, what is left for a ‘critical’ APT to do?
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Gina Fairley: The APT redefined itself in 2006 with the opening of GoMA. APT5 reportedly drew 700,000 visits—more than the four previous APTs combined. While that redefinition may connect with a global post-critical shift, it was largely brokered on local conditions. Deputy-Director Lynne Seear admits the Gallery is ‘very audience focused’, and it’s hard to argue against an exhibition that engages so many people. But I’m concerned that the need to sustain massive attendance figures taints curatorial decision-making, leaving little room for the prickly irreverence of critical enquiry or a more probing cross-cultural dialogue.
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David Teh: The APT situates itself at the interface of two shifting spheres: the once nascent, now extensive stage for Asian contemporary art and, as Gina says, an ascendant, more parochial public culture. Sure, APT can still do important work, but does it work for the artists or for the taxpayers? I’d like to think it could work for both, but at this scale I can’t see how. There may be plenty left for a ‘critical’ APT to do, but there can be little motivation to lead that horse to water when it’s already drunk on something else.
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Lee Weng Choy: When the APT began in the early 1990s, bringing together artists from around the region made an intervention into the prevailing discourses of international art. But I think the APT has always aimed for the mainstream, which isn’t to say that it has to be devoid of criticality. It does seem that the present show is less edgy than the first show I saw in 1999. But I’m not sure which has the larger part to play in this evolution: internal institutional issues (the curating, the institutionalisation of the APT, the establishment of GoMA) or external ones (developments in contemporary art globally).
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APT6 doesn’t have an explicit theme, although some mention is made of ‘collaboration’. Do you see any implicit themes? What holds this show together?
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LWC: The APT has become a successful brand, and isn’t that what really holds the present show together? That’s not meant as an indictment—or, rather, there’s more at stake. Big museums and exhibitions are precisely about spectacle and branding, and getting worked up about this isn’t what’s needed in criticism today.
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GF: Little holds this show together. It presents simply as a group show with an Asian flavour. While there are socially and politically alert works—Gupta’s explosion of pots and pans, Chen Qiulin’s wooden house from the Three Gorges dam-flooded region, the nuanced ‘Mapping the Mekong’, and Qiu Anxiong’s epic animation—they do not build to any aggregated conclusion. The tensions and bite of socially challenging works that speak to an expanding region have been polished to a smooth rhetoric. Is this a kid-glove approach, to match our post 9-11 sensitivities, or a deliberate counter to the overtly constructed narratives we have come to expect of geography-based exhibitions? APT has defused the post-colonial tensions of the 1990s. That model of criticality has become institutionalised and neutered. Perhaps that’s a good thing, but new challenges are needed.
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DT: Collaboration has been advanced as one theme of APT6. It’s made to stand for a variety of tendencies in contemporary art that really should be distinguished, especially interactivity (audience participation). Interactivity suffuses APT6, as it does every contemporary mega-show, the mother lode of course being the seventeen Kids’ APT projects. The idea of collaboration is used as curatorial shorthand for all sorts of relationships: between artists and curators (Mansudae Art Studio), communal productions (ancestral figures from North Ambrym), artisanal workshopping (Pacific weaving, Vanuatu prints), community-embedded productions (Ho Tzu Nyen’s and Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s projects with art students), more intimate partnerships (Burmese artists Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu, the Aquilizans), works made by correspondence (‘One Year Drawing Project’, the embroidery made to Kyungah Ham’s specifications by North Korean artisans and covertly shipped out), to say nothing of an older studio model with its apprentices and assistants (Sopheap Pich, Subodh Gupta).

In his essay, Russell Storer conflates collaboration and interactivity and salutes its regional lineage too, although its pictured representative, Surasi Kusolwong, who makes very interactive work, is not much of a collaborator. Lines need to be drawn between ‘collaboration’ and ‘participation’. Are they even related? And I think we ought to scrutinise claims to collaboration. A good place to start the scrutiny would be the negotiations between APT, Mansudae Art Studio, and collector-curator Nicholas Bonner. In his floor talk, Bonner reportedly explained that the relationship rather exceeded collaboration.
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Lead curator Suhanya Raffel says the APT needs to be open to what artists do, even if that doesn’t fit our expectations of contemporary art.¹ This imperative seems to underpin the audacious inclusion of Kim Jong-il’s house artists, the Mansudae Art Studio, and also the special project ‘Pacific Reggae: Roots Beyond the Reef’. What do you make of them?
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GF: I find Mansudae Art Studio’s inclusion problematic. It’s such a fabricated, tightly massaged commission (the paintings were acquired by the curator and the mosaic by the Gallery). The APT’s celebrated ‘liberation’ of the North Korean artists is legitimised through the presentation of its counterpoint, ‘government issue’ images from the curator’s private collection. Which is the greater coup, the curator showcasing his collection or the gallery claiming the show as a press-tag ‘first’? While some will disagree with me, I would argue that both reek of opportunism rather than inquiry. Mansudae Art Studio sits quarantined within APT6 where the audience reverts to old modes of voyeurism.
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And ‘Pacific Reggae’?
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GF: Reggae may be the most prolific expression of contemporary culture across the Pacific but I question its place within a visual art context. ‘Pacific Reggae’ would sit more comfortably in a social history museum. The cynic in me asks: is it included because visual art practice has dwindled in the Pacific and the APT is struggling to fulfill its regional charter?
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Jacqueline Millner: ‘Pacific Reggae’ came over as tokenistic. Given reggae’s significance in the Pacific, and with its spiritual and political roots in Rastafarianism, I would have welcomed something more thought through.
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APT6’s humanism reminds me of the exhibition The Family of Man. The show is premised on tolerance—suspending judgement in order to respect other peoples’ values and experiences. But those values can be deeply conservative: religious (Ayaz Jokhio), paternal (Svay Ken), aristocratic (Reuben Paterson), and authoritarian (Mansudae Art Studio). Must we simply accept such ideas as part of the tapestry of culture? Should APT be so tolerant? Can we get beyond relativism?
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GF: Beyond relativism? Impossible, try as we might. The APT—you are right—increasingly wants to argue the universality of human experience. But the discombobulated hang works against cultural dialogue between works. The ‘cultural tapestry’, as you suggest, is inevitably reduced to a palatable weave.
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APT6 saw the introduction of a little levity, with Rohan Wealleans’s performance (a piss-take on Maori and Pacific Island protocols) and Tracey Moffatt’s mash-up video Other (picturing colonial contact as a steamy, doomed love affair). Both works made light of politics that APT has previously held dear.
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GF: Moffatt’s work both seduced and soured. Like all good one-liners, it offered little to extend intercultural dialogue. Delivered with surgical precision, its politics of sizzling racial/gender relations—delivered in a neat seven minutes—exemplified the kind of pummeling we have come to expect from the biennale formula internationally. Other pales in comparison to Shooshie Sulaiman’s Darkroom, for example, a work that confronts similar issues and yet is wrapped in humility and enquiry rather than brash humour. One is open for consideration, the other is a fait accompli.
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JM: Even with its by now familiar format, Other drew laugh-out-loud responses. Its outrageous stereotyping—the content was priceless—reminded us that certain old ideologies (like that of the noble savage) persist, despite lip service to the contrary. And it’s all the more excruciating when you realise they’re playing right now, at the local multiplex, in James Cameron’s latest claim to being King of the World.
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I’m from New Zealand and, when I look at the selection of New Zealand artists over the years, I can see how APT curators are always already looking for certain kinds of art. Despite its claims to diversity, to looking with an open mind, it seems to me that the APT has part fostered, part created a genre of art—let’s call it ‘APT art’. Do you share that view? What do you consider overlooked in APT6?
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GF: You hone your gaze to New Zealand, I hone mine to the Philippines. The Philippines had a consistently strong representation in the APT (except for APT5 when it was omitted due to Government travel warnings). The selected works have consistently addressed socio-political or gender issues. While this folds back into an extremely vital history of Philippine social realism, its constant revisiting does little justice to the diversity of this layered art scene. A long history of Philippine abstraction and a particularly local brand of conceptualism have yet to be exposed within the APT. The Philippine inclusion for APT6 offered little in advancing a sense of contemporary activity on the ground in the Phillipines. The APT chose the Philippine artists most represented in international biennales, Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan; artists who had recently moved to Brisbane and had already been presented in APT3. And, to top things off, they were presented to press as part of the Australian contingent. This is not to discredit the work, which was exquisite, and there are very good reasons why they were chosen. However, the breadth of the Philippine art scene—a scene which has changed dramatically since its last presentation in 2002—continues to remain overlooked.
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LWC: Perhaps the APT curatorial team has developed, over the years, certain habits of looking. This happens to everyone, critics included. So how does an institution check itself? This is one area where critical debate is indeed much needed. At stake are not just processes of selection, but processes of self-questioning.
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DT: APT6 gave me some feel for Cambodia, perhaps Taiwan, but I share Gina’s concern that APT might be losing track of what’s happening on the ground in some places. Place still has a place in art  and in the APT. I’m all for reframings, but ‘post-national’ needn’t mean ‘post-geographic’. Is there a genre we can call ‘APT art’? Undoubtedly. It’s ethno-pop, typified, in APT6, by Thukral and Tagra, Bùi Công Khánh, and Gonkar Gyatso.
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APT6 is huge, taking up all of GoMA and a lot of QAG. Massive works were commissioned to show off the museum’s grand spaces, as if seeking a seamless fusion between the art and the institution. Does the monumentalism work?
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GF: The venue dictates that work be large. Individually, the large works—including Gupta’s installations, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian’s mirror mosaic, Wit Pimkanchanapong’s paper ceiling, Zhu Weibing and Ji Wenyu’s crowd of men with flowers, and Jokhio’s watermall temple—are impressive and well managed. They sit beautifully in the space, engaging its lofty architecture, and yet there is an inconsistency or clunkiness in the show’s flow, as the viewer bounces between different scales of exhibit. Sucked along by bling and spectacle, it’s easy to overlook quieter pieces at the edges.
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JM: There’s little doubt that APT5 and 6 favoured spectacular works that blend into GoMA’s immaculate design and awesome scale. Guy Debord says spectacle seduces us, distracting us from reflective critical thought, but, with its capacity to generate strong, positive, affective responses, perhaps spectacle doesn’t preclude meaningful engagement. If it can be balanced with smaller-scale, less resolved, and quieter artistic approaches, perhaps it has a place in contemporary art exhibitions.
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LWC: What troubled me wasn’t the monumentalism of any works so much as the monumentalism of GoMA itself, even though I don’t find the building too large. It’s the big rooms. My experience of them was of large volumes of space more than of art. One big room would have been fine. But two—in the same show—was a problem. The big spaces seem more like a burden than an architectural asset.
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Raffel says, ‘The one constant of the APT is dissonance’. Is APT6 genuinely dissonant or just a mixed bag, something for everyone? Can you be populist and dissonant?
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GF: APT6 attempts to usher audiences through a region and yet frames that journey as disjuncture. Consider the juxtaposition of Charwei Tsai’s Mushroom Mantra and bright graphics of the Mataso Printmakers from Vanuatu, or of Rudi Mantofani’s guitars and Farmanfarmaian’s mirror mural. While ‘Asia’ is far from consistent or compatible—and I can see the desire to work against the catch cry of ‘contemporary Asian art’—dissonance needn’t work against curatorial synergy. But here the dissonance does little else than frame individual works. What is lost is dialogue between works and ideas—the threads are too obscured.
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DT: I think this idea of dissonance is just surface play, a decoy to divert attention from the general curatorial operation, which is to eliminate all forms of friction, both within and amongst works.
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JM: Speaking of dissonance seems trite, a way to strike the expected critical note. I did not see dissonance. I saw a tightly orchestrated installation that evoked sameness rather than difference. The selection and installation were so worked over, the invitations to ‘participate’ so orchestrated, that an at times oppressive sameness pervaded the exhibition. We need genuine dissonance, more loose threads, more stuff that does not ‘add up’.
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The APT is assertively regional. However, its idea of an Asia-Pacific region sometimes seems a bit arbitrary. The region keeps expanding. In APT6, it takes in the Middle East; India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Egypt; plus Turkey (which is seeking to join the EU). To this they add diasporic artists like British-based Runa Islam, who returned to her birthplace of Dhaka after twenty-three years and ‘felt herself a tourist’. What sense do you make of the way APT6 understands ‘the region’? What gaze underpins it? Should we be pedantic about geography?
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GF: The APT’s expeditionary charter stretches further and further resulting in a rubbery sense of region. For me this speaks less about the contemporary condition of mobility and more about ‘exotic outreach’—the press kit ‘scoop’. Australia has such a vital and layered region at its back door, so why constantly stretch further and enter the realm of every other biennale? One could argue the the inclusion of the Middle East and its peripheral Asian edges is an attempt to reflect a shifting Australian demographic and to open audiences to greater understanding. You just have to turn to APT6’s two major cinematheque programs, ‘The Cypress and the Crow: Fifty Years of Iranian Animation’ and ‘Promised Lands’, to see this. However, Iran to Niue is a galactic jump. Such dichotomies set up terribly unresolved curatorial abrasions.
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DT: I think the Great Push westward shows that APT’s expeditionary days are numbered. Fortunately, there’s plenty of mileage left in the immediate neighborhood, if APT cares to refocus. And a more coherent approach to its Australian inclusions would be a good sign, too.
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JM: APT’s regional focus is an asset that it should nurture as an alternative to the other large international showcases of contemporary art. Emphasising region requires careful attention to place, being attuned to geography, and dedicated to the local. The APT would be better served by concentrating more on Australia’s immediate neighbours. In particular, there is scope for greater participation of Pacific artists.
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The APT has long been moving away from national representation. With APT6, has it succeeded in creating a geography-based exhibition free of national emphasis?
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GF: Geography is about time and place, territory is a matter of economics and opportunity, and nation is what we collectively make it. Just as we have moved to a greater understanding of ‘Asia’ than our Western overlaid definitions prescribed, we no longer can neatly categorise artists by nationality. Charwei Tsai best describes this contemporary phenomenon. She says, ‘I am part of the generation of globalisation. My cultural influences are so mixed that it matters to me less and less what comes from where. For example, I read faster in Chinese, write and speak more easily in English. I live between Paris, Taipei, and New York, across three continents. I attend one of the first and most traditional fine art schools of the West, located in France, but I don’t speak French, and my work is considered Asian. I watch Japanese soap operas and Bollywood films and list to Taiwanese pop music. Most of my closest friends are Latin Americans. And physically, people say that I look Native American!’ Egyptian-born Australian-based Raafat Ishak offers an illuminating position for the APT today. His twenty exquisite painted panels fracture and link motifs, Arabic text, Western abstraction, and architecture, creating, ‘hybrid identities that blur distances, time, and symbolic currencies.’
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JM: With its unique regional focus, the APT is a valuable asset in an international art circuit still dominated by vestiges of the nineteenth-century nation-state. An exhibition that underlines the geo-political context of Australia for local audiences and provides a well-funded and open forum for cultural debate in a region where artistic expression runs serious risks still has important work to do.
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What do you make of ‘Mapping the Mekong’?
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GF: I think it’s one of the most successful, succinct aspects of APT6. It’s part of APT’s continued enquiry into what constitutes the geography of the Asia-Pacific region. To deliver it, the curators returned to the early APT principle of working with local experts. The role of memory is paramount to the Greater Mekong Subregion. Project co-curator and artist Richard Streitmatter-Tran picked up on this thread, seeing the Mekong River as a metaphor connecting five nations and eight artists across three generations. The project addressed the Mekong as a concept, a psychological rather than geographic space. It was bookended by Pich’s rattan sculptures and Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s film, which suggested very different landscapes and futures. It reminds us that Asia is not an absolute and secluded synthesis, but conflicted.
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JM: ‘Mapping the Mekong’ evoked various historical, cultural, and geographic dimensions of the region in a way that was not overly didactic, that highlighted diversity, and that offered a space for reflection without overwhelming scale. Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s video, The Ground, the Root, and the Air: The Passing of the Bodhi Tree—a beautiful, complex meditation on links between place, belief, and art—was among the most memorable works in the whole show.
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In APT6, Kids’ APT is bigger than ever. It’s no longer an add on, it’s now the very heart and soul of the project.
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GF: With GoMA, education-department-driven kids’ programs suddenly became embedded into the core of the APT. Practically the first works one encounters in APT6 are kids’ projects: Ho Tzu Nyen’s video installation H the Happy Robot, in the GOMA foyer, and the Aquilizans’s In-Flight, in an entrance to QAG. They confuse the agenda from the outset, or do they? In the APT5 catalogue, Doug Hall wrote of a culture shift to ‘a softer and closer relationship with children, families and youth; where media and cultural overlaps can flourish’ bringing ‘closer contact with the public’. With the proportion of kids’ projects ever increasing, APT is moving closer to this vision and further from its genesis in regional critical inquiry.
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DT: Kids’ APT is as much about parents as kids. It gets two generations of Queenslanders through the doors and comfortable with the place. If that’s what’s necessary to justify serious state funding, so be it. There’s still plenty of room for grown-up art. Really, who could have a problem with Kids’ APT? I can’t wait for Pets’ APT.