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059

continues to locate and relocate its place in the world, informed by the fluctuations, trends
and dynamics of global economics and its shifting centres, where cultural articulations are
rendered pragmatically prescient . The biennale in such sense symptomise pivots , even as it
function within its own logic of cultural decentering and associated emancipatory impulses .
Part IThe Singapore Biennale, the first launched in September 2006, is one of many that had
emerged throughout Asia since the 1990s. Like others, it may be regarded as generalattempts in global marketing or enhancing Singapore's tourism potential, and in doing so
consolidating, if not justifying investments into cultural infrastructure made over the many
years. Where myths of nation and nation-building are crucial as a historical arc or motif,
the biennale in this case forms part of a crucial narrative of 'becoming,' the transformationfrom a British colonial outpost into an independent and vibrant city-state. This is expressedvariously across economic, social and cultural turns, with the modern, made precise andmeasurable, as its indicator . The Singapore Biennale was declared to have "positioned
Singapore strongly as a vibrant global city for the arts" ~ and for Fumio Nanjo the Biennale's
founding artistic director, "it created a network of audiences and professionals connectedwith art in Singapore, assembled a mass of information about contemporary art and artists,
and made it possible for the city to become an art hub in the future ." ~ This emancipative
struggle for Marchart, "is no longer merely a format in which former colonial nations of theWest bask in the glamour of their own artistic production . On the contrary, worldwide biennialization has instead contributed to decentralizing the West," Q1 defined by an emergenceof a Global South through the evolving regionalities, and the networks of newer biennales
including those organized in Brisbane, Gwangju and Johannesburg . Borrowing from Ranjit
Hoskote, they form "sites of cultural production sharing common questions, themes , andindeed common [geo-political] precariousness" and collectively, as "Biennales of Resistancemark a cumulative counterpoint to the Venice Biennale as the universal template for thebiennial as form and medium." Q! In this regard newer biennales emerge from an anti - orpostcolonial impulse, setting themselves as propositions that simultaneously eschew thestructure of historical dominance and control, but yet deploying the same mechanisms tocelebrate forms of idealized relationships . The effect, if not its known potentials , is double
edged . For Singapore Biennale, Marchart has this to say:01

An interview question from Jan t l(aplan•o Geetd Kapur Se<>ars N1ttve. lwona
Blazw,ck oar et A. Kaplan, 0I~ Ogu1bc,
Paolo Venancic, Filho. Donn De Salv,i,
8e1KoTorr>n Gee!.:!Kapur and Emrr>a
Dextiar, ·c nturv C,ty Corversat1ons
wttt tt>e Curatc,rs "Art Joumal 60.3,
2001 pp 48-65.
02
Approaching ,ts f1ft1ethanr tVl.rsary c,f Its
ndependence, hPa~line$ such 3S
S1ngapcre races to become Southeast
Asia~Pac1fic'$"!rt hub" are .,ct inf quent,

the consumption of arts and culture th
yearly Art Stage and the launc~ 'lf
Gillman Barncks art galle1 es ,r 2012often P('sit1oned to reinforce rts drnval

into the fraternity of global cities. One: amarshy and mal npl island, 1t 1s 'lOW oneof t1 e four 'Asian tigers

with a concen•ratIor of wealth (it s home to 16 billion
aires, acwrd1ny to Forbes,. 11is 01 e of th~nchest courtne$ n tt>e world " See
Fmanc,a/ Times March 6, 2015

03
Oliver March ~ "The globaliz•t1or of art
anc the '81enr1alsof Resistance' a 1s
tory of the b1enm Is from the 'lerphery,"
NorldArt, 42 2014, p.264

04
Ibid

05
Lee Suan H1ang CEO's Message
Behef Singapore Bienna/e 2'J06. xh
cat. (Sir gapcre Nauonal Arts Council,
2006), p. 6
06

Throe.::uratorswon<mgalongsideNanJo
were Roger McDonald, Shar,in1
Pereira and Eugen Tan. Nan1o'saLcount1ng1sinstructive "41 networking CI.Jrd
tors; 95 artists and groups, 60% wereof Asian rmgm dnd t1ve were from t!,e

It is becoming increasingly difficult to seriously refer to some of the more recently
founded biennials as Biennials of Resistance, even if they do favour local and national
artistic production over that of the West. For instance, in 2006, the Singapore Biennial
was founded during a meeting between the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund. Although Singapore's intention had been to signal openness, for the duration of
the biennial, a general ban was placed on demonstrations in public places. Similarly, therecent wave of newly founded biennials in Gulf States with authoritarian governments
hardly has anything in common with postcolonial struggles for independence on anational, regional or continental level. Authoritarian regimes utilize the biennial format toglamourize their image and prepare the tourism industry for the post-oil era. Qj!_

Middle East.· '60% of the artists were
under 40 years of age
mainly •rom
Southeast Asia," "Europe, America,
Afnt. and 0c<'ar1a, so tt>1scould also
be an encounter w1tt--mt rrat :->r"dlart.·
See Fum10 Nan10. About the Sinqapcre
B1ennal Ibid p 9

07
Marcrart, "ThA globalization of -rt,
p.265
08

lbtd

09

Writings about cultural production and its contexts in Singapore are relatively new. An
emerging motif however is a pattern of instrumentalisation serving the need to sustain andadvance its capitalist development, cognizant to the turns of the global economy .
Wee Wan-ling's The Asian Modern : Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore (2007) argued
about the incongruency of Singapore's post-independence economic transformation compared to that of its neighbours in Southeast Asia. This anomaly had arisen as an outcome ofits continued "valorisation of the colonial past as part of the telos of progress and freedom,"
pragmatically sustained since achieving self-governance in 1959 to manage the interrelated challenges and strategies of colonial devolution, communist threats, multi-ethnic
frictions, the Cold War politics and continued dependence foreign capital, all in all moving

DAY2 MAY24, 2015

Context s and Predicaments: Singapore 1998 - 2006

Ibid p 266

Il:!£ffl!!I

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Contemporaries

a successful attempt towards a First World modernity, rather than settling for the Second
World version. By the 1980s, the city-state had move from a modernity committed to theindustrial and technological, to a discourse of "New Asianism and Asian modernity inspiredby the [exampleof] 'unique Japan' ... marked by a culturalist orientation," a participant in the"story of a burgeoning East Asian capitalism" characterized by developments of regionaland global economic networks. 1QWee describes this outcome:The 'developmental' city-state of Singapore in many respects has contributed towards
the now-established image of an Asian modern urban formation in which, it has
become almost predictable to say, East meets West, and in which centre and periphery, old and new, are conjoined . Looking at one representative critical response to
Singapore allows us to ponder why the East Asian modern could be perceived as an
inauthentic modernity, or perhaps as a distorted form of modernity . ~Singapore remained celebrated for its achievements, but at times, as observed by Wee,grudgingly, as critics quipped its "quasi -authoritarian, petit-bourgeois and sometimes smug
and priggish modernity that smoothed the path to economic success ." This ambivalentregard for Singapore and its modernity is a mixture of amazement and repulsion, Wee sums
up the receptions of critics like Benedict Anderson:
The 'new' model has come to stand for a dynamic and even iconic, if bland, multicultural utopianism adapted from and yet still dependent upon the West, but one in which
both democratic impulses and cultural difference and historico-racialist 'irrationalities'
were suppressed, homogenised or sanitised in the name of industrial-capitalist modernity's pure truths. g
This "pure truths," as both enablers and outcomes, Wee continues, had necessitated a"deculturated version of modernity," and a reversal of Nestor Garcfa Canclini hypothesisof Latin American modernity, Singapore experienced "an exuberant socio-economic modernisation with a deficient cultural modernism." 11. Here we may turn to the interests into theidea of "Asian values," and later, as if to claim its arrival, "Asian Renaissance." Singapore
and its political leadership were among the most vocal advocates of the notion of Asian
Values and its role in the rise of capital in Asia. Finding resonance to the economic developments of East Asia in the 1980s, it centred around ideas associated to Confucianism. The
focus on Confucianism began to wane by the mid-1990s to make way for a more inclusive
and pragmatic version based on Singapore's multi-ethnic composition . Yet "Asian values"
as a rhetorical instrument of governance remained in place in the form of "Shared values ."According to sociologist Chua Beng Huat, "Shared values," introduced around 1991 provides a way for the government to "rationalise public policies and shape social order," even
if it may not have an institutionalized legal status. Further, it is to be understood in relation
to its other, the West, coded to reference its flawed cultural emphasis on individualism anda sense of entitlement and welfarism, and in doing so to position the "collective" and "community" responsibilities and "acceptance of a hierarchical social order" as central in its
ongoing success. For Chua, it offers an entry point into concepts of Asia or "Asianness,"
reinforced crucially by Singapore's geographical position, its ethnic composition, and its
smallness that effectively demonstrates mechanisms of interaction and coalescence.
Chua further argues that its effective deployment across a broadest range of public discourse allowed for a naturalized self-identification among Singaporeans as Asians, and welldefined social relations-Le. "reinvented traditions are not without cultural currency ." 11
Governmental role is defined in terms of maintaining the efficacy of such values towards
economic competitiveness, and resources allotted accordingly defined by "supply-sidesocialism" that transforms and advances the human capital. This project of culture as such,
returning to Wee, "represent a distorted modernity .. . that covers up or disavows the factthat capitalism is one phenomenon ... [albeit] neither monolithic nor unified," revealing a
conflict not necessarily ideological in nature, but rather the positioning of Asian capitalism

Ahm :iM sn d1

Presentation lChapter1

061

and its continuing negotiation within in a hierarchy of global capitalist societies. This periodof the 1980s and '90s, highlighted by the assertion for geography and regional networks ,can be contrasted from Singapore earlier phase of industrialization and modernization,and may be described as a reterritorialisingof the city-state. 'Culture ; reintroduced into
the discourse of nation and what it may embody, is subjected to the rationalizing imperatives of the economic project as was the past. Evolving and newer economic platforms like
ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations , established 1967) and APEC (Asia-Pacific Econom ic
Cooperation , established 1989) provide stable referents in conceiving geo-cultural terrains. By
1993, following the establishments of the new Ministry of Information and the A rts (MICA ,1990-now MCCY: Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth) and the National Heritage Board (NHB,
1993), a series of state museums were launched including the Singapore History Museum ,the Asian Civilisation Museum and the Singapore Art Museum, ostensibly as an outcomeof a reorganization and expansion of the National Museum, a predecessor institution of the
NHB. The museum in Singapore is not without a history, having its roots in the formation of
the Raffles Museum (1874) and obliquely, the University of Malaya Art Museum (1955). As
colonial institutions useful in the technologies and collections accumulated, they may be
regarded not only as prototypal, but the very basis in which newer propositions of nation
and regionalities are being proposed: the ethnographic collection of the Raffles Museum
became a core collection of the Singapore History Museum and the Asian Civilisation
Museum. Having been transferred and displayed at the National Museum from 1973 to thelate 1980s, the collection of the University of Malaya Art Museum, provided an early proposition of Singapore and Malayan modern art and as ways to regard the traditions and living
cultures of Southeast Asia, displayed alongside materials from India and China. Variously
as collections residing in Raffles Museum (1876-1960), National Museum (1960-1 993) or
University of Malaya Art Museum (1955- 1973), materials accumulated portends forms ofregionalities, subjected to the contingencies of statist cultural policies. For example, separating the zoological and ethnographic collections of the National Museum in 1972 allows
for a distinct pursuit of a national history unencumbered by the colonial conflation of humandevelopments into natural history. A sense towards the region was embedded, although notnecessarily formalized into a cohesive programme across the fields: "The change came on
1 April 1972, when the National Museum became a museum of ethnology, history and art ofSingapore and Southeast Asia. Thus the National Museum becomes an institution devoted
to the science of man, to focus attention on cultures, the artistic and creative manifestationsof the peoples of Singapore and the surrounding region." ~It is here that we can turn perhaps to the establishment of the Singapore Art Museum in
1996. But before we get to this we must perhaps be mindful of the repeats, as if to say,thinking about the last quote, "we have been here before" in a different incarnate, traversing
the colonial, our nascent technicist post-independence beginnings, 1996, its coming futuresin 2006 and now. It was in 1889 that, after the momentous opening of the new Raffles
Museum and Library building at Stamford Road (current home of the National Museu m ) that
William Davison, its curator declared:
It would be advisable, I think to confine the contents of the Museum to the products of
the Malay Peninsula and the adjacent countries which are zoologically affined to it, andthis is best indicated by what may be termed [Alfred Russell]Wallace's 50-fathom line,
which includes only Sumatra, Java, Bali and Borneo, to the South . As specimens fromany of these localities are obtained they will replace the Australian and other specimens from places beyond the shallow sea line. One exception to this should be madewith regard to the Cocos-Keeling Islands, which lie well out of the 100 fathom sea, andwhich, as might be expected, show an affinity with the Australian fauna ; but being
connected with the Government of the Straits Settlements, it would be interesting to
get as complete a collection from there as possible. !§.

DAY2 MAY24, 2015

Contexts and Predicaments : Singapore 1996 - 2006

10

C J. Wan-ling Wee, TheAs,an Modern:
Culture, Capitalist Development,
Singapore (Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press, 2007), p.5.
11lb1d.,p2.
12Ibid., p6
13

Ibid., p7
14Chua Beng Huat, "Asian values:
Restraining the logic of capitalism?," Social Semiotics, 8:2-3, 1998,
pp.217-218.
15

The National Museum (1976), commemorative booklet published on the occasionof it official opening National Museum Art
Gallery on August 21, 1976, unpaginated.

16"Report on the Raffles Library andMuseum for the Quarter Ending 30th
September 1889,"quoted by Kevin Y. L.
Tan, Of Whales and Dinosaurs: The Storyof Singapore's Natural History Museum(Singapore: NUS Press, 2015), p.45.

~Session3

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Art Studies_02

It is based on an unerring attention to scholarship into natural history of its day, but also
politically prescient-the geo-political informs categories. The new building for theSingapore Art Museum was opened 20th January 1996 and along with it, an inauguralexhibition titled Modernity and Beyond Themes in Southeast Asian Art. How was the region
prospected and conceived? What were the sources-from informants to publicationsthat aided a regard for Southeast Asia and its modernity? What is the legacy left by thisinaugural exhibition, within Singapore and beyond?
The exhibition featured artists and artworks from seven Southeast Asian countries: Brunei
Darussalam, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. This
listing corresponds with the composition of ASEAN at the time , Vietnam being the latest to
join in 1995. By 1999, with the successive memberships of Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar,
ASEAN was constituted into its current form . A team consisting of curators from theSingapore Art Museum was led by art historian T.K. Sabapathy . Preparations started in
1993, as Singapore Art Museum ventured into an active acquisition programme, and building up networks of informants and consulting art historians across Southeast Asia , guided
by the available and emerging writings . Events that took place elsewhere, such as the AsianArt Show series (FukuokaArt Museum,1979andafter), the first Asia Pacific Triennial ofContemporary Art in Brisbane in 1993 and "Asian Modernism : Diverse Developments inIndonesia, the Philippines and Thailand " (TheJapanFoundationAsia Center,1995)were importantas referents to prospect curatorial approaches, each varying in its manner of engagementsor participations of local curators, and the roles the hosting institutional curators may perform. But significantly, it was the growing number of publications, written in English,
emerging during the early 1990s that prompted T.K. Sabapathy and his relatively young
curatorial team to consider developing a project independently conceived and developed in
Singapore. These publications, including monographs and journals , introduced the national
histories, and indirectly highlighting the ir varying in depths and intensities, as well as thenascent attempts to read across these histories, proposing common themes and prospecting emerging trends . The year 1993 was particularly significant:- Caroline Turner, ed. Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific ,University of Queensland Press- John Clark, ed. Modernity in Asian Art , University of Sydney East Asian Studies Number 7,
Wild Peony-Art and Asia Pacific, Inaugural Issue
I have highlighted these publications as t hey more than others had ambitiously assembled arange of writers, many whose writings remained previously entrenched within the confinesof national readership and interests . The position which Australian institutions and scholars
find themselves in is in itself interesting , which points toward a dramatic shift taking placein geo-economic order and the necessity to regard and engage the emerging economic
centres in Asia. !7. Yet this necessity to apprehend Asia, at least in cultural terms , requiresthat writings by Apinan Poshyananda, Emmanuel Torres, Alice Guillermo, Redza Piyadasa
and Jim Supangkat were not mere country entries, but by way of affinities and common
experiences, active propositions into modernities, their contexts and trajectories of artistic
productions . Through these publications, and others too, a mapping of common thematicfeatures begin to emerge . Consider Julie Ewington's article "Five Elements: An AbbreviatedAccount of Installation Art in South-East Asia," which appeared in Art and Asia Pacific (Vol. 2,
No.1) in 1995 which prospected the emergence of installation art as a contemporary strat egy that "found a receptive environmen t " in a region where as a turn to tropics the indigenous and the artist-shaman acquires international currency in an emerging global practicecharacterized by communications, access and travel. [Elsewherewe mayalsoconsiderAstriWright's"WomenandContemporaryPainters," written asa chapterin Soul, Spirit, and Mounta in:
Preoccupations of Contemporary Indonesian Painters (OxfordUniversityPress,1994)that assessedgender,representation, andagency.1!!] Broadly, the writings that emerged over the period of the early
1990s allowed a prospecting into modernities, their emergence and ways they

Ahmad Mashad1

Presentehon1

063

Chapter 1

were understood, cultural contexts through which they may be received and advanced,
decolonization and nationalism that at once particularise and universalize responses. As
such, a thematic approach was advanced, qualified accordingly by Sabapathy:
A thematic approach was settled upon as I was discerned to provide grounds fordescribing and analyzing artworks, and speculating upon art historical issue in waysthat can be pertinent to Southeast Asia in some depth and in relation to historicalcircumstances particular to the region. Of course the choice and formulation of thethemes can be debated and disputed, as they should be. Indeed, the interpretative
essays in this [ exhibition] publication emerge from a sense of wariness towards thegiven task. In this connection, the writers adopt interrogative stances in dealing withthe brief as specified by the themes, questioning its efficacy with quite persistence.
What is more, they proceed beyond the brief and prospect terrains which points tomore fecund approaches to regarding and reading art productions in Southeast Asia .
All these signal marked reflexive attitudes, even if they are raw and untested . The
themes are:- Nationalism, Revolution and the idea of the Modern- Traditions of the Real- Modes of Abstraction- Mythology and Religion: Traditions in Tension- The Self and Other- Urbanism and Popular Culture ~Significantly, the exhibition "Modernity and Beyond" is paired with another exhibition"Channels & Confluences : A History of Singapore Art" as part of the Museum's inauguration . Curated by its founding director Kwok Kian Chow, the exhibition framed Singapore art
chronologically, outlining its beginnings among the early photographic ateliers, the itinerancy of artists across colonial networks of Europe and China, formation of local and expatriate groups and their interactions, traditional genres and the introduction of Western andmodern styles, movement towards a discernable and authentic form in the shape of"Nanyang regionalism," consolidation of a Singaporean modernity highlighted by ethnic
plurality and continuities of the Nanyang legacy, and the emergence of contemporary
practice. Crucially, the establishment of artist groups, schools, and institutions were highlighted to aid, if not to facilitate comparability and compatibility with the arc of nationhood,
art history; a history that is subjected to the project of nation, in the criticism of cultural
theorist Lee Weng Choy. Whether deliberate or not, Kwok, as a director of the Singapore Art
Museum finds efficacy in positioning the Museum in the centre of a "new regionalism" thatfacilitates international interaction. In his concluding remarks in the exhibition publication,
he lamented on the role of the market in determining high-points of Singapore art (obliquelyreferencing to the commercial successes of artists like Cheong Soo Pieng, Chen Wen Hsi and Liu Kang in
the 1950s and the patronship they enjoyed). The "new regionalism" of the Singapore Art Museum

is aspirational, offering a staging ground for internationalizing Singapore art and by extension the development of Singapore artists, mediated accordingly along the programmaticand the institutional. gQ In this regard, T.K. Sabapathy's remarks in "Modernity and Beyond"appears as a premonition :... it must be remembered that these [museological and curatorial] aspirations [toward
Southeast Asia], even as they are understandable, cannot be satisfied by the inaugura-tion [of the Museum] alone; there will be great and continuing expectations beyond theinauguration and attending the entire lifetime of the institution. ll
By October of the same year, "Modernity and Beyond" was de-installed making way for"Masterpieces from the Guggenheim Museum," and accordingly bringing to light the brutal
complexity of a state institution struggling to sustain its coherence and critical focus in theface of competing and times contradictory demands.

DAY 2 MAY 24, 2015

Context, and Predicaments : Singapore 1996-2006

17

John Clark wrote 1nhis Preface 'Thisbook comes at a er cal tIm6 ,n which thecunous relA11onsh1p
betweer Austr ha
and Asia being rLdefined by new. but s
yet unforr,ed anitudes
Yet our poll~
cal leaders ~xhon us th;.• we mt.st get
into Asia or assen that we dre pan of
Asia· John Clark. ed Moderr>,ty,nAsian Art (University of Sydney East AsianStudies Nur,ber 7 Sydney Wild Peony,
2003). unpaginaten
18

Patr ck D Flores proposes a coripa1 ,t,ve •eading alongside Nc,ra Taylor. Whv
Have There Been No Great Vietnarr es,:
An1sts1·· Michigan Quarterly Rev,ew.
44:1 200fi.pp.149-165
FlorescomrrertsWhat sat stake here s the sta
b1htyof the canor which s ~ned open.
sc,teespeak dnd LnsettlPd tv the crit1qu~of patriar...,hyand c,n ntc.hsm FrofTIt"11s
processefT'ergethe contoursof alterna
t1veh1stores. peopled by differer t ~ub1ect,;1ndifferent places like Vietnam andlndc,n s1a,wt,1chhave in postL.OlorncJ
retroact1on •orrred ·· Se<'Patnck D. Flores
Field Notes From Anwords
Thtrd Text
25:4, 2011, ~ 388.
19

T K Sabapathy lntroduct1c,n, ed T.K.
Sabapathy, Modern,cy and Beyond·
Themes m Southeast Astan Art exh cat(S1rg pore Singapore An Museum.
1996) p 7

20
Kwok K1anChow. Chann,:ls &Confluences· A History r,f Singapore
Arr. exh Cdt.(S,ngapore- SingapccreAn
Museum. 1996) pp 150-155.
21
Sabapathy, lntroduct on,

> 5.

~

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064

Art Studies_02

Part Ill

Assessing the Singapore Art Museum, Nora Taylor remarked :Its inaugural exhibition in 1996, "Modernity and Beyond," was the first comprehensive
survey of modern Southeast Asian art to be exhibited in the region. It is still the only
pan-Southeast Asian art museum in the region . [However] The museum is still
embroiled in Singapore's bureaucratic quagmire and periodically suffers from flawed
policies, shifts in leadership, weak programming, and lack of vision . Still, it has succeeded in creating a number of milestone exhibitions and has proven itself an invaluable resource for international curators and collections in the region. It can now morepositively claim to have an impact on the integration of Southeast Asian artists on thestage of world contemporary art. n
Of particular interests for Taylor are the series of exhibitions that advance readings into art
history of the region, marked by the exhibitions' ability to gather key artworks and collections as indexes of material culture for scrutiny and study, and measure their affinities anddistances bringing forth perspectives into subjects and interests, collective and alternative
histories, general tendencies and idiosyncracies. She highlighted exhibitions "Vision andEnchantment: Southeast Asian Paintings" (Singapore Art Museum, 2000),and more recently thepan-Asian collaborative exhibitions "Cubism in Asia : Unbounded Dialogues"(2006) and"Realism in Asian Art"(2010) .
So far, my discussion had been centred on institutions, exhibitions, and their operational
contexts . Its attendant project of art histories, access to networks, infrastructures and to asignificant extent material resources afforded through policies, if not enabled throughcapitalistic ideologies, are crucial predicates. But this view also offers little to the questionof the curatorial, seemingly passive to contexts, and largely unable to articulate its agency.
Even as the Singapore Biennale of 2006 reveled in its relational play, populating Chinese andHindu temples, Muslim mosques, Christian churches, former military barracks andSupreme Court with art and as such inter -textual potentials, it could not removed itself fromsuspicion of the state's ability to instrumentalise and discipline . "Belief" as a theme reverberates as a liberal democratic cry, but also confounding for not attempting to problematise
difference, plurality and the contested truths-all of these arguably lost in between the
spectacle and the carnival. After all, according to sociologist Chua Beng Huat, multiculturalism as a form of public discourse in Singapore, the very referent adopted by the curators ofthe 2006 biennale has been effectively neutralized in its early post-independence history asa site of intellectual, cultural and political contestation . In fact, through recognition of theneeds of the various ethnic groups and careful state provisions and allocations, multiculturalism became an effective instrument of order and control. ~ These "divisions," the ethnic
and religious spaces we saw in the 2006 biennale had already form the idea of theSingapore state . If the curatorial is to be seen in terms of its potential and intellectual
agency, this predicament needs thinking through .
What of the curatorial future? We turn to Lee Weng Choy's provocation:
Singapore is Sign-apore, a society of the spectacle par excellence, the all appropriating
agent, modernity's idealized tabula rasa. Singapore imagines itself not just as taking thebest from the East and the West-the inheritor of the great traditions and the latest
technologies-it also stakes a claim as part of the avant-garde of the next stage of global
capitalism . Whenever I visit other places, my experience is of multiple temporalities;
there are always neighbourhoods that seem significantly unchanged. In Singapore, there
appears to be only one time-frame- a peculiar present, in a hurry, on the verge of tomorrow .. .. I know of no other place where it feels like everyone marches in the same step .
Practically everything here is subjected to economic development- hills have been
flattened, cemeteries unearthed . M

Ahmad Mashad1

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The curatorial, if it is not to be a function of the institution, requires articulation, by this Imean a practice reflexive to Singapore's self-conscious regard to the place of the individual,
society and the defining features of its capitalistic drive, ways that it approaches and manages global interactions. I return to Wee so as to Singapore and its condition:

22
Nora Taylor, "Art without History?
Southeast Asian Artists and Their
Communities in the Face of Geography,"
Aft Journal, 70:2, 2011, pp.12-13.

23

Singapore remains a humourless morality lesson as an economic success story, as apaternalistic-pragmatic modernity, and as a managed and generally benign multiculturalsociety that created a measure of respect for ethnic and religious differences . It notably
increased equity in socio-economic opportunities. As a consequence of the elevation of
petit-bourgeois values, it also became a "cultural desert" known abroad as a land of
shopping centres . Historical amnesia-the inevitable by-product of modernisation- is
prominent and surpasses, one suspects, the level of dehistoricisation in developed
Euro-American societies. In many ways, this radical experiment in modernising a small
Asian locality into a sort of hyper-petit-bourgeois modernity is unique. ~Chua Seng Hua!, "Multiculturalism in
Singapore: An Instrument of Social
Control," Institute of Race Relations, vol.
44:3, 2003, pp.58--77

24
Lee Weng Choy, "The Future Was When:
Art Criticism and the Comparative Tensesof Hong Kong and Singapore,"Journalof
Visual Culture, vol. 6:3 (Los Angeles,
London, New Delhi and Singapore: SAGE
Publications, 2007). p.345.

25

This uniqueness include the co-optation of the Western "metropolis" into a new vocabularyof its Asianness, hyper-rationalized marshalling and use of space; skyscrapers, museums,
casinos and a giant wheel gloriously choreographed into a landscape. We can only defer
the question of the curatorial to another occasion but end with Rustom Barucha's call for an
Asian museum, characterized by a "new socialization of its radical possibilities":
The "Asia" therefore, that is being celebrated in the recent inter-Asian collaboration hasless to do with the propagation of democracy through people's movements or emergent
struggles in civil society, than with the creation of spectacles and events which "Asia"
becomes a new manifestation of cultural capital itself .. ..
[The]"new Asian museum" cannot be separated from its larger implications in global
culture. The museum offers a particularly embattled site to study the tensions between
the global and the local, the intercultural and the multicultural, "Asia" in Asia and the"Asia" supported by the increasingly privileged hegemonies of Diaspora. ~DAY2 MAY24 , 2015

Contexts and Predicaments :Singapore 1996-2006

Wee, TheAs,anModern, pp.12-13.

26
Rustom Barucha, "Beyond the Box: A
View from India," Contemporary Art andthe Museum, ed. Peter Weibel andAndrea Buddensieg (Germany: Hatje
Cantz, 2007). p.216.

~~es_sio~_3

The Making of Art withArt Studies_02066Contemporaries

The Politicalandthe Personal:
Australia'sExperiencein
VisualArts Exchangein
SoutheastAsia
throughthe 1990s

AlisonCarroll
Founding Directo r, A sia link A rts

The focus of this paper is the two streams of the political and the personal, which interflow
into something that might be called "culture ." The paper evaluates what has gone well andwhat badly with Australian art exchanges with Asia, particularly Southeast Asia in the
1990s. It is clear that what has failed is political and what has succeeded is personal.
First, some context about Australia and Asia, as it is not widely known and it sets the scene
for what will follow. Politically, Australia the nation is based on white settlement, or invasion
if you like, in 1788, overtaking all existing structures . The new mix of cultures gathering inAustralia was depicted around 1867 by Englishman J.C. F. Johnson in his beguiling paintingof a European, a Chinese and a man of dark skin playing the card game of euchre on theAustralian gold fields, !jg_,.Q! an image matched by others, including Indigenous artist Tommy
McRae's similarly nonjudgmental draw ing of a Chinese man, carrying his burden across hisshoulders , wearing his conical hat and queue, alongside a European man in a high hat andwaistcoat standing about with his hands in his pockets , and Indigenous men posing with
their weapons held aloft . Q1 Both images show a more benign situation than the very harshreality of the day. Immigration from Asia was mainly Chinese gold miners, with the rare
Afghan cameleer and Japanese pearl diver. The various colonies were federated (or brought
togeth er) as one new nation in 1901, the same year as the White Australia Policy was intro duced, mainly directed at deterring Chinese immigration.
We had our share of mercenaries , missionaries, and misfits living in Asia through theseyears who often collected Asian art, wh ich became the source of some excellent collectionsof historic art in our museums . ~ In World War II, Australians endeavoured to keep Japan
from invading militarily , and then Communist China from invading ideologically, which
extended to sending troops to fight alongside the United States in Vietnam through to the1970s. World War II was a turning point politically, separating Australia from the United
Kingdom and turning us more to Asia. The Colombo Plan of scholarships for students in
Asia to come to Australia was instituted in 1950, a significant program at the time; gradually
Asian languages were introduced to tertiary institutions - I learnt Indonesian in the 1960sand, in 1966, the White Australia Policy was finally rescinded. In this period, our main arts
funding and advisory program, the Aust ralia Council for the Arts, was established. Then in1972 the Whitlam Labor government w as a new broom sweeping us towards a new future :Whitlam recognized the People's Republic of China, brought the troops home from
Vietnam, and encouraged greater economic ties with Japan and our region. Then, the final
cherry on the Australia-Asia political cake was Paul Keating, Prime Minister from 1991 to'96 , making an overt policy that Australia 's economic and cultural future was in Asia andthat all moves in this direction would be supported .
Everything about visual art exchanges with Asia really started to happen then . The
Australia Council under the Keating Government decreed that by 1993, fifty percent of its
international budget would be for projects in Asia. The other funding partner, theDepartment of Foreign Affairs, also turned its clout to artistic exchanges with the region .
State or in Japanese terms, prefectural - Governments have funds for the arts, and this ,too, was turned to Asia. Even some local governments, particularly the City of Melbourne ,put support into Asian art exchanges . It should be said that not everyone in the arts

Ahson Carroll

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responded positively or quickly . Our art museums hadreceived exhibitions of traditional Asian art for many
decades - "The Chinese Exhibition of archaeologicalfinds " (l 977),"The Sculpture of Thailand " (1976- 1977),"The Artof the Japanese Package"(1979),"Japan: Masterpieces fromthe Idemitsu Collection"(1982- 1983),and so on-but contemporary Asian art did not have an automatic welcome .
I remember , in the 1990s, a senior curator at the National
Gallery of Australia telling me that, if anything was going on
in Vietnam , his dealer in Paris would tell him . Asian art
departments in our major institutions are still, mainly, staffedby curators expert in traditional art, often uncomfortable with
contemporary work. This is not unique to Australia-I suspect
it has echoes in Europe, the United Kingdom, and, even, Japan .

01
Tommy McRae. UntJtled 1890, ink or
paper, 20.2 x 16.2 cm, Collection of"Jat,onal Gallery of A~strnua
See http.1/artsearch nga.gov a Detail
cfm?IRN=19166

02

fig.01r. I- ' 'II

I tt.,, . '~ -.~--¥

However, outside these departments, in the 1990s, within
Australian art circles more broadly, things really did change,
with more exhibitions and projects about contemporary Asianart being shown in Australia, no longer separating Asian
culture from immediate relevance . A pioneer event had been
the Artists and Regional Exchange (ARX),coming out of the
network of Contemporary Art Spaces, run from Perth, and by
1987 including artists from Southeast Asia . Then the
Queensland Art Gallery started the Asia Pacific Triennial ofContemporary Art (APT)around 1991, leading to the firstexhibition in 1993, with funds from the Queensland State
government, encouraged by the mood of the times. Amongthe artists coming to Brisbane was Indonesian artist Dadang
Christanto , making a major installation, For Those Who Have
Been Killed, which captured everyone's attention. fia.o2 The
importance of this exhibition was immediately understood by
the art world , with one critic writing, "The Triennial is themost important exhibition of recent art to be shown inAustralia for a long time ." ~ For culturally Euro-centric
Australia, this was a big change . The magazine Art and Asia
Pacific (currently ,ArtAsiaPacin"c) started in Sydney in 1993. ~ fla.o3
The first major exhibition of contemporary Chinese art seenoutside China and Hong Kong, "Mao Goes Pop," was held at
the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney also in 1993. The
Adelaide Festival in 1994 was devoted to Asian work, andincluded Thai artist Montien Boonma who made a place forindividual contemplation between rows of fir trees in the
Botanic Gardens. Ql! fia.04 The political became personal and it
was very successful. I look back on exciting times indeed .
It was the period where gradually Australian art started to
be seen in Asia. Visual art institutions in Asia were starting
to want to engage within the region - organizations in Asia
began to accept residencies and exhibitions from Australia,
and to want to co-curate projects . In 1994, the Australia
Council was behind Cultural Organisation in Southeast Asia,a guide written by an experienced arts diplomat Jennifer
Lindsay to give help to Australians who might want to understand working in the region better . tia.os In 1990, I was alsoable to get funds primarily from the Australia Council andForeign Affairs to start the Asialink program, which focused

DAY2 MAY24, 2015

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fig.OZ

Herbert Wade Kent. merchant n China
and Japar from 1905 1936, who g ve h1$
collection of Chinese art to the N •1onal
Gallery of Voctona, ,s one of theseSee ~ttpJ/adb nu.edu au/b1ograp~y/kent herbert-wade-1072'
Ot'V1ously,t~e phrase of "mercenaries
and rn1sf11li1srhetomal
many of thesepeople were motived by gem,Ire Nerest
and altrU1sm.
03

Joanr>a Mer>delsso~n. 'Asia Pac1f1cTnernal In Brisbane," 7hP Bu/let,n.
Vol 115. October 12 1993. ,.>107
04

was the editor if this h$t tnaI ed1t1on,
which included articles by Ap1nan
Poshyananda. Leor Paro1ss1er,Marian
Pastor Roccs, Tatchata AK,n, Chang
T;ong lung. N1rhola$ T\loll'as. andyse

05
Th~ exh1b1t1on,Adela,d lnstallat,ors 'under the umbrella of the Art Gallery ofSouth Australia, 111cludedmaier coin Is
soonedsrte specific work by Mo~t,er
Boonma, Sanbayo Bose Endo.....
osh1katsu,Hen Dono, Kim Soun-gui Lu
Shengzhong, Shim Moor Seup, andl'luberto v1ll.mueva

fig.03
fig.01
Joseph C F Johnson (A~stralia) 1848
1904. Euchre m the Bush c.1867 oil orc.anvas,42 x 60.2cm, Collection of Art
Ga1lery'll Ballar t Bequest of Clance
May Megaw. 1980.

fig.02
Dadang Chnstanto. Performanre 9nd
installation. For those: liVhoare poor.
liVhoare suffer(mg), Who are O(){)ressed,
Who are vo,celess, liVhoarepowerless,
Who are burdened, Who are VICtJmsof
VIOience, Who are vIctIms of a dupe,
Who are victims of In1ustIc,,, The First Asia

fig.04

The Political and the Personal: Australia's Experience in VisualArts Exchange in Southeast Asia through the 1990s

Pac1f1cTriennial of CoNcmporary An.
Gueensland Art G•llery, Brisbane
September 1993. PhotograptChnstabelle Baranay. Image c0urtesy
Gueensland Art Gallery Gallery of
ModeMAr'

fig.03

Art and Asia Pac.if'KSydney, 1993, vo1 1'l(1
fig,04
Mor>t1enBoonma (1953 2000, Thailand),
Room, wood, cloth, area:r 19 x 8 m,
Adelaide Botanic. Garder,s Adelaide
Festival, '994

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at first on touring exhibitions and a residency program in Asia . Q2 In the 1990s, we sent
ninety-four artists to Southeast Asia (and many more of course to North and South Asia, and many
more since). We worked with the premise that each individual artist would be best able towork with their peers through a local institution, so we set up arrangements with, mostly,
art schools at first as they had experience of engaging with foreigners, and then spreadfrom there . We did a lot of touring exhibitions from Australia, which were not so hard todo, but also collaborative curatorial projects with work from both places and touring toboth places. These were harder to do and took longer to set up, but always were better interms of engagement and outcomes. "Rapport" (1996) was created with co-support fromSingaporean curators, artists, and funds; "Giao Luu (Confluence)" (1997) in Vietnam, and"Patterning" (1997) with input from Indonesian artists, followed by "Kawing (Link)" with
regional centers of the Philippines, and then "Saisampan (Soul Ties)" with Thailand. We held
an exhibition in Malaysia, "Sekali Lagi (Once Again)" in 1999, based on Australian artists
revisiting Malaysia, all creating new works there, hosted at Rimbun Dahan outside Kuala
Lumpur . 119· 06 These Southeast Asian programs led us to other joint ventures with India,
Korea, and, especially in the early 2000s, with Japan . Again, it was an exciting time .
All of these ventures came from people working together : talking to artists, visiting studios,and discussing ideas and concepts with curators and writers, getting institutions involved
and raising funds. It was about people engaging . The two institutions I knew well, Asialink
and the Asia Pacific Triennial, certainly had government backing, financially, and also, in theregion, the support of our embassies and officials, but they worked because people who
were committed to making things work got together.
I have five principles based on this, established at the beginning of the 1990s and remaining
realities today:
1 Artists working in the region worked, and it worked for them . QI Asialink regularly got four

hundred applicants from individual artists to work in the region each year, for what in theend were forty places.
2 Partnerships worked . We tried to have equal management, equal finances, and equal
work in each project-not always achieved with countries where funding was much lessavailable, but even a small amount made a difference to the principle.
3 A general flexibility worked. That you do what you could to make something work as you
think it should, then you went with the flow .
4 Keeping bureaucracy to a minimum worked. We had two-page contracts-putting
downwhat is agreed for both sides and keeping it simple. Then we relied on trust. No contract
will cover the gaps that happen in cross-cultural projects if you have no trust.
5 Relying on people like this created links that kept developing into the future. !1!!.
Overall this is an attitude of interest-being interested in the other culture, and showing it.
However, in Australia since the mid-1990s, over this personal building up of relationships
has hovered a political failure to continue the level of energy or thinking of the Keating government. A financial graph is an easy demonstration, showing the percentage of the international funding of the Australia Council for performing arts projects in Asia from 1992 to
2011. !1!I11a.o7 It goes down from fifty percent at the beginning of the period to ten percent
in 2011. Recently Arts Victoria, the most advanced of the State bodies, stopped its standalone international program. Arts leadership in education is part of this, and I report, sadly,
there is no expert Asian art historian teaching at my university, the University of Melbourne.
In 2012, still, no performing arts tertiary educational institution in the country had a course
which included Asian cultural practice in dance, theatre, or music as part of its core curriculum. 19. And, most important, we have no politically-supported structure to do better. We
have no international arts agency; Japan has the Japan Foundation with an active professional arts staff, which is experienced and proactive in the region. We need the internationalarts experts to be given responsibility for this part of the agenda for the arts, not left in thehands of political or economic experts of the Foreign Affairs department, nor in the hands of

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officers at the Australia Council who have little experience ofworking in Asia.
I have been asked to add my thoughts about Japan andSingapore in relation to Australia's experience in this arena,
particularly in the 1990s when our political system did provide
more support. My memory is strongly that the two proactive
and financially supported countries in the region able to do
this were Australia and Japan with, through the '90s , a parallel
program of activities with the rest of the region . This was thesame period as the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale started andthe Japan Foundation Asia Center. There was a similar senseof positioning, both aware of the need to be more proactive
culturally with the region .
We both were very aware of a similar sized "issue" in Asia todeal with, to live with, and for both of us, to live beyond-us
for our White Australia Policy and our white Western , nonAsian cuckoo-in-the-nest status, and Japan because of its
old arm's length identity with "Asia" generally and then its
actions in World War II. It means politically motivated art
ventures have this lurking in the background, even today.
While the last thing I want it to say is these issues were positive actions in themselves, they do add layers of complexity
to understandings, and I think that is not a bad thing: art was
being used by both governments for political ends, but it gave
opportunities for personal actions and engagements basedon a more nuanced understanding of identity and place.
If there is an issue that the Singaporeans faced with cultural
exchange, such as the White Australia Policy is for us, then it
would the perception in the West , including in Australia, of uniformity, censorship, and a lack of democracy. That had truth in
the 1990s, including an infamous censorship issue with an art
event, and I so clearly remember the tension between the artist
community, pushing against this, and the power of the government, really rather shocked by such rebellion . As a foreigner
trying to set things up in Singapore, I remember having to deal
with bureaucrats who focused, if not on censorship, then,on the economics-all arts ventures had to have a financial
income attached. That was a problem for the sort of thing wewere trying to do. But, through these years, Singapore reallychanged from within. The demands of those young, protesting students, artists, or whoever insisted on their voices being
heard and, now, the openness of critique, the level of research
into their past, their un-ending curatorial energy, their lack ofcolonial resentment, and their speed of response and adaptability, all speak of the political morphing into a new, creative,
personally-rewarding environment.

06
See www.asialink.unimelb.edu.au/arts

A fuller discussion of the program is givenin ""Peopleand Partnership: An AustralianModel for International Arts ExchangesThe Asialink Arts Program.1990-201
chapter 9. in Contemporary Asian Mand
Exhibitions; Connectivities and Worldmaking. ed. Michelle Antoinette andCaroline Turner (Canberra: Australian
National University Press. Asian Studies
Series Monograph 6. 2014). pp. 199-217.
See http://press.anu.edu.au ?p=298341.

o;·07
fig.OS08

fig.06Another part of the questionnaire asking
about follow-up projects reported 93
percent of residentshad continued withwritten contact leading to 54 percent
having follow-up projects between theartist and their host country.
09

This graph was published In, Alison
Carroll and Carrillo Gantner, Platform
Papers no. 31. Finding a Place on the
Asian Stage I New South Wales: Currency
House, 2012), p.52

10Ibid., pp. 49-53.

fig.07

Both Australia and Singapore are, obviously, predominantly
immigrant nations: multi-layered groups of peoples of theworld coming together in, by and large, a good-willed grouping. In Japanese terms, maybe these are difficult-to-definegroups of people, with many allegiances to past lives and local
ethnic groups under a wider Australian or Singaporean

DAY2 MAY24 . 2015

Asialink conducted a questionnaire In
2005 for past residents in visual arts.
performing arts, writing and arts management. One question about the importance of the experience on their work had
86 percent reporting it was ··extremely""or ··very influential.""The Political and the Personal : Australia 's Experience in Visual Art s Exchange in Southeast Asia through the 1990s

fig.OS
Jennifer Lindsay, Cultural Organisation
in Southeast Asia, Australia Council, 1994

fig,06"Sekali Lagi (Once Again): Australian
Artists Revisit Malaysia," Rimbun Dahan,
Kuala Lumpur, 1999.
Photograph courtesy: Asialink.

fig.07Australia Council funding for Performing
Arts projects in Asia, as a percentage
of "international" funds spent, from

1992-2011.

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umbrella, coming together in very recent times . I like to think , though, that the idea of multiple
times is as interesting here as multiple cultures - that for us, our short , two hundred and thirty
years of immigrant society has been lived in fast time compared with slow , or-a term I heard
recently-" deep" time in a culture like that of our Indigenous people, which looks back to theancestors . Indigenous Australia has little interest in this Western Enlightenment compuls ionof "forever forward." Australia 's position in this discussion today, in Asia, in ourselves, and in
our time, remains unsettled . Cultural commentators speak of the spaces between cultures as
areas of uncertainty and discomfort, but also of energy and possibility . Australia is such aspace, at least in the way it relates to those outside it.
Australia has sophisticated Western -based arts infrastructure , as does Japan , and much of
the rest of North Asia . However, in those days, this did not exist in the visual art institutions
in Southeast Asia , nor, for that matter, in South Asia . Hong Kong curator Oscar Ho has
recently written about this succinctly, t alking about Asia 's , "under-developed infrastructure, conservative administrative cultures , prolongation of the colonial mindset, andWestern cultural domination arising from the continuing imbalance of power and influenceof curatorial practices that are led by Western thinking ." n He questions whether thisWestern model of arts infrastructure is t he most useful.
Certainly, the reality in Southeast Asia in the 1990s showed an alternative way of thinking.
In fact it had been flagged in Australia by the engagement between artists of Southeast
Asia through the 1987 ARX project in Perth, which was noted before . The top -down,Western-derived, government-supported institutions of Southeast Asia were resistant tochange- even in the face of the general feeling through the region at the time that the art
world itself was changing, and that opportunities were arising and exchanges were possible .
It meant locally-relevant alternatives were created : artists groups, collectives, NGOs (orNPOs), private foundations, and small galleries bloomed . Art naturally made in the streets
became celebrated in the street . So-called "popular art" was taken up with enthusiasm by allsorts of practitioners. The community ruled . I had thought at the beginning that gradually

fig.OS
Dale Gortinkel. Michael Candy
and Wukir Suryadi (Australia andIndonesia). 8,rd Organ, mixed media,
from "The Instrument Builders ProJect;
Collaboration ,n Sound by Indonesian andAustralian Artists, " National Gallery ofVictoria, November 2014.

Ahson Carroll

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11

I would gain more professionally-trained curatorial colleagues
within the major institutions, but no, I gradually realizedagainst my will, really-that my new colleagues were everywhere else. It meant we, in Australia, had to be more agile torealign our thinking to this-not easy for some in Australia
where the demarcation between the publicly and privately
funded is fairly sacred . It is one of the areas that people in Asia
can teach those of us based in Western thinking . Writers like
Dipesh Chakrabarty in Provincialising
Europeg and
Kuan-Hsing Chen in Asia as Method ll have been looking for
new ways of thinking about the world, different sorts ofknowledge systems, and intra-regional links.
One excellent example of this thinking, always there in
Southeast Asian arts practice, was the Instrument Builders
project recently in Yogyakarta and Melbourne. It was of young
creative people building programs together, organically, acrossold media silos. It was full of inspiration, intelligence andcreativity, and everyone-artists and audience-loved it. fig.os
A great example of another way was shown by Sugimoto
Hiroshi in his exhibition "The End of Time" at the Mori Art
Museum in 2005. As those who saw it would remember, he
expected the audience to enter the work and walk through hisseries of spaces-like entering a literati ink painting and walking through that landscape . It enforced a different reality oftime and space, and inner harmony, on the traveler through hisworld . It still resonates for me as an alternative to a Westernderived external, static or didactic museum display. It wasnoted before that our main museums have been resistant tochanging their ways with Asian art. However, another example
of a different way of thinking is the exhibition during early 2015
at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, led by Suhanya Raffel,
Deputy Director of that museum, from their collection . ~ fig. 09
It puts contemporary and traditional work in marvellous dialogue. But, again, Suhanya is an individual driving a different
agenda within that place, able to do it because of her seniority,
and also her background and skill.

Oscar Ho. Under the Shadow P'Oble'TIS
In Museum Development in Asia, •Cnntemporary Asian Art and Exh,bttJon
ConnectNI/Jes ,nd World-makmr;, edMichelle Antoinette and Caroline Tun"er(C,inberra ANU Pres., 20141, p '80
12D1pt.shC~akrat.arty. Provmoallsmg
Eur0()€ Postwlomal Tho ,ght ,,n,f
HtStor,ca/ O,fferencv (New acns::yP•Ircetor University Press. 2007)

13
Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method
Tcwarrf De,mpenalrzaaon (Durham Duke
ur1vers1ty Press 20'0)
14

Conversdt1ons through the As,ar
Collcct1ors' curated by Su~anya Raffel,
DeJ)l ty Director, and Justin F ton. HeadCur tor International Art and the Asia~
curators of the Art G llery of New Soc tt,
Wales.2014 2l115

fig.09Conversations through the As1dn Collect1ons,
Art Gallery of New South Wales, March 2015.
left Mukha-lmga (Cambodia) 600s 700s, stone
right. Arnsh Kapoor,(India/UK), b. 1954.
Untitled, 2002. stainless steel and lacqurr

I'd love to see these creative, flexible, local, personal outcomes more around the region and the world . I'd love to see
Southeast Asian countries thinking flexibly in terms of space
as well : either laterally outwards, geographically, if they were
so inclined, or celebrating their own internal, personal, andlocal interpretation of culture, presented in a thoughtful andpositive way. There is no one way . I personally really like theMuseum of Fine Arts in Hanoi, proudly introspective about its
Socialist Realist collection .
Australia, Japan, and Singapore remain having among themost developed arts institutions in Asia, and there remains
the desire from above to keep this internationally accepted
professionalism flying high. An instance is the increasing
number of curatorial and art museum training places inAustralian tertiary institutions being for students from Asian
countries . Against this, is the growing rejection of the model.

DAY2 MAY 24, 2015

The Political and the Personal : Australia 's Experience in Visual Art s Exchange in Southeast Asia through the 19901

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Cultural Diplomacy andMuseum Management:
Beyond an
Imaginary Asia

Art Studies_02

072

KishiSayaka
Associate Professor . Faculty of Letters . Tsuru University

TranslatedbyAndrewMaerkle

The 1990s was the decade in which contemporary art saw widespread diffusion in Southeast
Asia. This is also the period during which Japan launched a new vision of cultural diplomacy,and public-run museums began to engage seriously with contemporary art. For the first timesince the end of World War 11,the Japanese art world, partly in response to various negative
legacies of the past, gave full attention to a broader Asian context-one undergoing both
geopolitical and generational transformation. This entailed attempts in the creation of artistic
values with local art practitioners across the region, as well as the development of proposals
for a new historiography of art stemming from the initiative of public institutions.
In this presentation, I would like to examine the contexts in which, firstly, the JapanFoundation instigated a cultural diplomacy to build confidence and trust in the arts and academia; and secondly, how the Fukuoka Art Museum aimed to differentiate itself from othermuseums through its managerial and curatorial endeavors. These contexts, and how they
related and functioned in the formation of the intra/ extra-regional art system, will be investigated by retracing a trajectory of relevant exhibitions and collections of the period.
Currently, the Asia-Pacific region is attracting the interests of sociology and economy in
the arts as a site for the "glocal" production of contemporary art, and as a market that canaffect the direction of the international art market . !!1 Japan's involvement with the AsiaPacific art world in the 1990s, which had become linked to the mainstream art world byvirtue of globalization, had its limits . Nevertheless, it can be said that it succeeded in challenging existing constructions of "Asia" while also generating new indicators and values .
This paved the way toward a new stage for the "Contemporary Asian Art" market whereupon existing notions and fixtures were questioned and overcome.
A Prehistoryof "AsianArt" - The Context of the 1970s and '80s

In Japan in the first half of the 1970s, the political repression in Korea under the military
regime there, the normalization of relations between Japan and China, and the anti-Japanese demonstrations in Southeast Asia all contributed to heightening concern for Asia.
Then, in 1979-80, the "Asian Art Show " was held at the Fukuoka Art Museum.
Having become a government-designated city in 1972, Fukuoka quickly began to catch
up with the modern political center of Kumamoto and the neighboring industrial center ofKitakyushu in the hub-based urbanization of Kyushu. In 1979, the city built an art museumon the same scale as the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art of the time, and designed,in fact, by the same architect, Maekawa Kunio. For its inaugural exhibition, the museum
organized an exchange with art academies from across Asia affiliated with UNESCO's
International Association of Art (initially thirteen countries). ~ Although it's not as if there wereno signs of a revival of the pre-war pan-Asianism among Japanese art professionals, what isremarkable is that it was this exhibition that sparked an interest, among the museum's postwar generation of curators, in Asian artists of the same generation.
In the latter half of the 1980s, Fukuoka rolled out the concept of the "focal point of exchanges

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073

within Asia," and established new events inspired by the city's hosting of the Asia-Pacific
Exposition (also known as "Yokatopia" ), like the Fukuoka Asian Prize (now the Fukuoka Prize) and the
Focus on Asia-Fukuoka International Film Festival. At the Fukuoka Art Museum, the "Asian
Artist Today- Fukuoka Annual" series of solo exhibitions introducing "Asian contemporary artists" began in 1988, while starting with the 3rd Asian Art Show Fukuoka: "Symbolic
Vision in Contemporary Asian Life" in 1989, the museum began to take part in the selectionof artists, which to that point had been delegated to representative organizations from eachcountry. Moreover, in 1991 the Asia collection was made a priority area, which would leadto the establishment of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. The artist chosen for the first exhibition in the "Asian Artist Today" series, Roberto Feleo, whose works were acquired by themuseum, became an overnight sensation in the Philippines. Gradually, the museum took on
the role of giving emerging artists their first exhibitions outside their homelands .
In the latter half of the 1980s, when the Fukuoka Art Museum was strengthening its
engagement with Asian art, there was a construction boom of art museums throughout Japan, and subsequently diversification of exhibition contents. This phenomenon,
described by Kitazawa Noriaki as "overcrowding of art museums" pushed those museums
to become the new "cultural leaders." ~ With the museums searching for materials in different area for their exhibitions, "Asian art" became one of such materials worth pursuing.

01
For example, Cosmopolrtan Canvases:The
Globalizat,onof Markets for ContemporaryM, ed Olav Velthuis and Stefano Ba,a
Cunonr IOxford: Oxford Unrvers1ty Press,2015).

02
Kishi Sayaka, "B1Iutsukan ga 'Aj12' n,de' au tok, Fukuoka AI1a B1Iutsukan no
setsuntsu to tenka, (When Art Museums
Encounter As,a The E:stablishment andDevelopment of the Fukuoka AsianArt Museum), Sengo N,hon no koku·
sai bunka koryu (International Cultural
Diplomacy ,n Postwar Japan), ed. Sengo
Nihon Kokusai Bunka K6ryu Kenkyukai/
Hirano Kenrchiro (Tokyo: Keis6 Shob6,
2005), pp. 240 -278. In the 1970s, a handful of Korean contemporary artists wereshown at pnvately operated venues likeTokyo Gallery, but the term "Asian art"
itself essentially meant things like Korean
porcela,n and Southeast Asian Buddhist
art See also Tokyogar6 60-nen (60 Yearsof Tokyo Gallery). Tokyo Gallery, 201003

On the other hand, the Japan Foundation approached Asian contemporary art from the context of cultural diplomacy. Established in 1972 as an auxiliary organization of the Ministryof Foreign Affairs, and against the backdrop of the sudden rapprochement between the
United States and China (the "Nixon shock " ) and rising anti-Japanese sentiment in Southeast
Asia, the Japan Foundation set up offices in Washington, Jakarta and Bangkok, prioritizing projects addressing the United States and Southeast Asia. With its initiation in 1976 of
the Asian Traditional Performing Arts (ATPA)exchange program for researching, performing
and documenting ethnic music, and the organization in 1982 of the Japan Foundation Film
Festival: A Panorama of South Asian Films, the Japan Foundation produced rank after rankof Asian theater and film specialists.

K,tazawa Nonak,. "B1Iutsukan no 11dai:1970 nenda, kohan--1990 nenda, (TheAge of Art Museums From the Late
1970s to the 1990s);' 89utsu no N,hon
km-gendat s/11.Se,do,gensetsu, zoke, (TheJapanese Modern and Contemporary
History of Art: lnst,tut,ons, Discourse,
Practice), ed. Kitazawa Nanak, and Mon
H1tosh1(Tokyo: Tokyo B1Iutsu, 2014),
pp.631-680. Around this time, art museurns specializingin contemporary art
opened ,n lwaki (1984), Hiroshima (1989),
M,to (1990) and Tokyo (1995), and began
to engage in art,st,c exchange with Asia
04

With such professionals in a central role, the ASEAN Culture Center was establishedin Tokyo's Shibuya ward in 1990. ~ The main attraction of the opening was a performance by the Bengkel Teater, led by the Indonesian anti-establishment poet and dramatist, W . S. Rendra. In 1994 the Japan Foundation Forum was established as an event
space in Akasaka, and in 1995, the ASEAN Culture Center was reorganized as the Asia
Center, expanding its scope of activity and target countries. Following the ASEAN Culture
Center's establishment, specialized exhibition staffs were added to those for theatre andfilm, and exhibitions and symposiums focusing on contemporary art were periodicallyorganized and introduced to the Japanese audience.

Wada Jun, "H1gash1AI1a ni okeru Nihon
no kokusa, bunka k6ryu to bunka gaik6:
Sengo Nihon no se,fu k1kan no katsud6
to kadai (Japanese International Cultural
Exchange and Diplomacy ,n East Asia:
The Activities and Challenges of Postwar
Japan's Governmental Organrzat,ons), "Gendai h,gashi,4/1ato Nihon 1: Nlhon no
h1gash1
A/iakoz6 (Contemporary East Astaand Japan 1: The Japanese Conceptionof East Asia), ed. Soeya Yosh,hide
and Tadokoro Masayuki (Tokyo: Keio
University Press, 2004), pp. 59 109.

05

What was being advocated here was a "bilateral intellectual exchange" differing from thekind of "one way" public diplomacy predicated on national interest pursued by the Ministryof Foreign Affairs? It was understood that, without excluding statements and expressions
that could be considered critical by the Japanese government and its counterparts, thebuilding of mutual trust and respect through academic and artistic fairness and neutrality
contributed to the broader national interest. ~Gek1J6se,do, kokusai k6ryti, bunka setsaku (Art and Environment: Theater"New Art from Southeast Asia 1992" as Turning Point06

In 1992, the exhibition "New Art from Southeast Asia 1992" was organized as the outcome of the collaborative initiatives of public museums and the cultural diplomacy outlined
above . A team comprising curators from the Fukuoka Art Museum and the Hiroshima City
Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as art critics with extensive international experience,
was appointed and sent to conduct field research with the help of local informants, coordinated by the Japan Foundation's overseas offices and by Japanese embassies .~DAY2 MAY24, 2015

Cultural Oiplomac"yand Museum Management : Beyondan Imaginary Asia

Oka Manko, "Kokusa, k6ryu k1kin tobunka gaik6 (The Japan Foundation andCultural Diplomacy)," Ge9utsuto Kanky6.

lnst1tut1ons, International Exchange andCultural Policy). ed 116Yasuo and FuIi1
Sh1ntar6(Tokyo: Rons6sha, 2012), pp.
194-213.

For more on the expenences of those on
the receiving end of the "parachuting"curators, see Flaudette May Dautin's presentation paper in this publication (p.141.

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On the basis of this research, the team was able to introduce the work of young ASEAN artists who were just beginning to emerge at the time.

07
Kish, Sayaka, ·90 nendai AJia biJutsu ni
okeru 'dai toa sense' no k1oku· Wakaki
hangyakusha tachi no tabu e no chosen(Memories of the 'Pacific War' in the
Asian art of the 1990s: The Young Rebels'
Assault on Taboos)." Semegiau kioku:
Rek,shi no sa1k6chiku o meguru h1kaku
bunka ron (Competing Memones: Theses
on HistoncalReconstructionin
Comparative Culture), ed. Tsuru Bunka
Oa,gaku Bungaku Bu H,kaku Bunka
Gakka (Tokyo: Kash1wa Shob6. 2013), pp.
55 84.

08
Kuroda Raiji, "AJia gendai biJutsu 'bumu'
no omote to ura (The Ins and Outs of
the Asian Contemporary Art 'Boom'),"ArtEXPRESSno. 6. March 1995.
pp. 32 42

09
Tatehata Akira. "Yaguchi Kurno no
kokorozash, o tsugu tame ni !Carrying on
the Vision of Yaguchi Kunio)," Yaguchi
Klimo biJUtsu ran shu.· Byutsu no uch, tosoto [The Collected Criticism of Yaguch1
Kunio: Art Inside and Out), ed. "Yaguchi
Kurno Bijutsu Ron Shu" Hakkohn Kai,
BiJuLsuShuppan-sha, 2006. p 1B
10
Brenda V.Fajardo." Rethinking ASEAN
Aesthetics: An Overview of the
Symposium Topics and D1scuss1onof
Emerging Issues:· The AesthetJcs on
ASEAN Expressions. Second ASEAN
Workshop, Exh1b1t1onand Symposium on
Aesthet,cs (Jakarta: ASEAN COCI. 1994),
pp. 60 75
11
Tanaka Sanzo. 'Ajia gendai bijutsu
bumu Fukuoka, Hiroshima nado kakuchi de tenranka, Se1y6to no taintsu karadapp,, gen1Itsu no naka de ·Iibun sagashi[The Asian Contemporary Art BoomExh1b1t1onsIn Fukuoka, Hiroshima andelsewhere: Sloughing off binary relations
with the West, and 'searching for the self'
in reality)" in the Asahi Shimbun, October
5, 1994. Incidentally, the same year, thesocial phenomenon of Japan's exhibition
culture was confirmed as an ob1ect ofconsumption after the Barnes Collection
exh1b1t1onorganized by the National
Museum of Western Art and the Yomiun
Sh1mbun saw the third-largest number ofvisitorsto an exhibitionin history,at
1,070,000 But ,twas also a year when,with the approach of fifty years since the
war's end, art became pol1t1cizedthroughevents hke protests in Seoul against the"Works of Japanese Traditional Craft"exh1b1tionorganized by the JapanFoundation and the Korean National
Museum of Contemporary Art.

Organized as part of Southeast Asia Festival 1992, commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the Japan Foundation and twenty-five years since the formation of ASEAN, theexhibition toured from Tokyo to Fukuoka, Hiroshima and Osaka, and its works addressing
social issues caused a stir in the Japanese art scene. For example, Wong Hoy Cheong's
Sook Ching (The Purge) (1989) dealt with the massacre of overseas Chinese committed by theImperial Japanese Army in British Malaya during World War 11,as well as the oppression of
ethnic Chinese in contemporary Malays ia. The work's inclusion can be seen as an instanceof the thinking at the time that no art exhibition about "Asia" could be complete without
such direct forms of expression . QIAmong the seventeen artists who were exhibited at the Fukuoka Art Museum, thirteen had
their works acquired by the institution, and the sensibilities of these works would informthe theme of the 4th Asian Art Show Fukuoka, "Realism as an Attitude." ~ To this point,
Japanese museums had generally depended on the financial support and know-how ofnewspaper sponsors, and the name-appeal of masterpiece works, to attract visitors totheir exhibitions. The collaboration with the Japan Foundation, with its vast connectionsin Asia-centered on Southeast Asia-showed the potential for creating unique initiatives
and networks that did not rely on pre-existing institutions. !!!! "New Art from Southeast
Asia 1992" had a considerable effect on Southeast Asia as well, and the following year,
1993, saw even more momentum build for reforms in cultural exchange across the ASEAN
region at the 2nd ASEAN Workshop, Exhibition and Symposium on Aesthetics, held in
the Philippines, as well as in light of the inaugural opening of the Asia Pacific Triennial ofContemporary Art in Australia . .1.Q
In September 1994, the Fukuoka Art Museum and the Hiroshima City Museum ofContemporary Art (Hiroshima MOCA) respectively held two group exhibitions, the 4th AsianArt Show Fukuoka and "Asian Art Now ," using the curatorial and organizational know-how
they had gained through their experiences of holding "New Art from Southeast Asia 1992"
exhibition. Among the works produced locally in Hiroshima, Yanagi Yukinori's Project Article9
stuck to the theme of issues of war-and -peace in Asia, while Cai Guo-Oiang's explosion
project, Earth Has Its Black Hole Too, was a celebration of that year's Asian Games, held in
Hiroshima, as well as a requiem for the dropping of the atomic bombs . In Fukuoka, too,socially critical works dominated the exhibition, to which an impressive eighteen artists had
been invited, and public workshops, performances, talks and community exchange eventswere held over the course of a month on the basis of numerous supporters .
The same year, the Asahi Shimbun would report on the "Asian contemporary art boom
( compelling reconsideration of the rhetoric of Japanese advancement) ." 11 Inspired by the symposium
organized at the same time by the Japan Foundation, "The Potential of Asian Thought," thisled to debate in the Japanese art world among both the old and the young generations.
Although there's no room to go into detail here, with voices warning against Japanesehegemony rising from among even the advocates of Southeast Asia, the position that a"Japan" which had always been under the sway of the West could learn something from
"Asia" came into conflict with the position that "Japan" should avoid invoking "Asia" (as it
would lead to "Japanese" cultural aggressions) . .11 In this way the peculiar understanding in Japanof "Asia" as "exotic/resort/poverty-stricken"
came to be challenged . Simultaneously, there
were attempts to find a new role for "Japan" as a facilitator that could connect "Asia" withthe "international art world." It may not have been fully appreciated at the time, but thearrival of an age of contemporary art with "Asia" at its forefront would gradually lead to areconsideration of the concepts of "Asia" and "Japan" themselves .
In 1995 and '97, both the Japan Foundation and the Fukuoka Art Museum organized exhibitions of Southeast Asian modern art, beginning their engagement with the recounting ofKtsh,Sayaka

Presentation 3

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a regional art history . The Japan Foundation's "Asian Modernism : Diverse Development
in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand" exhibition (1995)toured to the Philippines,
Indonesia and Thailand, setting the stage for collaborative initiatives in Asia from the
2000s onwards. Similarly, the Fukuoka Art Museum's "Birth of Modern Art in Southeast
Asia" exhibition (1997) was anchored by the modern art collection of the Fukuoka AsianArt Museum, leading to a unique vein of research into modern art. In 1996, the Singapore
Art Museum's inaugural exhibition, "Modernity and Beyond," called for the necessity ofengaging in research of a regional scope, while following developments in Japan, Australia
and the United States, as "art writing by Southeast Asians has developed along lines
circumscribed by national boundaries" H While research on the modern art histories ofneighboring countries like China and Korea remained difficult, it could be said that by
involving public organizations from different countries in Southeast Asia, these exhibitions
provided a foothold for the establishment of thematic frameworks and comparative analysis of a regional scope.
There were also steady increases in the holdings of Asian art in museum collections. Works
exhibited in Fang Lijun's solo exhibition organized by the Japan Foundation Asia Center
were acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT),the Okinawa Prefectural
Museum & Art Museum, and the Tokushima Modern Art Museum, in addition to Fukuoka
Art Museum. In the "Art in Southeast Asia 1997: Glimpse into the Future" exhibition heldat the MOT and Hiroshima MOCA in 1997, even younger artists were included, and of theseventeen participating artists, more than half had works acquired by Tokyo, Fukuoka andOkinawa, while in Hiroshima, the commissioning of works had been undertaken the previous year.
Internationally, exhibitions like "Traditions/ Tensions," organized by the Asia Society in New
York, and "Cities on the Move," which toured Europe in 1997, followed on the heels of the
2nd Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane in 1996. At a symposium organized in 1997 by the Japan Foundation, the issue of (the work 's inherent) "quality" was one of
the subjects that caught attention, and questions were raised about the (artistic) "value" of
Asian art as artwork. 11
Around this same time, Japanese contemporary art galleries began to explore places like
Vietnam and Taiwan, and gallerists appeared who would promote Japanese and Asian artists at Western art fairs and among Asia-Pacific public organizations, eventually becoming
important leaders in the "Asian contemporary art" market . As the art scenes of the Asia
Pacific linked up with the mainstream art scenes of Europe and the United States, glocal
artistic production, allowing artists to address the broader world while staying in their own
localities, would at last become possible .!!!
On Engagement in the Construction of Artistic Value

Established to focus on the modern and contemporary art of twenty-one Asian countries
and territories, the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum opened in 1999. The core of the collection
was centered on works that had been acquired essentially from the end of the 1980s
onward. Then, in 2000, the Japan Foundation started the inter-regional exchange program"Under Construction ." That same year's Gwangju Biennale (with its Asian section curated by Tani
Arata) and the following year's Yokohama Triennale (which featured numerous Asian artists) werethe culmination of these Asian art projects in the Japanese art scene, but almost immediately, due to repercussions from the economic situation and administrative and f iscal
reforms, the 2000s saw the arrival of the "period of winter-like hardships for museums ."Amid great remorse, the Japan Foundation Asia Center was dissolved in 2004, while the
Fukuoka Asian Art Museum's budget was slashed. As the Asian art projects of Japanesecultural diplomacy and public museums were rapidly scaled back, it became apparent
in hindsight that what had been reported on as a "boom" was in fact the presumption ofDAY2 MAY24 , 2015

Cultural Diplomacy and Museum Management : Beyond an Imaginary As ia

12

sr,

K
S. ya1<a. B1IutsL , 01<en, AI1ano nyosho Fukuoka AJ1ab11utsukan notnn1I katsudii (Reprsertat,ons of "As,an An Tt,e Exh1b1t1onActovnoesof the
Fukuo>«. Asian An Museum).· Kokusa,
bunks kanke, sh, kenkyu (flesearc.h or
the Hostory of lnternat,or I Cultural
Rel toons) ed Hirano Ken'ochoro F, ruta
Kazuk >.T.:i ct 1daAK1c..c:tnd~warnu1
Yoko. okyo Un1vers1tyPres.s,201 .
p~ 234-254. The n,story of discourse>nAs1dnart was addressedin the Jr,
Fourd •to,r symµc soum cf 2008 See
Ka11yaKen11s ·N,non .,, okeru AJ1ano
gendd1b1Jutsu
to kmda1no b6r 1A~1an
Contemporary An and tne Gnost of
Moc'ern1ty In Japan)." as well as "Session
1 D1scuss10n, lnternatJona/ Sympos,um
2008 Count 10 Before You Soy Asia Asian
Art Airer Fbstmndermsm ed. Furu1c~1
Y,:sukc, (To1<yo·-riie Japan F0Lm.tat1c.n,
L009)

13
K. Sabap;,thy, "A Regional View
-riiemes n Soutneast Asian An •Supple:menttoArtAsiaParJf,, 3. No. 2.
1996. p. 6 For the details on tne plan
"In\', an<! preparation -:,f thr same ex~1b1
too~. see AhMad Mast>adi's prese~tatI0n
paµeronth1spubhc tionlpp.61 63)
T

14

From the exchange between Tateh •aAkor and Nan10 Fum10 n Sess1or 2.
Sympos,um. Asian Contemporary Art
RernnSJderod Report. ed. Furuoch1
Yasuko and Hoash1 Aki (Tokyo· -riie JapanFoundation As,a Center. 1997)15
Regarding the anractoon •oward theAsia Pac1fte as a new fram0Y10rk,Se£~ Iardo, Hethinking ASEAN AP.sthetocs'

Pie Thaiartist Montten Boonma said,,apan dnd Australia are supponing
exh1b1t1onsc,f Souther st Asian an" (As,aCeroterNews no. 6. Summer • 997). while•here are 31soassenIons that young ThaianIsts have staned choosing 111pursue•heir ct:1reers
1n the As1a~Paclf1c
region,rather than going IC'st dy n Europe,
as had previously ':>eE.nthe conventIor(Annabelle B01ss1er."De ·an moderne al'art c >rtemporain. Un transfertde monopole dans le monde do I'an tha1lanc.ais "Sc,ence~ soc,ales et humames en
Aste du Sud-Est, n 24, 2009. pp 91 109)
AseantP.

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government organizations and art museums, as well as journalists, and cannot be said tohave aroused great interest among the general audience. !!
In postwar Japanese society , art museums had functioned largely as sites for broad cultural
consumption based on their coordination with "newspapers, journalists, department storesand the market ." rr It has been pointed out that where works of modern art and those bymainstream academic-style artists - already confirmed in their value-had establishedmarkets and could obtain a broad base of social appreciation , it was difficult for contempo rary art to build a stable basis from which to support a constituency and market. Additionally,
the above-mentioned bipolar stance of t he 1990s art scene may also have made it difficult toengage with Asian art in an optimistic way . The Asian art projects by Japanese public institutions could not overturn the pre-existing system, nor could they directly connect to theformation of a contemporary Asian art market driven by China and India.

16
Nakamura Hideki, "Who 'introduces'
What to Whom and Why?), International
Symposium 1999-AsianArt: Prospects
for the Future Report, ed. Furu1ch1Yasuko(Tokyo: The Japan Foundation Asia
Center, 2000), pp.150 151
The merits and demerits of proJects by
public InstItutIons are also debated byNakamura H1dek1,Tani Arata andNakamura Masato in "Te1dan: Ajia nonaka no Nihon, Aj1a no soto no Nihon(Three-Way Talk: Japan in Asia, JapanOut of Asia)" In REAR. 2005.

17
Sato Doshin, Bljutsu no aidentiti' Dare notame ni, nan no tame m (Identity ,n Al1:
For Whom, and For What?) (Tokyo:
Yoshikawa Ko Bunkan, 2007).

18
For example, Kak12ak1Takao, "Gyarari 75
shunen: Tsune n, atarashii 11daino kach1 n,furenagara (75 years of gallenes:
Constantly touching upon the values of a
new age)," A/ta gendat btjutsu Repot1
No. 1 (Asian Contemporary Al1 Repol1No.1)(Tokyo: 81JutsuNenkansha, 1994),
pp. 30-34. It's common to hear people
say that views on art have changed dueto the works of Asian contemporary
artists.

19
Asia Center News no.17 (Tokyo: The
Japan Foundation Asia Center, March
2001), p.8
20
Nathalie Moureau and Dominique SagotDuvauroux, le marche de f'at1 contempo
ram (Pans: La Oecouverte, 2010);
Raymonde Moulin, L'art1ste, !'institution
et le marche (Pans: Flammanon, 1992);
Nathalie He1nich, le TripleJeu de l'at1
contemporam (Paris: Les Editions deMinuit, 1998).

Even given the above limits, I still think that the 1990s are worth studying as the formative
period of Asian art. For one thing, in the open atmosphere of the early period, a small but
new audience began to appear along with a new generation of specialists. For example ,inspired by her interactions with the art ists in the exhibition, one of the volunteers supporting the 4th Asian Art Show Fukuoka started sending out regular updates on the museum,and other related information, earning the gratitude of many of the artists . Similarly , a citizen's group from Fukushima has become known for its continuous support of new works
by Cai Guo-Giang, after the artist held his solo exhibition at the lwaki City Art Museum in
1994. Audiences in Tokyo also began to pay attention to Asian art after the 4th Asian Art
Show toured to the Setagaya Art Muse um in 1995. A collector who describes himself as"salaryman collector," first took interest in Asian art around then and is now known as thecollector and the spokesperson for Asian art .
According to those who were exposed to these artists' events , Asian artists have a "different wavelength from that of Western art ists." 1! At the symposium for the Heri Dono exhibition at the Japan Foundation Forum in 2000, one of the guests, Ozawa Tsuyoshi, recalled of
Heri Dono, "We first met in 1994 in Fukuoka, and I was overwhelmed by his vitality ... it was
really enjoyable being together in the same exhibition. " !l! Perhaps the sense of solidarity
and sympathy toward one another's works shared by artists who lived in the same region,and the expectations toward artists who seemed to have bright futures, were producing a
sense of a new art as the object of an engagement or " investment " that had not been possible in the traditional artistic viewpoint centered on enlightenment and patronage .
In the realm of contemporary art, public institutions provide objective indicators via the
production of exhibitions and publicatio ns, and the formation of collections, thus functioning
as the authorizing body, and conferring artist ic value upon artists and artworks by way ofreciprocal interaction with the art market. ~ In the production of contemporary art, the newprinciples of cultural diplomacy described as " bilateral intellectual exchange" played a role in
the production of artistic value on a regional and international scope, alongside the invigoration of art museum management. And the exhibition, publication and collection activities ofpublic museums would contribute to the formation process of universal values that went
beyond the "local" or the "regional" levels, but which were at the same time more grassroots than the affirmation of pre-established values or the mechanisms of enlightenment.
In this way, it can be seen how the isolated, ossified concept of "Asia" that was formed bymodernity was gradually loosened and unpacked through the involvement of the publicorganizations of the 1990s. This is a question that even now continues to add vitality toartistic production in the Asia Pacific, but in the age of the "Asian contemporary art" market, which since the latter half of the 2000s has allowed for the participation of ever morediverse players, it is dissolving into an even larger framework of artistic production . Perhaps
what is needed now is the provision of an environment for reevaluating the spirit of artistic
production in the 1990s, and carrying it forward in a critical way .

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DiscussionI Session3.....

HoashiAki

DAY2 MAY24 . 2015