11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

In keeping with the popular 2024 meme, the success of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art’s 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art might rest on it being recognised as a “demure” and “mindful” affair, guided by issues of healing and community without the need for Pop-like attention grabbing.

“Well, it’s APT time . . . again,” I want to say with the on-camera inflections of Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, 1993, dejected by the day’s repetition. Now in its eleventh iteration, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) conjures, in hardened Australian gallery-goers at least, a corresponding mix of disillusionment and intrigue towards a once pioneering exhibition that has been replicating itself for at least the last fifteen or so years.

As with most biennale-style exhibitions these days, of which there are nearly 300 around the world, in APT11 the issue of how conventionally governed museums can best serve the often unconventional individual projects they rely on isn’t even remotely up for questioning. Instead, boasting more than seventy artistic projects by artists from over thirty countries, the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) has more legacy-building matters at hand. While it’s difficult to find anyone in the art world who isn’t tired of the biennale cliché of staging anti-spectacle spectacles of neo / de-colonial cultural flow (which promise a kind of de facto wonderment at cultural specificities writ large), many of us also know that, as in Groundhog Day, cynical resignation is not the answer.

Since 1993, the APT has been one of the few recurring mega exhibitions with an avowed interest in a specific region of the world, even if it has looked frequently dominated by its own precarious delimitations. The show repeatedly negotiates the tricky politics at play when craft-based Indigenous traditions sit alongside the theoretically infinite outputs of diasporic ethno-cultural groups. But, for the nay-sayers—those who think of the APT as largely a diplomatic exercise (one in which its artists come off more like ingredients than delicacies)—APT11 won’t change any minds. Thirty-two years after its first instalment, the exhibition’s soft regional diplomacy has grown from a nineties curatorial habit to an asserted core value; a moral ideal pronouncing care and advocacy in an era of transactional and bombastic world leaders like Trump.

In keeping with the popular 2024 meme, the success of APT11 might rest on it being recognised as a “demure” and “mindful” affair, guided by issues of healing and community without the need for Pop-like attention grabbing—as seen in previous efforts that interspersed traditional craft-based practices with the more provocative aesthetics of artists such as Takeshi Murakami, Uji Handoko Eko Saputro (aka Hahan), Ai Weiwei, Yasumasa Morimura, and Jeong Geumhyung. To this end, Māori artist Brett Graham consciously undercuts the impact of his large-scale sculptures by making them highly codified plaintive memorials, referring to a range of structures created by both the British and Māori during the New Zealand Wars in the nineteenth century (1845-1872). The politics of design ancestry underpin every aspect of Graham’s symbolism: weapon mounting platforms from an historic New Zealand government warship inform O’Pioneer, 2020, and the mast-like poles made by followers of Pai Mārire—a Māori religious movement formed in response to the government’s nineteenth century military operations and land-grabbing—are key motifs in the nine-metre-tall Cease Tide of Wrong-Doing, 2020.

Graham’s practice of critically interweaving assorted historical signs and materials—didactic in a visually symbolic rather than narrative way—is echoed throughout the exhibition. An enormous array of local geo-political histories are posed in APT11, in ways that seem designed to be indexically unpacked. Because of their sheer scope, however, the viewer’s unpacking largely gets deferred to gallery plaques or to the catalogue at a future date. The Philippine collaborative group Piguras Davao’s The Silent Witness, 2019, exemplifies the mosaic-like mode of historical symbolism prominent in the exhibition. The work is a surreal, mural-type painting mixing religious, mythological, and contemporary cultural motifs. Bare-chested goddesses, Spanish soldiers, ancient sultans, and Japanese samurai warriors all panoramically allude to the melting-pot community of Mindanao, the second-largest island in the Philippines.

A similar amalgamative aesthetic is central to Karla Dickens’ work, an artist of Wiradjuri, Irish, and German ancestry. She is represented by fourteen assemblages in the Robin Gibson-designed Queensland Art Gallery space, many riffing on the world globe as both breast and ad hoc cosmos support. Although visually more like Robert Rauschenberg than fellow Australian artist Tony Albert, Dickens nonetheless shares Albert’s love of the “fall-apart” sensibility of Blak farce: a kitschy, carnivalesque aesthetic in which broken motifs are not converted or exalted so much as left looking hackneyed and timeworn, in keeping with their critiques of broken political systems.

The first three APTs saw the Queensland Art Gallery working closely with a team of curators in the Asia-Pacific region, but since then the event has been collaboratively curated inhouse, a practice that does little to counter claims that its methods have become stagnant. This isn’t necessarily the fault of the talented curators assigned to the exhibition. As somebody said to me when I was visiting the show: “what cutting-edge exhibition has ever been repeatedly staged by a committee?”

The stated aims of QAGOMA’s curators Tarun Nagesh, Abigail Bernal, Ruha Fifita, Reuben Keehan, and Ruth McDougall are to place focus on art as a process of co-creation, emphasising “the fundamental value of establishing and nurturing relationships with one another and the natural world.” Happily, terms such as relational art and socially engaged art are put aside in favour of a more general, almost pre-modern embrace of collective creative practice.

A host of collaboratively produced works are shown alongside those made by genuine collectives such as the Māori groups AWA (Artists for Waiapu Action) and Paemanu Ngāi Tahu Contemporary Visual Arts, the Solomon Island-based KAWAKI and Dreamcast Theatre, and the Mumbai-based CAMP. The latter group’s atmospheric and immersive remote-controlled CCTV video installation, Bombay Tilts Down, 2022, is a particular highlight, poetically setting the factual, all-seeing aspects of city surveillance against visual, aural, and linguistic metaphors of power, performance, and restraint.

The stop-motion animation of Taiwanese artist Zhang Xu Zhan, Compound Eyes of Tropical, 2020-22 / 2024, is an undeniable favourite and perhaps the most persuasively installed work in APT11, in an exhibition that is otherwise marked by formulaic arrangements by the gallery’s specialist installation-design team. Centring on a hand-made papier-mâché figure of a “mouse-deer” (later revealed to be the costume of a human performer) who is trying to cross a crocodile-infested river by relying on its shrewdness, Zhang Xu’s work draws from Taiwan’s yi zhen folk dance and the Malay tale The Mousedeer Crosses the River. The animation—which is quirky but without quirky’s usual trappings—has a distinctly textural quality to it, accentuated by its evocative score and the papered walls of the darkened space, which rally viewers to see beyond its localised motifs to the inter-cultural realms of folk magic.

While some have criticised QAGOMA in the past for embracing populism over artistic practice, I would argue that this and other APTs are, on the contrary, so focussed on the aims of its artists and curatorial interlocutors that, for viewers, engaging with the actual works often feels like an inconsequential bureaucratic element of a supposedly more important curatorial agenda. In the catalogue, director Chris Saines notes an impending loan of some one hundred works from the Gallery’s Asia Pacific collection, acquired since the APT’s inception in 1993, to the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. There is no doubt that the exhibition has a legacy worth protecting, but while guest curators at least promise each time to reinvigorate a city’s biennial or triennial exhibition, the APT is entering its thirties coasting towards convention.

Exhibition
11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art
30 November 2024 – 27 April 2025
Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane

This profile was published in Artist Profile, Issue 70, 2025.  
Images courtesy of the artists, Silverlens, Manila and New York, and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane