Asian Art - A blockbuster in all but reputation

Asian Art - A blockbuster in all but reputation

It's hard to underestimate the significance of the APT several of these artists were artists-in-residence at Pacific Bridge. Unfortunately a decade later the penetration of Asian Art into the US is still in waiting

DOUG Hall is content to look back at his 20 years as director of the Queensland Art Gallery and admit to ignorance. "Sometimes the more you know, the less you will try to do," he says. When in 1990 he convinced QAG trustees to commit to an initial series of three Asia-Pacific Triennials, the potential was there, but very little else.
"With the first APT in 1993 and the second in 1996, most of the artists hadn't been heard of," Hall says. "We were breaking new ground. We were able to write about the art and collect it where there wasn't a body of critical opinion that was able to support it. We just had to back our judgment."

Hall's assessment was shrewd. Given its history and location, Australia would always be a poor relation among the families of the old art world, and Queensland always the country cousin within the local family. The solution was to create a new family and with it a circle of interesting and increasingly influential friends.

"We were looking to mark the things that were different about us and, as a quirk of geography, we look towards Asia and across the Pacific so, psychologically, that's our difference," Hall says.

The idea of strategically rethinking Australia's political, economic and cultural identity was fashionable in the 1990s. The University of Melbourne's business and cultural centre, Asialink, began its arts program in 1990 after the federal government set up the first ministerial meeting to establish the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum at the end of 1989. Looking towards Asia seemed like a good idea, but what it meant in practice was less clear. In 1987, the same year Hall was appointed director, the new chairman of QAG's board of trustees, Richard Austin, made a speech suggesting that an Australian gallery "on the periphery of Asia" should take into account countries to the near north. Austin, a former soldier, diplomat and businessman with a passion for collecting Japanese art, had also been known during his time on the board of the National Gallery of Victoria as someone resistant to modern art.

It was all the more extraordinary, then, that this octogenarian conservative (he died in 2000) and the iconoclastic 32-year-old director should hatch a plot to revolutionise Queensland's cultural identity. What's more they encountered little effective opposition, either at the time or as the project developed.

Hall's argument was that QAG's historical collection was, at best, patchy.

"As we looked at developing the policy, we kept coming back towards a focus on art now," he says. "So while we take our art history very seriously, we realised that if we wanted to do something distinctive, we had to narrow our options."

That meant widening their horizons, with what appears in retrospect to be a kind of wildly optimistic chutzpah. "I remember being in a taxi in Indonesia with Doug in 1992," says Alison Carroll, now arts director with Asialink, "and I thought to myself, 'This could all go horribly wrong'."

Carroll was one of a small group of advisers brought together by QAG in the set-up period: it was a very small group, she says, because there weren't many people with sufficient expertise in the area of Asia-Pacific contemporary art to assist.

With the backing of his board, Hall reasoned that to spend large amounts on lesser works by major artists would still not give QAG a collection comparable to the southern galleries. And an attraction of getting in early with works by contemporary Asian and Pacific artists was the relatively low cost. For example, a work by Takashi Murakami, known as the Asian Andy Warhol, created for the 1996 APT and acquired for $32,000, is now insured for $1.2million. Works acquired across the past 15 years by artists such as Heri Dono, Lee U-fan, Nam June Paik and Yayoi Kusama are now part of the new Gallery of Modern Art's permanent collection.

"We've been able to buy the main event," Hall says. "We own the real touchstone piece of many of these artists."

Art Asia Pacific magazine's New York publisher and editor Elaine Ng describes QAG's collection as a goldmine and credits Brisbane's APT with sowing the seeds for the rapid growth of biennials across the region, "setting the trends and forecasting where the creative energy is".

"If you look at the Queensland collection," she says, "all those artists are now a name and historically important. The Guggenheim in New York this year appointed a curator of Asian art (announcing itself as the "first major international museum of modern and contemporary art" to do so), but Queensland were pioneers in their efforts."

Ng says the entry of the world's leading contemporary art institutions into the Asian-Pacific field has created record sales figures that put much of the new work out of the reach of smaller galleries, but Queensland has the jump on the "big powerhouses".

"There is now, more than ever, an urgency for expertise in the area," she says.

QAG's new Gallery of Modern Art, which opens tomorrow, will house an Australian Centre for Asia-Pacific Art, the research centre established in 2002 in support of the APT. APT5 will be displayed in the smaller original QAG building as well as the GoMA. Almost 70 per cent of the works on show are already part of the gallery's collection, although many have not yet been seen.

As with all previous APTs, there is no single curator but instead a curatorial team that includes Hall and senior staff from QAG.

"From day one, the curatorship has been invested in the institution," Hall says, "not only because there was insufficient curatorial strength to carry it unilaterally, but it also took into account that these are collective cultures we are dealing with, so that the idea of unilateral curatorship brings forth legitimate arguments of colonialist mentalities arriving to do whatever they like.

"Australia has built a different dynamic than, say, America, because we have built an independent cultural, intellectual and governmental relationship with the region.

"I think one of the reasons for the ease with which the APT was accepted in the region is because Australia didn't colonise anyone and we had been colonised ourselves."

Endless expressions of angst in group curatorial meetings did, nevertheless, cause problems. Hall remembers, after one drawn-out process of self-examination, a representative from an Asian gallery told them: "Look, it's your triennial, just do it."

Sixty thousand people came to see the 200 works by 76 artists at APT1, a surprise success Hall is at a loss to explain. "Why is it that you show contemporary art from cultures little understood, by artists who have never been heard of, and the public comes in and loves it? I don't understand the phenomenon, but I think it's got a lot to do with the personality of the gallery."

It also says something about Brisbane: perhaps it's not as conservative as its reputation would suggest, or at least it's easygoing enough to try something new.

Double that number turned up to APT2, then 155,000 for APT3, until, three years ago, 220,000 people visited the three-month free exhibition. These are figures that stack up against blockbuster exhibitions in other state galleries, such as Melbourne's Winter Masterpieces. Yet, although it looks like a blockbuster, acts like a blockbuster and pulls the punters like a blockbuster - minus the entry fee - the APT "isn't mentioned in the same context as the blockbusters, like something coming out of the school of Paris", Hall says.

It's as though blockbusters are just about Western art history, he says, and showing contemporary art has to be pitched as a festival. "If you asked the general public whether the APT is a blockbuster, they'd probably say, 'We don't know'," Hall says. "But they come, and they love it."

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