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Collaboration and community are at the heart of the 6th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT6), the latest in the Queensland Art Gallery's ongoing series of surveys that are shaping our view of contemporary art in the region. It is only natural, then, that Art &Australia should team up with the Brisbane gallery (QAG) to produce a special APT6 edition. In this issue our perception of the region shifts ever westward and eastward, as QAG's Suhanya Raffel gently probes in conversation with Hou Hanru and Robert Leonard. At the same time the region is knitted more closely together through the creative networks of its artists - whether it be photographer Shirana Shahbazi's collaboration with the rug weavers and sign painters of Tehran or Japanese superstar Yoshimoto Nara's artistic marriage with Osaka design firm graf. This issue also charts cross-cultural collaborations across the Pacific, and so we encounter a collectivity of voices and a communion of creative spirits - all of which help define APT6.
Vol 47 No 2 Summer 2009
Vol 47 No 2 Summer 2009
Reaching for Utopia
Artists are naturally suspicious of maps. These often arbitrary-seeming demarcations of nationhood can impede the flow of creativity, reducing us to mere cultural artefacts. As novelist Brian Castro writes about the idea of 'Asia' in this special issue of Art...
The idea of 'Asia'
The word 'America' was poetically employed by John Donne as a synonym for a hope and a dream: 'O my America! my new-found-land.' The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines it as: 'A place which one longs to reach; an ultimate or idealised destination or...
Biennale makers: Hou Hanru and Suhanya Raffel in conversation with Robert Leonard
Recent times have seen biennales bloom. Mapping the state of world art, these exhibitions have become synonymous with globalism. Curators Hou Hanru and Suhanya Raffel are seasoned campaigners in this new art landscape. Hou curated the 2000 Shanghai, 2005...
House of Magic
Pop art emerged as a distinct art form in the 1960s within the context of a wide range of urban subcultures – fashion, film, club culture, and so on – appropriating these forms and sharing common ground while presenting a different way of viewing...
Sweet dreams: The paradox of Pop
As if revealed by a child's kaleidoscope, the image turns in on itself; ceaselessly shifting, dissolving, consuming itself. Around its border, the Maori fern motif the koru unfurls from a 1960s Pucci pattern which morphs into the black kowhaiwhai design found...
One thousand and one nights: The edited images of Shirana Shahbazi
Shirana Shahbazi is widely thought of purely as a photographer. This definition is unsurprising given that the source of her imagery will always appear in her camera's viewfinder in the first instance, but also because she is a master of the medium. When...
Revolutionary conservatism: Public art in North Korea
Established fifty years ago in the nation's capital, Pyongyang, Mansudae Art Studio is a name synonymous with artistic production in North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). Home for over a thousand artists and designers, and...
Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan
Pagtali. Pagtahi. Pagbuo. (Tying. Sewing. Putting together). Ten years ago, these were the terms Alfredo Juan Aquilizan used to describe the practice he shares with his wife, Maria Isabel Gaudinez-Aquilizan. In the decade since that time the ethical and...
Oceanic Collaborators
When someone uses the term 'collaboration' to describe an artwork, they usually mean to suggest that it has been produced through a process of even-handed, collective authorship. The etymology of the term, and its association with the French figure of a...
Rohan Wealleans
In a recent conversation, Rohan Wealleans accidentally pronounced the word 'malevolent' as 'male-violent'. It was an apt malapropism for an artist who has regular accusations of misogyny hurled at his sexually charged work. Yet his is a democratic assault on...
In-betweenness: The art of Liu Xiao Xian
Liu Xiao Xian's art makes you smile. Born in Beijing in 1963, he has lived and worked in Sydney since 1990. Our gods, 2000, arguably his best-known work, is a composite portrait of Christ and Buddha – each portrait made from image pixels of the other....
The relational aesthetics of Vipoo Srivilasa and Rirkrit Tiravanija
In his book Thinking Through Craft (2007), the Victoria and Albert Museum's Glenn Adamson argues that craft in the twentieth century functioned as a repository for all that visual art defined itself against, such as amateurism, skill and pastoralism. At the...
An invisible architecture: SANAA and the art of 21st century museum design
Despite completing many different commissions in Japan since forming their Tokyo-based firm SANAA in 1995, architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa have developed an international reputation in recent years for designing contemporary art museums –...
Crazy with joy: The curatorial vision of Germano Celant
Since his manifesto for arte povera, 'Notes for a Guerrilla War', was first published in 1967, the Italian critic and curator Germano Celant has been something of a cultural renegade on both sides of the Atlantic. Whether helping to define the oeuvres of...
Lucy Orta: The artist as enabler
A trained fashion designer and an instigator of the first Masters program to promote socially motivated design, British-born Lucy Orta has worked predominantly in the contemporary art sphere for the last two decades. Along with her solo practice, since 1991...
Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces and Art & Australia Emerging Writers Program
There is a great, silent resistance mounting against categorisation; a collective, unspoken imperative of non-compliance with rigid systems of any kind. And it was clear, looking around the works in 'Too Much of Everything', that they eschewed coercion within...
Matt Coyle: The Shades - 5 & 6
In the third of a four-part Art & Australia special commission, the Hobart-based artist and author of the graphic novel Worry Doll (2007) continues his shady new narrative.'When I finished Worry Doll I decided to do a series of stand-alone drawings which...
ANZ Private Bank and Art &Australia Contemporary Art Award: Gregor Kregar
From live sheep to ceramic piggy banks and giant, floating geometric shapes, Gregor Kregar's sculptural menagerie suggests that he is not an artist seduced by a single subject. Nor can one material tie him down; he picks and chooses between glass and steel,...Powered by: 
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Fax: +61 2 9331 4577
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