Queensland Art Gallery - Queensland Government

Yayoi Kusama’s The obliteration room, for Kids’ APT 2002,
encouraged children to cover a white room with coloured
dots / Photograph: Richard Stringer
Cai Guo Qiang’s bridge building activity for Kids’ APT 1999
Vibrant and ongoing relationships with leading contemporary artists have been developed
through Kids’ APT. In fact, collaboration is the key component of the program. Working with
Gallery staff, artists create their interactive projects — a process that enables artists to explore
anew the fundamental ideas and concepts concerning them. In recognition of children’s varying
interests and abilities, Kids’ APT comprises a range of media, from drawing activities to largescale
multimedia projects.
Internationally acclaimed artist Cai Guo Qiang, whose retrospective was held at the Guggenheim
Museum in 2008, developed one of the first interactives for Kids’ APT in 1999. Designed
to complement his major work in APT3, Blue dragon and bridge crossing — a large-scale
installation encompassing a 30-metre-long bamboo suspension bridge constructed over the
Gallery’s Watermall — Cai extended an invitation to children to design and construct a bridge
using the simplest of materials: tape and cane. To provide children with inspiration, the artist
sketched 76 line drawings of various bridges, revealing varied approaches, some fanciful,
others basic and fundamental. Over the course of the exhibition, children visiting with parents
and carers engaged with the artist’s ideas through the engineering of their own bridge models.
As part of Kids’ APT in 2002, senior Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama worked with the Gallery to
develop The obliteration room, referencing the obsessive repetition of dots that Kusama has
incorporated into her work since the 1950s. Kusama’s space for children was fashioned in
the style of a typical Australian living room, furnished with ordinary household items. Though
the entire room and its contents were initially painted stark white, children ‘obliterated’ the
environment by covering every surface with multicoloured dot stickers of various sizes. By
the close of the exhibition five months later, the space had been transformed from a pristine
interior into a spectacularly colourful and accreted environment.
Contrasting with the spectacular, many Kids’ APT artist projects have also involved children
engaged in quiet contemplation. Chinese artist Song Dong’s Writing with water 2002
featured an installation of large rocks upon which children could write their thoughts or draw
pictures with water and traditional calligraphy brushes. While evoking the revered art form of
calligraphy, Writing with water also related to a performative aspect of the artist’s practice and
his ongoing investigations into the passing of time.
Launched in 2006 with the opening of the Gallery of Modern Art, Kids’ APT5 featured 14
commissioned interactives. Artist Khadim Ali travelled from Pakistan to his home region of
Bamiyan in Afghanistan — where the Taliban destroyed the colossal ancient Buddha sculptures
in 2001 — to undertake workshops with the local school children. The Bamiyan drawing project
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