Queensland Art Gallery - Queensland Government

APT6 features the works of many artists born in the 1970s and 1980s, many of whom have
studied overseas, and may still live there; their points of reference are fluid and multifarious.
Collaboration’s complication of the singular artistic identity and ‘signature’ provides an
important critical current running through APT6, which, with its focus on the contemporary art
of a specific region, takes on the contestations that such a geographical framework brings.
This understanding cuts across the regional bounds of the Asia Pacific Triennial, and offers up
a range of possible readings of art works. These are subject to the equally diverse experiences
and histories that we, as audiences, bring to them; and by opening their studio doors to the
world, artists are inviting us in.
to control the environment in which they are shown, while subtly shifting the dynamics of the
gallery space. DAMP’s enormous plinth functions in a similar way, creating a structure that turns
inward, its cubby/studio being a room within a room. On top of the plinth is a circle of chairs,
which the artists have allocated for meetings by local groups at specified times, transferring
social activities traditionally external to the Gallery into the space as a performance. While many
collaborations in the past have resisted museums and proposed alternative structures, many
recent projects, such as those by YNG and DAMP, are intended to work within this context.
Museums, in turn, have been transformed by this process; opening out to more interactive
approaches, and bringing broader forms of artistic endeavour into their ambit. The growth of
relational practices over the past two decades has indeed been primarily within the circuit of art
institutions and biennales; likewise for ‘site-specific’ works, which effectively relocate the studio
to each site of display. 7
Endnotes
1 Chu Chu Yuan, ‘Wah Nu’s and Tun Win Aung’s art’, Artstream Myanmar, , viewed 15 October 2009.
2 See Angelika Nollert, ‘Art is life, and life is art’, in Collective Creativity [exhibition catalogue], Kunsthalle
Fridericianum, Kassel, and Revolver Books, Frankfurt, 2005, pp.25–9. For a historical overview of conceptualism
across the world, including numerous collaborations, see Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s
[exhibition catalogue], Queens Museum of Art, New York, 1999.
3 Charles Green, The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Post-Modernism, University of NSW
Press, Sydney, 2001, p.x.
4 John Roberts, ‘Collaboration as a problem of art’s cultural form’, Third Text, vol.18, no.6, 2004, p.557.
5 Russell Storer, interview with the artists, Queensland Art Gallery, 3 June 2009, QAG Research Library artist file.
6 Pamela M Lee, ‘How to be a collective in the age of the consumer sovereign’, Artforum, vol.XLVIII, no.2, October
2009, p.185.
7 Claire Bishop, ‘The social turn: Collaboration and its discontents’, Artforum, vol.XLIV, no.6, February 2006, pp.178–9.
8 Daniel Birnbaum, ‘We are many’, in Making Worlds [exhibition catalogue], 53rd Biennale of Venice, Marsilio,
Venice, p.191.
The translation from the studio to the gallery is a process with which contemporary artists across
the region are increasingly familiar, and are embracing as a means of communicating ideas
and exchanging information. Artists throughout the world are living and working in a highly
interconnected environment, socially and technologically, and their work is circulating more
widely in exhibitions around the globe. This requires a continual rethinking, for artists as well as
audiences, of context and identity, which is not, and has never been, singular and fixed. This is
an obvious but often overlooked point in the case of large international exhibitions, as curator
Daniel Birnbaum acknowledged in his essay for the 2009 Venice Biennale:
Instead of viewing ourselves and others in terms of a singular identity, we should remember
that each and every one of us carries a multitude within . . . If one maintains that a cultural event
with participants from many cultures is to be more than a stage where one culture is put on
display to another, then it may be important to insist on the complexity of individuals, not to
mention the communities that they form. 8
Surasi Kusolwong
Thailand b.1965
Ruen pae (During the moments of the day) 1999–2000
Installation at ‘The Third Asia Pacific Triennial of
Contemporary Art’, Queensland Art Gallery, 1999 /
Photograph: Ray Fulton
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