Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

12
SESSION I
(trans)locality. This mapping observes the progression
of projects at the same time that it plots coordinates
among them. (See Appendix 1)
Interest
John Clark, who has written the only comprehensive
book on modern Asian art historiography, settles on
1988 as a key date that indicates the keen and concrete
interest in curators in Asia. In this year, the Japanese
curator Fumio Nanjo was appointed to the Committee of
the Aperto in Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest biennale
established in 1895. In 1995, Nanjo was named curator of
a parallel event at Venice titled TransCulture. Antedating
these high-profile forays into the global stage were
international exhibitions held in Asia and the Pacific
that foregrounded the region as a locus of convergence
in art, from the India Triennale in New Delhi (1968)
and the Fukuoka Asian Art Show (1979). Alongside these
were inter-governmental programs under the direction
of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)
and some bilateral and multilateral diplomatic
undertakings. Needless to say, art works and artists
traversed the region through market mechanisms not
necessarily under the auspices of the state. For instance,
as early as the fifties, the Indonesian Affandi was already
represented in Venice.
This posture translates at varying levels a challenge to
the hegemony of the Euramerican perspective in art.
Two quotes are germane:
According to Clark (2003):
The role of the curator needs attention beyond the
“national” level because of the extent and nature of
the connections between similar such gatekeepers
“transnationally”. The evidence for such linkage comes
in the increasing predictability of artists chosen for
international exhibition and the apparent circulation
of their names and works between a new international
cohort of such mediators. Such gatekeepers speak to one
another regularly at international exhibitions and appear
to engage in quasi-market making for a new kind of cultural
good, the artist or art work now considered worthy of
note at the “transnational” level. (unpublished)
Writing in the catalogue of the exhibition of contemporary
art of the non-aligned countries in 1995, Supangkat
(1995) states:
This is a very basic principle of contemporary art: to
bring into awareness that the paradigm of world art in
a modernist point of view, that we have been familiar
with us so far, was based on a very limited reality. (31)
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows
In the same period and onward, several institutions
invested in the diligent survey not only of Asian art, but
also the discourses that inform it. The Japan Foundation,
the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, the Queensland Art
Gallery, and the Singapore Art Museum initiated research,
set up exhibitions and conferences, published materials,
and developed collections. Conferences such as “Modern
and Post-modern Art in Asia” in Canberra and the series
on contemporary Asian Art in Tokyo were crucial
meetings that helped firm up the network of artists,
critics, curators, and art professionals in the region and
consequently facilitated the production of knowledge
that was to underpin a conception of contemporary art
in Southeast Asia and the contemporary curatorium
that would foster it. Alison Carroll (2005) sums it up:
In the early 1990s, with the booming tiger economies, the
strength of Japan, and the growth of wealth in China,
the rest of the world…refocused its gaze on the region.
Arts bureaucracies followed, and increase in support
was offered for curatorial, artistic, exhibition, teaching,
publishing and other events that engaged more closely
with Asia. (542)
Moreover, according to Clark, these developments
benefited from the impetus provided by the biennales
in Havana and Sao Paolo as well as the popularity of
Chinese art since 1993. Curators beyond Euramerican
centers like Gerardo Mosquera and Okwui Enwezor
also prepared the ground.
Contact and Continuity
Incipient signs of curatorial concerns being concretized
were intimated in the late eighties and early nineties
in Bangkok and Jakarta. In 1989, Somporn Rodboon
curated an exhibition coming out of a workshop with
a German printmaker at Silpakorn University, where
she was professor. In 1991, Apinan organized a print
exhibition of Prawat Laucharoen, along with other
visual artists, at the National Gallery. And in 1993,
Jim Supangkat clearly set down the responsibility as
the curator of the Ninth Jakarta Biennale on behalf of
the committee convened by the Jakarta Arts Council,
an event that courted intense critique from artists and
the press and incited a tumult that deeply affected
the curator, as if it were in his own words a trauma.
Supangkat credits the proceedings of a conference on
international exhibitions titled Expanding Internationalism
as his primer on curation.
It can be noticed from these early stirrings that the
first curators were critics, historians, and artists; most
of them underwent training in the academies of fine