Introduction

By the 1990s, new large, recurring survey exhibitions were springing up across the Asia-Pacific region. Brisbane, Fukuoka, Taipei, Gwangju, and other cities began important international biennials or triennials that garnered international attention. The rise of such biennials over the decade, it might have been presumed, was yet another symptom of global power stretching out from colonial-era centers, with the Venice Biennale and documenta at the apex of a pyramid. The reality was much less simple.

For a start, the rise of Asia was often touted as exemplifying the triumph of neoliberalization. The call was along the lines of “look at the biennials, triennials, and art fairs in China alone these days, all cannibalizing the western biennial model!”¹ But by contrast, as we have emphasized in previous chapters, the idea of biennials generating international cultural exchange was definitely not just a post-1989 phenomenon, nor did it arise from a desire to join the European and North American art world, as recapitulating a few key dates demonstrates. The Tokyo Biennale had already begun in 1952, focused largely on the arts of Northeast Asia. In 1962, Vietnam War-era Saigon hosted an international biennial featuring artists from India, Australia, South Korea, and other countries “friendly to [South] Viet-Nam” during the War.² The Triennale-India began in New Delhi in 1968, followed by the Arab Art Biennale in 1974, Fukuoka's Asian Art Show in 1979, the Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka in 1981, and a biennial that ultimately became one of the most significant of all, the Istanbul Biennial in 1987.³ Other, long-running though simply national biennials across the region included the first Indian biennial, called the Bharat Bhavan Biennial of Contemporary Indian Art, in 1986 in Bhopal, a city still recovering from a toxic gas leak that was one of the world's greatest environmental catastrophes, the Jakarta Biennale (which dated back all the way to 1974 as The Indonesian Painting Exhibition, which showed little interest in experimental art beyond painting), and the Yogyakarta Biennale in Indonesia. This latter exhibition commenced in 1988, starting with a very local focus and also restricting itself to painting; in 1992, it was challenged by younger Indonesian artists in a dramatic series of protests, before broadening its focus later still to practices along the Equator and throughout the South. And, as we saw in chapter 2, the Biennale of Sydney was already promoting itself as a meeting point between artists, curators, and writers around the Pacific Rim in its second edition in 1976 (the first had been in 1973, but was focused mainly on painting and sculpture from Australia). Exhibitions such as the Second Johannesburg Biennale, Trade Routes (1997) or 2000 Shanghai Biennale (also known as the Third Shanghai Biennale, 2000), both of which foregrounded the globalization and connectivity of the international art world (and which we will analyze presently), had not yet appeared. In Europe, Catherine David's otherwise admirable, “political” documenta X (1997) would cover the Asia-Pacific completely inadequately and so would even its epochal successor, Okwui Enwezor's Documenta11 (2002). The early and mid-1990s Venice Biennales were almost completely, perhaps naively, unselfconscious in their North Atlantic-focused selections, even though a limited number of artists from China were included.

The relationship between nascent understandings of “globality” and biennials in Asia-Pacific clearly requires more precision than that offered by a broad-brushstroke approach if justice is to be done to the complex histories of cultural connection across the region. We need to shift from the general so as to emphasize the particular – and to focus on specific biennials, even specific editions of specific biennials – in order to understand the dramatic transformation of biennials in Asia during the 1990s.⁴ With that in mind, this chapter considers the Fukuoka Asian Art Show in Fukuoka, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific Triennial (or APT) in Brisbane, Australia, to show the entwined nature of two key narratives in contemporary art. First, we note the ascending arc of biennial cultures in Asia during the 1990s, which was also the decade of neoliberal expansionism. Second, as this arc ascended, Asian biennial curators replaced the previous division of tradition versus modernity with a focus on the transformation of tradition by globalization and thus on the emergence of contemporary art that, because of the degree of its independence from North America and Western Europe, was now not to be described by terms like hybrid or postcolonial but by the idea of Asian contemporary art (or, with its perhaps slightly different connotations, contemporary Asian art). By this we mean that a regional and not a local orientation was created in the Asian biennials of the 1990s, in order to suggest a coherent notion and display of “Asian art” today. This was true even though the artistic situations in South Korea, Japan, India, China, Australia, and the other nations across the region were significantly different. Each had, on the surface, very different exhibition histories. Korean biennials such as Gwangju took advantage of Korea's huge economic boom by the early 1990s to signal the end of authoritarian rule. Bangladesh created a biennial in the same grassroots, ecumenical spirit, albeit with the same slightly authoritarian undertones, as the Bienal de La Habana. In China, the priority that curators and artists felt was the imperative to align local with global forces in order to legitimate so-called experimental art; we shall trace that in more detail in chapter 8. The differences were vast, nation to nation, and it is possible for outsiders to argue that by using the umbrella term, Asian art, many specificities were lost. That may be the case. However, this objection completely misses the point that it was Asian artists and curators who built biennials that self-consciously defined Asian art, not art historians like us.

The Fukuoka Asian Art Show and the Asia-Pacific Triennial sought, even more self-consciously than other new Asian biennials, to define contemporary art across the region and to generate a very substantial cross-cultural dialogue between artists, curators, and academics. To this end, in Brisbane, the Queensland Art Gallery (or QAG) and the Queensland State Government poured significant resources into the event. By its third incarnation in 1999, the APT was beset by expectations created by its own success: the limitations of highly complex, unwieldy consultative structures had become clear – not least of which, as we will see, was its ratio of one curator for every two artists involved – while the consequent tensions in the Triennial's intellectual underpinning and future direction were more apparent than earlier in the decade. This was because the APT was pulled in two quite different directions from the start: the desire to ecumenically celebrate cultural difference; and the desire to arbitrate in the critical rather than celebratory formation of a revised art historical canon. The same stresses were visible at Fukuoka. They existed less in other biennials across the region, no matter how ambitious they were in their yearnings for global and especially North Atlantic approbation. The Gwangju Biennale was the most lavishly resourced of all these biennials (its budget and attendance were vastly greater than that of South Korea's other major biennial, the Busan Biennale, even though Busan is a far larger city with a lavish cultural infrastructure) and the one most thoroughly integrated into the North Atlantic art world through its selection of curators and artists.

The very inclusion and explicit celebration of micro-cultural difference that initially distinguished the APT and Fukuoka sat increasingly uneasily with the shifting critical interrogation and analysis (both by artists and academics) of that same difference, as well as with the intractable persistence of nationality as the apparently unavoidable key to artist classification. Under what conditions should tradition and difference be celebrated (especially given the gender and class inequalities embedded in many traditional cultural practices)? What should be singled out and exhibited? Is tradition sustainable? What about cosmopolitanism? Is the politics of difference always or ever progressive? And does staging difference in an exhibition convert it into enervated spectacle? Such curatorial questions and their dilemmas were evident to Fukuoka's and the APT's early teams of curators even at the time, back in the 1980s and at the start of the 1990s. In 1989, the director of the Fukuoka Art Museum, Mikio Soejima, recounted the debates during the conference that had accompanied the 2nd Asian Art Show of 1985, writing as if it was natural (which it was not; many modernist artists would have stressed the reverse) that “the debate naturally focused on the question of where the uniqueness of Asian art lay, as this is what Asian artists have always been asking themselves.”⁵

There was another phenomenon at work at the beginning of the 1990s: the frenzied selection of a new global artistic canon with all the art world pressures (the same as those at each frenetic opening week of a Venice Biennale) that this entailed. So, as familiar yearnings for international attention increased, so did bloated artist lists and increasingly loose themes that covered all bases. This elicited the charge that we have mentioned before, that biennials were little more than handmaidens to neoliberal globalization.⁶ It seems to us that most of the new Asian biennials of the 1990s intended from the start to introduce new artists, new curators, and new parts of the world to a globalizing international contemporary art world whereas other, earlier biennials had not prioritized the direction of this trajectory to the same degree at all. They instead deliberately created (as had the Bienal de La Habana) the South–South model that we saw in the last chapter, sometimes but not always combined with a more familiar, centripetal direction (as at Sydney), bringing the so-called contemporary art world and its artists out to the host city for its betterment.

In short, biennials now offered newcomers to the global scene a stage on which to participate in the contemporary art and upmarket tourist industries, while enabling a dramatically expanded audience the chance to see recent art. This was on the surface no different to the biennials described in previous chapters. But during the 1990s, the number of progressive conurbations outside the North Atlantic that had previously not successfully hosted an international art biennial, including Brisbane, Gwangju, and Fukuoka, increased each year. The itinerary necessary to follow contemporary art was expanding far beyond the journey between the first-established and now elderly biennials, such as Venice, and now also beyond the network of established, even middle-aged biennials such as Sydney. Despite these logistical successes, there remained little to read beyond simple exhibition catalogues (consisting usually of a succession of abridged résumés, a small black and white photograph, and a short artist statement for each contributing artist), glossy picture books or trade journals with superficial texts, and not much else that was substantial or searching.⁷ Modern or contemporary Asian art was still a long way from becoming a basic part of most students' study of twentieth- or twenty-first-century art.

Experimental Versus Traditional Art: “Traditions/Tensions”

We will start with a question. If one of the core markers of contemporary art, of art that embodies the condition of contemporaneity, is its stress on the experimental at both the points of its production and the points of its reception, then how, when, and why did this contemporary art become synonymous with globalized art practice? Today, the division between production and reception (like that between theory and practice, or between globalization and colonization) seems so blurred as to be virtually non-existent. This is precisely what marks contemporary art's clear distinction from both the self-consciously experimental, late modern arts of the 1960s and 1970s and, equally emphatically, from postmodern art with its régime of the original and the copy. So when and how did this distinction develop?

The answer begins at the end of the 1980s, when it became both possible and desirable for biennial curators in Asia and other so-called “peripheral” regions to argue that tradition had become contemporary, and then increasingly demand that traditional art had to demonstrate an adaptation to the conditions of contemporaneity if it was to be selected for the emerging biennials. These adaptations had previously been faced by profound indifference. Witness, for instance, the remarkable lack of interest or understanding (at least by most critics and historians from around the North Atlantic) about the ground-breaking Third Bienal de La Habana in Cuba, with its focus on “Tradition and Contemporaneity,” until roughly twenty years after its staging back in 1989, and the almost complete lack of awareness about the many Asian art biennials until the mid-1990s.⁸ Awareness of that indifference also informed the title that one of the most acute and sensitive curators of contemporary Asian art, Apinan Poshyananda, gave his landmark Asia Society exhibition in New York in 1996: “Traditions/Tensions.” That title was especially telling given Apinan was also a member of the second Asia-Pacific Triennial's curatorial collective that year, in 1996, selecting the Australian artists who were included: At APT2, the accommodation between the traditional and the triennial was seemingly all too apparent, as attested by a variety of semi-hostile reviews by commentators who actually did perceive a tension rather than a reconciliation between tradition and contemporaneity.⁹

A simple, open, all-inclusive definition of contemporary art would have meant that Asian art biennials (including the Asian Art Show and the Asia-Pacific Triennial) would have featured the selection of locally celebrated, contemporary exponents of heritage arts and crafts. In the lead-up to their 1979 Asian Art Show, Fukuoka's curators witnessed fierce hostility and antipathy between traditional and contemporary artists: Yasunaga Koichi remembered a meeting in Sri Lanka where artists almost came to blows over the question of what type of art should represent their country.¹⁰ The APT's first curators were often urged to select traditional, heritage art: for instance, senior Yogyakarta batik artists fully expected to be considered for the first Triennial but the Brisbane curators, as their journals and working notes show, were far from eager to include heritage art in the Triennial.¹¹ They were reluctant because heritage cultures were often associated with conservative state bureaucracies or cliques, and with highly regulated guilds and associations that resisted change or encroachment upon their privileges, as opposed to the internationalizing universities and art schools across Asia whose professors, students, and curricula were not at all dissimilar to their North Atlantic peers. It was these university-based or freelance professional intellectuals – including Jim Supangkat in Jakarta, Geeta Kapur in New Delhi, T.K. Sabapathy in Singapore, and Somporn Rodboon in Bangkok, with their international and emerging regional networks and their knowledge of the cosmopolitan local artists whose works would be most “legible” to roving global curators – who were most often consulted by those international curators hunting for contemporary art. They were the gate-keepers. And their artists did not observe the proprieties that went with heritage forms but often did take pre-contemporary production methods as a part but not the whole of their artistic methods. The reverse – that the so-called (Western) experimental, new media tradition was part of their artistic methods – was true as well. Both the Fukuoka and the Brisbane curators were intensely aware of the difference between exactly these very contradictory definitions of contemporaneity. At Fukuoka, Mikio Soejima wrote that:

“contemporary art” in the Japanese context refers to works essentially different from those regularly seen in open or competitive exhibitions sponsored by art organizations, and more particularly to works embodying avant-garde, experimental and radical forms of expression, but it is inconceivable for this working definition to prove universally applicable in Asia.¹²

He lamented that there was, therefore, little recourse except to a weak definition of contemporaneity, which would mean simply that all art made today by Asians was contemporary art. And at the same time, his text is worth noting for how embattled the idea of either modern or contemporary art then seemed, so different to the triumphal acceptance that contemporary art now finds in new art museums across Asia. The backdrop to this was the deep conservatism and regional populism that had been the forces dominating most institutional art history and patronage across the Asia-Pacific region. This era was only just passing in 1989, when the 3rd Asian Art Show opened in Fukuoka. The exhibition received much more government and municipal support than ever before (touring to the Yokohama Museum of Art), and its curators remembered a strong sense that the idea of contemporary Asian art was now respectable; in turn, this was the first Asian Art Show to be organized around a theme rather than simply to be a survey of whatever each nation chose to send.¹³ At the same time, exhibitions of modern and contemporary Asian art were appearing in Europe and the United States. Kazu Kaidō curated Reconstructions: Avant-Garde Art in Japan, 1945–1965 at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in 1985, while in late 1986, the Musée national d'art moderne in Paris presented Japon des avant-gardes: 1910–1970.

But episodes when a deeply conservative vision of art had not ruled state-run or national art museums across Asia itself (the Queensland Art Gallery in Australia included) had been alarmingly few. A biennial survey exhibition of Asian and Australian art, the Artists Regional Exchange (always known more simply as ARX), had been held in Perth from 1987. It migrated from location to location with later editions but its existence was finally curtailed by a tiny budget. ARX was small in scale and many of its international visitors, including Thai curator Apinan Poshyananda (one of the key advisors, as we have observed, to the initial Asia-Pacific Triennials), had remarked on ARX's DIY disorganization.¹⁴ Inversely and instructively, the reason that particular Asian and Australian provincial governments chose to reverse this conservatism by embracing biennial culture was that they recognized that something more real than homespun pride was at stake in the way provincial nation-states, or provincial cities like Brisbane or Fukuoka, presented themselves to the world in a period of increasing globalization.¹⁵ If Brisbane and Fukuoka identified as contemporary, progressive, and open to change – much as Cold War America had projected itself as progressive through the Museum of Modern Art's International Program in exhibitions such as Two Decades of American Painting (which toured to Tokyo and Kyoto, as well as Delhi, Melbourne, and Sydney, during 1966–1967) – then they were able to participate in the equivalent of a rolling circuit of cultural Olympics.

This brings us back to the emerging networks of globalized Asian biennials. If the development of biennials in parts of Asia from the 1960s to the 1980s (in New Delhi, in Sydney, in Dhaka) signaled a first wave of the region's biennials, then a second wave appeared in earnest in 1993 with the first APT at the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) in Brisbane. This was followed in quick succession by new biennials in the South Korean city of Gwangju (1995), in Shanghai (1996), Busan (1998), Taipei (starting in 1992 but adopting its present form in 1998), and then in numerous other cities after that. But it was the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, 1100 kilometers west of Tokyo, that must be credited as an even greater influence on the region's biennials and their dedication to contemporary Asian art. In 1979 and 1980, the city of Fukuoka staged a massive survey of Asian art, which appeared in two sections. These were the inaugural exhibitions of the new Fukuoka Art Museum. The first part of the exhibition, in 1979, was historical, showcasing Chinese, Indian, and Japanese early modernist artists, including Amrita Sher-Gil and Qi Baishi. The second half, the Contemporary Asian Art Show, in 1980, was a gigantic survey of contemporary art across Asia, featuring 470 works by artists from thirteen Asian nations. The Asian Art Show appeared at five-yearly intervals (this, as an index of significant ambition, was the same interval as Kassel's documenta), before it was rebadged in 1999 with a new name by a new museum, separate from the Fukuoka Art Museum and called the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (or FAAM). FAAM was located in a generic office building in downtown Fukuoka, and is now fully distinct from the Fukuoka Art Museum, which nestles next to a famous lake in Ōhori Park, a couple of kilometers west from downtown. By 1999, the Asian Art Show was to take place every three years and would henceforth be called the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale.

QAG's new director, Doug Hall, was well aware of the Asian Art Show's long and important history. One of his first overseas trips after his appointment to QAG's directorship in 1987 was to Fukuoka. He saw first-hand Fukuoka's policy of acquiring works from its exhibition so as to generate an important collection of contemporary Asian art, a policy that he then adopted with great success in Brisbane. As we have seen, the Fukuoka Art Museum was actively promoting the idea of distinctively Asian contemporary art rather than art centered on the United States or Europe, even if the rejection of Europe-centered explanations resulted instead in clunky, awkward-sounding frameworks like the Fukuoka Art Museum's idea that Asian art was distinguished by “symbolic visions in contemporary Asian life.”¹⁶ But the Fukuoka Art Museum backed its ideas with active curatorial research rather than simply issuing invitations to exhibiting nations to send works that they would choose. Art historian Joan Kee recounts, for instance, that a team of Japanese curators visited Seoul for a week in mid-1979, ahead of the Asian Art Show, meeting tansaekhwa-style, minimalist artists such as Lee Ufan.¹⁷ But at the same time, the Fukuoka Art Museum's curators saw their museum as fragile, accepted only grudgingly in Japan.¹⁸ Japanese audiences did not accept the importance of pan-Asian art, imagining, like Australians, that the term, “Asia,” did not include their own nation. Cultural edifices and large, expensive complexes had, Fukuoka curator Kuroda Raiji asserted, been opportunistically erected by politicians eager for monuments based on European museums. Moreover (and in an implicit jibe at the Fukuoka Art Museum's permanent collection, once the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum had been detached), he claimed that all they housed were second-rate European and American art and pale imitations.

Other East Asian biennials relied on different exhibition models. For its first two installments, the Shanghai Biennale restricted itself to traditional Chinese art and craft, rebranding itself only in 2000 with international artists making enormous installations and video projections. The Gwangju Biennale began in 1995 in a spirit of regional boosterism but also of profound historical commemoration, memorializing the Gwangju Uprising and the large-scale massacres carried out by the military on May 18–27, 1980. In the entrance hall of the huge Biennale building is a somber memorial plaque, “The Kwangju Declaration.” Its preamble reads:

Art's true spirit and values are undergoing an identity crisis wrought by the conflicts afflicting our society. Although the era of political ideology and cultural hegemony has come to an end, questions concerning the essential functions and credibility of art still remain unanswered. Art must overcome the isolation and bias induced by authoritarianism and break new ground to create a freedom of the spirit that welcomes all peoples. The year 1995 may signal the close of the century and thus the conclusion of a chapter in history but the Kwangju Biennale aims to open a new order in the world of art. Trying to clarify ambiguities about the history of Kwangju, Korea and of the world, this festival of art promises to mark a new era of openness.¹⁹

The Uprising was the outcome of widespread indignation at the repressive military government that had succeeded the dictatorial President Park Chung Hee, and was instrumental in helping to bring down South Korea's authoritarian government.²⁰ The Kwangju Declaration shows that the creation of the Biennale was intended to be a very serious memorial to the protestors in a city that had a long history of protest and, especially, of Madang (Open Square) theater, which combined traditional folk drama and western agit-prop.²¹ This highly political theater pre-dated 1980 across the main cities of South Korea. So, when the first Gwangju Biennale director, Lee Yongwoo, wrote in 1995, “The objective of the Kwangju International Biennale is to encourage independent cultural behavior,” then his call had a context in a long Korean tradition of radical and experimental art and in a very serious commitment to the place of contemporary art.²² That first Gwangju Biennale was distinct in other ways too. It eccentrically insisted on dividing artists according to the continents of their births (a seldom-used division in large-scale exhibitions of any kind). Subsequent iterations continued to experiment with very unusual and often highly idiosyncratic curatorial methods in ways that – due to the extraordinarily large funding, amongst the largest budget in the world for any biennial, given to the exhibition by the Gwangju Biennale Foundation – were quite unlike most other large biennials, concentrating on inventing new curatorial processes and innovations rather than seeing the biennial as a resource for creating a permanent collection. With a strong but local attendance base assured by proud, enthusiastic locals and large school groups (1,630,000 visitors for the first edition, 900,000 for the second, 610,000 for the third, and 550,000 for the fourth), Gwangju then strategically cultivated select international audiences by hiring globally renowned curators based in Europe and the United States, such as Okwui Enwezor, Charles Esche, Massimiliano Gioni, Hou Hanru, Harald Szeemann, Jessica Morgan, and Maria Lind.

By contrast, the APT was conceived to shepherd Australia's predominantly Western culture back into the fold of Asia-Pacific regionalism. As had the Bienal de La Habana, each edition refined what the edges of its regional scope might be. The first APT, in 1993, attracted an audience of 60,000 visitors, a small but remarkable number for an exhibition hosted by a city of little more than a million people, separated by one or two hours' flights from the much bigger centers of Sydney and Melbourne, and about six hours from Singapore. It included seventy-six artists from Australia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and Hong Kong (since this was before that city's reunification with China), but not, surprisingly, from India. The second APT in 1996 attracted 120,000 visitors and now redressed that lack of Indian artists. The third APT in 1999 received 155,000 visitors, featuring seventy-seven artists from Asia and the Pacific, from countries including Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, India, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, and Australia, and for the first time Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Wallis and Futuna Islands, and Niue. Interestingly, the APT's fiercely supportive, local Queensland audience adopted the event with great enthusiasm despite the xenophobic rhetoric generated by chauvinist, right-wing politicians in Australia during the mid-1990s.

At this point, it is worth thinking a little more about the implications of housing a biennial inside an art museum in search of a collection, for it is important to remember that some biennials have been itinerant (as Saigon's biennial was intended to be), some have survived without the stable use of an exhibition venue from year to year, such as the Istanbul Biennial, while other biennials – there are more of this type in Asia than one might think – have been centered in art museums even if they also spread across their host cities and into temporary sites. Some biennials and triennials are loaned the use of exhibition spaces inside state art museums for the duration of their exhibitions (including the Sydney Biennale). The warehouse inside which the 8th Istanbul Biennial was housed became a new art museum, the Istanbul Modern. Next door, another vast building, Antrepo 3, which housed numerous editions of the Istanbul Biennial in the early 2000s, was to be converted immediately on the closure of the 13th Biennial into up-scale apartments. Tenancies inside established art museums, however, have often been fraught or tenuous. The exceptions, amongst which are FAAM in Fukuoka and QAG in Brisbane, show us that biennials owned by art museums have often been associated with the museum's priority to transform their collection through the acquisition opportunities presented by their biennial. Neither the Metropolitan Museum of Art nor the Museum of Modern Art in New York – both art museums with great collections – is associated with a biennial; the Tate in London acquired its triennial quite late, in 2000, coincidentally at about the time its notorious Turner Prize lost its landmark status, precisely because Tate Modern's immensely successful Turbine Hall single-artist projects and its Tate Triennial had replaced the Turner Prize's increasingly too-parochial performance of contemporaneity.

There were consequences that went with acquiring a collection from the hosting of a biennial. Not appointing a freelance artistic director with unilateral authority over artist selection meant the chance to build the authority, expertise, and networks of the museum's own curators, as well as the collection. Back in 1990, Brisbane recognized the importance of in-house curating. No museum was willingly going to delegate its actual acquisition choices to an itinerant auteur, no matter how famous (or perhaps especially because of this). Tate Modern had no need of a triennial to boost its collection nor did the needs of a triennial mesh any better with this enormously successful institution than an increasingly enervated art prize; after the 2009 triennial, directed by celebrated French curator Nicolas Bourriaud (of relational aesthetics fame), the Tate quietly suspended plans for its successor. Yet most of the charismatic auteur curators who freelanced as biennial directors – from Harald Szeemann and Rudi Fuchs to Okwui Enwezor and Massimiliano Gioni – worked again and again with the same list of artists who produced works for which there was a far greater demand than supply. Access to these artists and their works is strictly policed by their dealer representatives, many of whom spend considerable time refusing invitations to biennials and curated exhibitions on behalf of their artists. In theory, an auteur curator like Szeemann might have provided access to collection opportunities denied to mere museum curators. And all members of the surprisingly small biennial curator cadre shared and swapped from an informal, shifting but circumscribed list of artists. But there was no need at all for most of these hundred or so artists to show in or make sales to art museums located in the cities in which most biennials are located (in other words, not New York, not London, not Basel or Cologne). Instead, the artists gained considerable cultural capital from non-retail outings of their works in shabbily glamorous settings like Istanbul or by continuing their association with much-sought-after curators, as at Gwangju (for Western collectors and curators have closely tracked the artist lists of that biennial). In this sense, auteur biennial directors have often worked like art dealers with overlapping stables of artists. The core list was fairly constant, exclusivities were demarcated, but the edges of the list were flexible enough to admit new names as older ones were dropped. A reasonable and increasing number of Chinese mainland artists appeared on this list from the early 1990s on, but in reality this flexibility extended to very few artists from anywhere else in the region except for one or two Indian artists and groups (such as Shilpa Gupta or Raqs Media Collective). For auteur biennial directors or freelance exhibition curators, the business of being actually financially involved in sales was both irrelevant and avoided. Here, we do not doubt the ethics of those involved, not least because any obvious infraction would have been fairly quickly noticed and instantly publicized. Moreover the actual conflation of dealer and innovative curator had precedents in earlier periods. Short-term financial sacrifice went with building long-term reputations. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, as we noted in chapter 1, several famous, exceptional commercial dealers – for instance Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf and, further afield, Bruce Pollard in Melbourne – specialized in establishing the worth of a generation of notoriously difficult and apparently unsalable artists, often organizing exhibitions of their artists' work at galleries in other cities or in art museums rather than in their own private galleries. Fischer did this for many American artists, not least Sol LeWitt, all across Europe.

On the other hand, creating a biennial from scratch at a largely unknown and previously irrelevant art museum with no international reputation for innovation or patronage, using in-house curators, meant that access to such famous North Atlantic-based artists was very limited if not non-existent. For that reason almost alone, deliberately narrowing the Fukuoka and APT focus to the Asian region was wise. An informal but intensely hierarchical art world structure such as that which exists in the North Atlantic art world did not yet exist across Asia, though of course it did to different degrees within national borders. In fact, it would be more correct to say that at the start of the 1990s, there were a few centers that housed an “art world” in the Asian region but not many more than that. But this meant that Brisbane curators – none of whom then was a recognized authority on Asian art but a couple of whom had particular enthusiasms – would be involved in vast quantities of catch-up research, travel, and consultation in the Asian region. So the regionalism of APT and Fukuoka was a gamble on a subtle but undeniably epochal difference between seeking out cultural specificity and, on the other hand, on locating a so-called dialogue between artists and cultures inside the Asian region rather than on their incommensurability. This was to be the crucial gambit in terms of creating a regional version of global contemporary art. For implicit in the use of the word “dialogue” was the idea that cultural transaction would be legible in the work of art, rather than the local artist standing aloof from the sheer variety and flow of diverse types of art from many places. This formula was described elegantly by theorist Marian Pastor Roces through the term “expo art,” which she used in a lecture at the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial in 1999; we will come back to her argument at the end of this chapter. The new idea of a contemporary dialogue with the local was only possible because of the “longing for contemporaneity,” as Wu Hung put it, that had overtaken the whole region, compared with the earlier, late modern, or postmodern moments of the late 1980s.²³

To select artists, the APT's curators immediately and consciously set out to eschew Venice's model of nationally chosen pavilions, avoiding Venice's delegation of curatorial responsibility to national representatives. Even so, the exhibition's catalogue was to group the artists by their countries of birth, highlighting in the process the local consultants – sometimes curators, often artists or academics, but always locals with contemporary cosmopolitan sympathies – who assisted in the selection process. The practicalities of international curating put transnational ideals under great pressure, for it was difficult not to retreat into expedient nation-state divisions in the process of tapping into local informants' advice, not to mention access to the funding that national arts agencies might offer. Each artist was selected in an increasingly complicated process of consultation, meetings, and apparently endless co-curatorship.²⁴ Like the Fukuoka curators, the Brisbane team started with an extremely elaborate system of in-house curatorial responsibility, in practice reinstating national classifications even as they conscientiously and exhaustively researched artists from most nations across the region. Even in 1993, this amounted to an impressive list of selectors and advisers: ten Australians and sixty-one foreign advisers from the nations in the region, which ultimately brought together almost 200 works by seventy-six artists.²⁵ By the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial this committee structure had become even more complex.²⁶ In effect, by then, QAG Director Doug Hall, chief curator Caroline Turner, and their team were balancing a survey of recent Asia-Pacific art against a more auteurist, grand statement of themes and their obviously guilty desire to diffuse responsibility for such statements. Their notes show that they agonized over this task. It was evident in the exhibition publications' timid, endlessly reiterated mission statements and many complaints from the floor of the APT conferences about the sheer craziness of forty-eight curators selecting seventy-seven artists. The same elaborate, three-way balancing act was in place at Fukuoka and continued relatively unchanged into the twenty-first century. Rawanchaikul Toshiko, a curator at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, wrote:

The artist selection process begins with on-site research conducted by ourselves. Making full use of a network cultivated through the Museum's past exhibition and residence programs, only one or two staff carry out research each time. The staff from the museum's administrative section are involved as well. At each destination, we listen and engage in fervent discussions on the latest trend with local specialists of contemporary art such as our Commissioned Researchers and art critics. We then meet the artists recommended by these collaborators as well as those we researched on our own, and repeat by seeing more and more works. We rely on local collaborators and Coordinators for arranging the research, thus, the preliminary research of the local coordinating institutions and various negotiations with them become important tasks in the process.²⁷

The issue was whether biennial selectors should aim for consensus (and thus be ostensibly democratic), aiming to reflect what locals themselves judged was going on at their distant sites, as this passage from Fukuoka and those from Brisbane indicated. The curators of the 1979 Asian Art Show had allocated an identical quantity of wall space to each nation, completely leaving it to each nation to select their artists. The shape of consultation had been one of the many problems facing curators from the start of the globalization of the contemporary art world. Jean-Hubert Martin, André Magnin, Mark Francis, and Aline Luque, gathering the 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la terre, knew that their lack of knowledge about different countries' art worlds, especially those far away from the curators' European base, meant they too had to rely on local informants to generate their artist lists. And those informants also had their limitations, especially when their knowledge was bordered by culture, language and kinship, or because each had a protégé or two to promote.²⁸ There were, however, a couple of upsides to such outsourcing. By insisting on commissioning local cultural figures to help resource the exhibition, the APT curators (much like Martin and his Paris colleagues in the late 1980s) were conscientiously trying to avoid the fly-in/fly-out method that had developed, recalling (even if unfairly) European auteur-curator Harald Szeemann's example. This tended to treat unfamiliar localities as transit zones into which the curator would parachute, and to see artists as little more than symptomatic of the curators' mythologies about what that cultural context was like (depending, as we have noted, on a small group of artists used to performing, for better or worse, a dependably atavist regional identity). By contrast, the APT curators – and here they were once more influenced by the slightly earlier methods of the Fukuoka Asian Art Show – very deliberately sought to locate contemporary art that pinpointed diversity and cultural difference within each local context, rather than to find exemplars of tradition, so that the chosen artists tended to avoid straightforwardly repeating their traditional culture's chosen forms.

What, ultimately, did this mean? In 1989, the Fukuoka Art Museum had summed up this nexus of tradition and contemporaneity thus: the Museum sought “to be actively involved in contemporary Asian art, and has concerned itself with the issue of ‘tradition and the modern age’ in Asian art.”²⁹ Guided by their informants, the 1993 APT also sought regional definitions of the contemporary that emerged from the modernizing of cultural traditions (for instance, Chinese artist Shi Hui's sculptures woven from bamboo strips and rice paper), or else from the aftermath of the highly developed multiple modernisms that had long flourished across the region, from Chiang Mai (Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook's monumental, dark paintings and installations) to Tokyo (and Shigeo Toya's chainsaw-hewn wood sculptures). In particular, the curators repeatedly insisted that they wanted to include women artists (they had largely been ignored in large international survey exhibitions and continued to be underrepresented) and artists whose images of cultural reparation distinguished them from their peers who had often absorbed international modernisms without the latter's occasional early twentieth century activism.³⁰ Increasingly, the more modernist the artist, the more anachronistic she or he looked in comparison with contemporary artists who appropriated the forms or the images of tradition: from the 1989 Asian Art Show, for instance, we could compare Malaysian modernist painter Syed Ahmad Jamal's modernism – his slightly brushy, geometric abstractions – with Redza Piyadasa's postmodernism –his retouched appropriations of traditional Malaysian family groupings.

Seen in this way, contemporaneity could be understood as developing critically from local traditions rather than from modernism. Globality could be presented from the viewpoints of Asia-Pacific regionalism if carefully curated enough, but a well-chosen contiguity of art works was crucial. That was clear enough in Caroline Turner's introductory essay for the First Asia-Pacific Triennial catalogue in 1993, when she wrote that the team had approached the exhibition through national contexts that themselves, she acknowledged, raised significant questions.³¹ By 1996, she acknowledged that their ideas about the boundaries between traditional and contemporary art also needed reviewing:

We have learned that the distinction between fine art and craft or “tribal” art may fail to take into account the full picture of revitalised traditional art and contemporary art practice, particularly in indigenous art and the art of the Pacific.³²

Her claim, that this warranted “a revolution in art history,” would not be taken up quickly or without reluctance and qualification, but the APT's and Fukuoka's own interest in revising art history was genuine.³³ The effect of the institutional ownership of APT and the particular thoroughness and generosity with which the curators proceeded – the long-term collecting and conserving intention, the collective, consultative curatorial model that rejected itinerant freelance direction, the self-conscious definition of a circumscribed geographical niche – all inevitably resulted in a historically minded point of view, a definite curatorial method that conserved contemporary art and thus historicized the contemporary period. The complex processes themselves that the Fukuoka and the Brisbane curators created led the participants to archive and historicize what they were doing from the start. The APT appeared at the beginning of what we now see was the start of the third phase of biennialization. However, after its 1990s editions, it was also evidence of the institutionalization of biennial-making towards thinking of contemporary art as a global phenomenon whilst, as a matter of biennial form, thoroughly deemphasizing separate national narratives. The consequence, not least in the sublimation of Asian traditional forms – albeit without the incorporation of traditional exemplars from outside contemporary art into the contemporary – was profound. This was a process in which both the Asian Art Show and the APT, due to their commitment to contemporaneity, their highly professionalized bureaucracy, and their researcher-curators, played a crucial and, as it turned out, prophetic early part.

The concept of “dialogue” also materialized as a commitment to an extensive array of ancillary events, publications, and conferences with a large number of invitees from across Asia, on a scale rare until then and which presaged those of documenta X and Documenta11. These events were integral to both the Fukuoka Asian Art Shows and the Asia-Pacific Triennials, as they were later to be to those documentas. In 1984, the Fukuoka Art Museum held a large conference, “Contemporary Asian Art: The Future in Perspective,” to coincide with the 2nd Asian Art Show. Large conferences coinciding with the APT openings were attended by most of the exhibiting artists and very many Asian curators in a genuinely sizeable and exhausting, marathon encounter between artists, curators, and academics from all across Asia. For instance, one session at the first Triennial featured US freelance curator Mary Jane Jacob, the Head of Yogjakarta's art school, Professor Soedarso, Sydney-based Asian art historian John Clark, Japanese curator Toshio Hara, curator Alison Carroll (one of the APT's curators), and theorist Geeta Kapur from New Delhi. All the participating artists and consultants were invited to these openings and if they attended their expenses were paid. The size and genuine generosity of these huge, celebratory events, attended by hundreds of visitors from across Asia, was unprecedented in the region.³⁴

With that response, it was easy for the Triennial organizers to then imagine that their exhibition had produced a series of decisive moments for Asian artists even though, at the very start of their planning for the first Triennial, they had been warned by their Thai adviser, Apinan Poshyananda, that it was very important that the Australians not be seen as “another set of whites coming in to choose Asian art.”³⁵ He was referring to the Thai experience with a visiting US curator, but the caution also applied to Japanese curators working on the Fukuoka Asian Art Show, given long memories right across Asia about Japanese expansionism, imperialism, and World War Two. Yasunaga Koichi had encountered these fears back in 1977 and 1978.³⁶ Some visitors, as well as Asian reviewers writing for their home media, immediately jumped on the Triennials as a conceit. At APT's 1999 conference, for instance, Indian activist, dramaturg, and critic Rustom Bharucha accused the organizers of acting as the accomplices of First World cultural imperialism and Brisbane as being the “lion's den” of Western hegemony. Even though his claim was overblown, he was right to point out that hegemony poses, as it so often does, in benevolent guise and that its cultural agents – art museums and curators – could be both willing subjects and colonizers. A triennial sprawling across a large art museum's air-conditioned, luxurious spaces, in the embattled and unequal 1990s, framed the answers to still-open questions of contested freedoms and struggle very differently to how they were posed in humbler, less costly gatherings at smaller regional centers such as the then-new Tjibaou Cultural Center (housed in an innovative but low-tech, Renzo Piano-designed structure) in nearby New Caledonia, or in the vibrant yet more obscure and genuinely humble, low-budget, artist-pays biennials such as that in Dhaka. Could a pristine museum in comfortable, modern, subtropical Australia or high up in a corporate office building in Fukuoka offer more than elegant reification and the most tenderly teasing ideological patronage? One answer was that both the APT and Fukuoka offered a “safe house” in the spotlight, where art that would be risky or impossible to show at home found a respectful audience. This was the case for Indonesian artists such as Heri Dono, F.X. Harsono, and Dadang Christanto, while Indonesia was still a military-ruled dictatorship, which it remained until the upheavals of 1999. But back in 1991, selecting works for the 1993 Triennial, the APT curators were careful to meet at the Jakarta Institute for the Arts with their adviser, Jim Supangkat, to quietly discuss whether Harsono's works would prove altogether too politically sensitive for the repressive Indonesian military government to allow him to travel or the works to leave the country.

The implication, nevertheless, was that globalized contemporaneity was deliberately selective, even when regional and respectful. We have noted Caroline Turner's observation that after APT1, its Queensland Art Gallery curators began to take into account the art of the Pacific.³⁷ So APT2 in 1996 and APT3 in 1999 expanded their focus to further art centers in Asia or across the far-flung Pacific islands, to artists in locations that were small and economically (if not always politically) inconsequential. In this sense the Triennial, after APT1 (in which the only Pacific nation represented other than Australia and New Zealand was Papua New Guinea), circled back to a global-South direction entrenched by Havana but with Brisbane's First World infrastructure. And APT1, like its successors until APT6 in 2009, was dominated by works that connected colonization and decolonization – along with more intricate neologisms such as neo- and post-colonization – with religion and tradition. The title of the first APT conference had been “Identity, Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of the Asia-Pacific Region.” This meant that equally plausible alternative approaches to Asian art – such as the genealogy of the take-up of experimental, new media art in the region, and the late modernism that was often indistinguishable from American art – were sidelined from the start. As well, dividing artists by nationality remained irresistible apart from the convenient “other” category of diaspora. Avant-gardism resonated less than geopolitics. If the idea of an “Asian” art or even of national heritage came simultaneously to look more shaky by the later 1990s, then this was ignored and was less and less central to what the Asia-Pacific Triennial curators, like Fukuoka's curators in Japan, wanted to define. By 1996, Turner wrote almost in an elegy, “while the 1993 Triennial was essentially concerned with tradition and change, with the objective of bringing the past into the present, the second Triennial has focused on the immediate present.”³⁸ Fukuoka's curators were tracking the same shift, remembering in 1999 that,

A look backwards at previous Asian Art Shows clearly reveals that contemporary Asian art has undergone a transformation, with the end of the 1980s acting as a dividing line .… Speaking in broad generalities, the period up to 1989 was the age of modern art in Asia.³⁹

The newer models of art-making that now began to dominate the always-expanding contemporary collections of ambitious art museums like Fukuoka's Asian Art Museum and Brisbane's QAG, and a considerable part of their other exhibition programs, intersected more and more with the direction of biennials and documentas in Europe. This meant the increased global inclusion of more works such as Chen Zhen's vast “furnace” of junked abacus beads, chamber pots, red light globes, calculators, cash registers, computers, and television sets, Invocation of Washing Fire (1999) at APT3, and other symbolic representations of recent historical conjunctions felt as pressure. This was a new “world art” that was inclusive of tradition and experimental practices, which had themselves fundamentally replaced the often parochial late-modern art that still stubbornly dominated art museums in Australia and beyond as late as 1993. This “world art” would tend to produce images that deliberately refused national self-representation. By contrast, the multiple artistic modernisms of the region had often existed in tandem with progressive postcolonial nationalisms. Curators such as Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich Obrist told audiences this contemporary world art offered clear, provocative insights into the form, structure, and changes underlying the world we live in even as that art was appropriately and inextricably imbricated with – and welcoming of – large audiences. How right, in this light, to shift gear to emphasize social and political documentary, the contestation of national stories, the rewriting of histories, and most of all the absolutely and determinedly inclusive audience interaction that great art museums were now seeking with younger audiences through the contemporary. We shall see the idea and the ownership of this world art powerfully refigured across each of the remaining chapters in this book.

The point, of course, was that the connection between art, identity, and politics in the Asia-Pacific region, and much more selectively in Australia, seemed so close – as it had not necessarily been during the period of modernism, though Geeta Kapur has argued the contrary case about Indian modernism and its embrace of nationalism – that it also seemed obvious that these would be the tropes of global contemporary art practice.⁴⁰ It is important, then, to understand the profound defects behind not just orientalizing perspectives, which everyone in the region was quite conscious of, but also of the defects behind Orientalist critiques themselves, which had become an orthodoxy and an unreflective trope in the art writing of the early 1990s. John Clark explained in his book Modern Asian Art how Edward Said's by now completely canonical arguments deformed an understanding of modern Asian art history. Xu Bing's affectionately ironic but user-friendly classroom complete with desks, instructional videos, paper, ink, and brushes (even promotional T-shirts, the first consignment of which were snapped up by visitors and staff alike) and all of which comprised his work, Introduction to New English Calligraphy (1994–1996), simply sat between yet deliberately outside an identifiable, art-critical opposition between neo-Orientalism and critique. Further, as Philippines cultural theorist Marion Pastor Roces explained at APT3's 1999 conference, no matter what artists said (and though the brief artist statements montaged alongside APT3 catalogue essays were frank and illuminating), both “traditional” and “contemporary” artists deliberately and cleverly altered both their art and their explanations in order to “transact business,” in order to survive and prosper in the international contemporary art world; she called this “expo art,” identifying the spectacle of biennials' contemporary adaptations of tradition with exhibits at the World's Fairs and Universal Exhibitions of the 1880s.⁴¹ In an address at the Third Gwangju Biennale in 2000, Robert Morgan suggested, “internationally known artists today may be concerned less with cultural identity than with the problem of distancing oneself strategically from the origins of cultural experience.”⁴² Few of the better-known Asian artists exhibiting at the Asian Art Show in 1989 or APT1 in 1993 lived in the United States or Europe but a much, much larger number in later shows did. Even in 1993 a considerable number of the artists were already launched on substantial global careers with busy schedules: Gu Wenda (one of the large number of Chinese artists who went into exile just before and after the brutalities in Tiananmen Square in 1989) wrote to director Doug Hall in March 1992 outlining the extraordinary list of shows he was working on, but emphasized how interested he was in the Triennial.⁴³ Shahzia Sikander, Lee Mingwei, and Vong Phaophanit, amongst the many expatriate inclusions in 1999, had lived in North America or the United Kingdom for long periods.

So, the modern Asian art of the twentieth century that appeared less and less in Asian art biennials of the 1990s may have been regarded as having undergone profound changes, but its local histories were more and more ignored in favor of the transnational. Even the process of emphasizing indigenous identity or, later, the disjunction and transition that were taken, by the end of the 1990s, as paradigmatic figures within the landscape of international globalization, were not enough to automatically disrupt the calm of biennial networks. This view is at variance with earlier biennial curators' presumptions, familiar to us from previous chapters and in particular from chapters 2 and 3, that biennials were, somehow, transnational safe-houses for dissent and difference. But when, as in late-twentieth century Australia or Japan, art had lost almost all its modernist role as the testing-ground for culture, then it was hard to detect biennials automatically offering anything like a challenge to authority, given their complicity with corporate and state sponsors. It was hard to even see a reflection of an evolving (and multicultural) sense of a more complex identity such as was being attempted at Manifesta (even though this was, as we shall see, profoundly flawed too, and moving from site to site and city to city was only possible with assured transnational funding, in this case from the European Economic Community and, later, the European Union). The impasse between art museums' and biennials' recuperation of politics and the actuality of crisis was to lead later to threatened boycotts by angry activist artists, as happened at the biennials of Sydney and São Paulo in 2014. In 1993, the situation was different in politically and socially riven cultures such as authoritarian Indonesia, within which there were neither the credible art museums to house a biennial, nor the willing support from benefactors to mount a large, costly art exhibition of contemporary works that would certainly challenge social mores and the regime. (Indonesia's recent biennials have often been smaller, artist-run or similarly independent affairs.) In the Asia-Pacific Triennials, the prominence and success of art by First Nations peoples was in stark contrast with the wider societal and governmental intolerance of those peoples, since other nations in the region – India, Malaysia, Burma, and Indonesia, most obviously – were far from tolerant of minorities and infinitely more repressive. The third APT in 1999 opened exactly as the post-referendum vote for independence in Timor-Leste (East Timor) resulted in Indonesian army-inspired campaigns of mass terror and murder. The exceptional nature of each biennial experience has to be stressed – in time and at each location, as we noted at the start of this chapter. It was in part because the genuinely idealistic determination of curators in the Asian region to forge enduring regional links meant the privileging of transcultural, postcolonial, and “Asian” signifiers in spite of, or without much attention to, what they might over-simplify.

This was completely apparent by the 1999 APT conference. The outlines of a revised discussion along these lines were now finally obvious and scholars including Marion Pastor Roces, John Clark, and Sinologist Geremie Barmé were vocal. It was clear to them that “isms,” especially received ones (whether old-fashioned formalist or new-fangled theoretical, or postmodernism itself) were of little use in decoding the new or the old Asian art. A perspective on contemporary Asian art was now available across a range of new biennials, even if no reliance on their publications was possible. The task of writing this recent art history was largely still left to hard-pressed curators with fast-approaching deadlines, and the result was therefore not particularly rigorous. Even though a postcolonial perspective was relevant to all thinking that wished to inscribe a truly global approach onto the provincialism of mainstream art history, postcolonialism itself was increasingly a disputed and fading term and, by the later 1990s, an increasingly misused (even, paradoxically, neocolonial) discourse since, as is often the case with theory, it had been mobilized to support different opinions and interests. So though the writings of Homi Bhabha and Geeta Kapur, amongst others, had been enormously influential in the region – they suggested that the deconstructive analysis of postmodernism (and implicitly modernism) reinscribed the conceptual boundaries of the West onto the periphery – even they had been transformed into something else: the progenitors of another globalizing lingo deployed as shorthand in biennial catalogue essays. Difference was now treated, in exhibitions and art magazines, as ceaseless flow and change but also as a new, exciting, and easily absorbed contemporary art style, for better or worse. It was a visual matrix of fixed cultural distinctions, of emblematic contrasts and significations that was allegorized in the Chinese art that the curators selected for the first three APTs, and in particular Xu Bing's great, suspended, ink-block scroll printed with meaningless characters, A Book from the Sky (1987–1991), which Queensland Art Gallery purchased in 1994. Works like this (and there were many of similar grandeur and drama at APT and Fukuoka) could only peripherally, and then unproductively, be linked to the debates that had ruled North American and European art writing and art theory over the previous twenty years. A Book from the Sky was neither postcolonial nor hybrid. In it, there was no relationship between center and periphery, no reclaiming of place, no time-lag or belatedness in its appearance. And this is how its reception might be understood: a scattered, mobile, globalizing art world at long last actually internalized the conditions of the regional as an alternative to perpetual, radial, advancing avant-gardism and, again at long last, identified these regional conditions as contemporary – as parallel contemporaneities rather than regional and parochial derivations even though, for the record, multiple Asian modernities had flourished across the region all during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That is only just now seeping into mainstream art history and it is a matter of very great importance.

Conclusion

The downside of the history that we have been tracing was that the types of art shown at Fukuoka's Third Asian Art Show (1989) and Brisbane's First Asia-Pacific Triennial (1993) did not fit the narrative arc of “the experimental,” the postcolonial, or the postmodern as they informed comparable North Atlantic exhibitions of contemporary art. By this we mean that the types of art that the Asia-Pacific Triennials and the Fukuoka Asian Art Shows exhibited during the 1990s were not at all as self-declaredly experimental as comparable North Atlantic exhibitions such as documenta or aspirants to that status in Gwangju, Shanghai, or Singapore. As well, in terms of the form of an exhibition, these “Asia” Triennials remained quite conservative compared with, say, Europe's roving, and nomadic biennial, Manifesta, which constantly and radically experimented with the form of a biennial itself. Manifesta, as we shall see in the next chapter, was established in 1996 to epitomize “European values”: it was a mobile biennial, staged in different (but strategically important) European cities, so as to “bridge” East and West, center and periphery, introducing ever more discursive forms and structures to the point that the 2006 Manifesta, in Nicosia, Cyprus, where the curators sought to present an art school instead of an exhibition, collapsed altogether.

The Asia-Pacific Triennial, the Fukuoka Asian Art Show, and the early editions of the Shanghai and Gwangju biennials remained just beyond the peripheral vision of North Atlantic curators who mistook their own parochialism for internationalism. The Asian biennials' capacity to bring this aesthetics of regionalism (we might almost paradoxically say this counter-globality) to attention outside the Asia-Pacific was very far from fulfilled. But at the same time, we assert that APT and Fukuoka were no exception to the fact that increasingly it was exhibitions as well as the art works they contained – whether disjunctively experimental or resonating with heritage and its survival – that successfully changed the (contemporary) art world as well as changed the way we think about cultural experience. We have shown in some detail how, over the 1990s, the Fukuoka Asian Art Show (later, the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale) and the Asia-Pacific Triennial extrapolated regional definitions of the Asian contemporary onto the global. This was, eventually, enormously influential. Both exhibitions substantially altered regional expectations of the spectacles that constitute contemporary art as exhibitions. Finally, their success historicized contemporary Asian art almost instantly, and thus even their first editions, at the end of the 1980s and the start of the 1990s, were early warning signs of the end of biennialization's link with a disruptive, anti-institutional, and experimental vision of contemporary art in favor of an ecumenical and almost populist spectacle. The chasm that resulted is now plain to see.