More from this Issue
Confess and Conceal: Asia/Australia Exhibition at AGWA
Review of Confess and Conceal a group show of 4 Asian and 7 Australian artists organised by the Art Gallery of WA and touring South East Asia. Catalogue has essay by Apinan Poshyananda discussing Thai women artists but fails to provide background to the other Asian works or whether Australia shares the sense of reorientation being experienced in Asia or whether it can be thought of as part of Asia.
An Australian Creates Space in Manila
From 1989 - 1991 artist Neil Roberts found himself engaged on a series of working visits to the Philippines. He decided to use only local materials, striking a welcome chord with his hosts. His tendency towards sparse presentation was in sharp contrast to the overload of the installations and paintings of local artists, echoing the contrast between Australian and Filipino attitudes to space. At ARX in Perth he collaborated with Cesare Syjuco who has the ART-LAB space in Manila.
Woven Textiles: The Enduring Tradition
Traditional Philipino woven textiles are still made today, keeping alive an ancient regional art form which is poorly documented in museums and not well recognised. All the varied types of weaving are described and illustrated. The patterns, iconography and styles are now seen in modern interior design and in fashion and help to maintain something essentially Philipino in a society which has taken on the trappings of world culture.
Strange Encounters
'Art Festival: Temples and Cemeteries' is an unusual event held in Chiang Mai over three months. Organiser Uthis Utimana, lecturer at Chiang Mai University, chose to show art in temples and cemeteries as Thai people are more familiar with them than art galleries and they encourage people to contemplate life. Artists ran into trouble with religious and education authorities who misunderstood some of the pieces but were undeterred.
The Power of Yogyakartan Surrealism
Why has Yogyakarta produced a school of surrealist painters and what do they paint about? Life perhaps offers strange encounters, especially in the meeting of eastern and western elements,but the clue is in traditional attitudes to the ghostly or uncanny. These are transposed into scenes of modern life which are richly varied and powerful. They include one of Indonesia's only woman artists, Lucia Hartini.
Exploring the Potential of Printmaking
Indonesian printmaking emerged around the time of Independence in 1945. It began to be taught in colleges in Bandung, Yogyakarta and Jakarta and became a way of showing Indonesian art abroad. Prints are now seen in offices, banks, hotels and homes. Indonesian printmakers have participated in international print exhibitions in Norway, Taiwan, and Japan.
Metaphor for a Delicate Balance
Artist Noelene Lucas describes the rationale behind the work The Presence of the Centre which she made at Silpakorn University in Bangkok during a residency. It deals with her perception of the landscape of theAustralian Centre as seen from 11,000 metres flying to Thailand, and the fragmentary way we perceive. It is a metaphor for negotiating our position in the world.
Pink Herrings and Tasmanian Tigers
The artist as a gay Asian male who migrated to Tasmania to escape persecution in Hong Kong, has "copped it swee" a lot of the time. Undeterred he has produced work which addresses this theme and worked quietly towards reform of the laws against homosexuality in Tasmania.
Textiles Bridging Vietnam and WA
Carpets have long been a link between East and West. In 1992 a Western Australian textile designer-maker Rinske Car-Driesens began working with the Vietnam Women's Union and a Singapore business women's body to have her carpet designs hand-knotted in Vietnam using Australian wools dyed in Albany. While Car-Driesens uses CAD-CAM technology to design them, the Vietnamese workers rely on their hand and eye skills to produce wonderful results.
Writing About Craft
What is the relationship between the art or craft object and its maker? This question is put from the Philippines in relation to crafts and compares the importance of the origin or culture of the maker in that country to that in Australia. Students of Philippine crafts have applied the 'mapping' method which helps to understand the depth of tradition and their subsequent evolution into urban variants. Writers on the crafts are developing ways of exploring these questions.
Refugees Confronting Memory
The US/Mexico based Border Workshop group worked on a collaborative shopfront installation in 1992 with the Cabramatta community of western Sydney where many Indo-Chinese refugee populations settled in the 70s. A large installation representing a refugee boat and a walk-in temple containing video monitors playing back student interviews with local people.
Modern Art in Thailand: A Glimpse
A concise history of the beginnings of modernism in Thailand from the 1890s. In the 1970s the current Princess established an alternative space for young Thai artists in which the tensions between art for art's sake and art for religious purposes were evident. Politically correct art about Thai-ness was sponsored by banks in the 80s. Later political instability and environmental problems gave rise to a new kind of work challenging cultural consumerism.