Tatsuo Miyajima

Time Comes At You! You Have To Confront It¹

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A conventional perception held by many heavyweight European and American art curators is that Australian art is predominantly mimicry of their dominion, and they relegate it accordingly. (And it would now seem that some Asian curators are of the same attitude. Increasingly over recent years, if not for a decade or so, their biennales have progressively excluded or disregarded Australian [and New Zealand] artists, as a kind of Wallace Line² of cultural partition.³) Correspondingly, and despite abundant provocation, there still remains in prevailing national museum presentations and their attendant discourse, an essential focus on that same Euro-American archetype. (Some have argued that the only authentic contemporary Australian art is not ‘white’ but Indigenous, but either disposition ignores the currency of artists from the Asia-Pacific and Middle East now living here.)

Analogously, the conundrum that is museum presentation of contemporary art from the greater Asia and Middle East regions—given our geographic proximity to the former and an historic and current connectivity to the latter (military and immigration)—is enigmatic if not abstruse. Sydney presents itself (as much as does Melbourne) as the centre of the Australian art world, yet the history of its incumbent biennale, the first established in the Asia-Pacific region and one of the oldest globally, has essentially rendered itself over time as an outpost of Euro-American art hegemony. Its belated, but nonetheless to be applauded 2016 appointment of Mori Art Museum Chief Curator Mami Kataoka, as artistic director for 2018, is the first Asian curator in its forty-four year history. Only Charles Merewether’s 2006 Zones of Contact and David Elliott’s 2010 The Beauty Of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age engaged to any significant... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Counter Voice in the Water at Fukushima, 2014. Digital video. Installation view, Tatsuo Miyajima: Connect with Everything, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2016. Image courtesy the artist, Akio Nagasawa Gallery and SCAI THE BATHHOUSE. © The artist. Photograph Alex Davies.

1999/2016. Installation view, Tatsuo Miyajima: Connect with Everything, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2016. LED, IC, electric wire, infrared sensor. Domus Collection. Image courtesy and © the artist. Photograph Alex Davies.