Vishakha Desai:
Good evening and welcome to the Asia Society. It’s really a great pleasure to see all of you here this evening. I should say that it was almost ten years ago to the day that we organized our first roundtable on contemporary Asian art. That moment was one of those moments when you almost feel like, “My God! I wonder where we will go from here?” Little would we have thought that we would be here today with as many of you interested in contemporary Asian art. It’s a great honour for me to introduce two friends and colleagues, both of them truly stars in their own right. Apinan Poshyananda is an artist and an art historian, one of the most distinguished curators in contemporary Asian art, who has been involved with more exhibitions of contemporary Asian art across the globe than almost anyone else. He has been a commissioner of biennales and triennales whether you go to Japan, or Argentina or Brazil. He was a commissioner for the Asian section of the Sao Paulo Biennale. He is a scholar and he’s also a prolific writer. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University and in fact it was soon after he received his Ph.D. and went back to Bangkok is when I had the opportunity to meet him in 1991. He was a member of the first roundtable exactly a decade ago. He was also a curator of our own highly acclaimed Traditions/Tensions exhibition and he will be curating our upcoming exhibition on Montien Boonma, one of the very fine Thai artists who unfortunately passed away. Apinan is going to be joined with Okwui Enwezor. I think it’s very hard to introduce Okwui because he truly has become an international star. As some of you know, it was more than twenty years ago when he came to this country. It was not to study art. It was to study political science. While Okwui was studying political science, he started writing poetry and art criticism. As he started writing about art, soon it had to do with being around art and before you knew it, it was to really begin to organize exhibitions. He was, in fact, the art director of the Second Johannesburg Biennale and he has been involved in a number of other exhibitions. The one in New York you might be aware of is Global Conceptualism in which he was the co-curator for the African section. He has also been a founder and one of the editors of one of the most distinguished African art journals that began in the 1990s. Of course, he is most well-known for being the art director of Documenta XI, the last Documenta. As a number of art critics have said, Documenta is to contemporary art what Olympics are to the world of sports. So please join me in welcoming Apinan Poshyananda and Okwui Enwezor.

Vishakha Desai:
These two told me that one of them was going to come in a wheelchair. It has to do with whether curators are actually challenged people, because they travel so much, both of them. I thought I would start with the beginning of the awareness of contemporary art because you really can’t talk about it as the beginning because as we all know, the contemporary art world in the non-Euro-American centres has been going on for a long time. So it’s really only the beginning for the western art world, perhaps, in the 1990s. Both of you started more or less at that time and I wonder if you might go back to that moment and talk a little bit about what it was like then. How did it feel? Okwui, you were already in New York then and Apinan, you had just gone back to Bangkok. What was your perception? What was it like?

Okwui Enwezor:
Well, it’s rather difficult to go back to the beginning because it means that by going back one has to leave a number of things behind, in order to talk about the beginning. You know, I think that for me the trajectory of coming to where I am today as a curator really is not one straight path. It was many different paths, many different attachments, multiple attachments if you will, intellectually, culturally, politically and otherwise, and so in a sense I come to where I am today with the idea of these multiple attachments deeply entangled with each other, and informing the sense that in order to think historically in the present, that one in a sense has to begin from the process of unlearning certain ideas that makes it quite burdensome to get into this very incredibly heady space called the contemporary art world. I come from Nigeria and I come from a place that has absolutely no museums such as we find in New York. I don’t think many people here would appreciate that, especially from the perspective of what it means to think and to really look at art thoughtfully in a way that allows the possibility for that art to have an impact on the way you experience it. So I must really say that the 1990s is not a beginning as it were. It is a beginning only in terms of the way in which people’s trajectories are suddenly mapped, you know, you arrive fully born, already fully formed and not as an infant. So I might say that it is an art world I confronted, I engaged with, looking with a sideways glance, looking with a great sense of preservation, a great sense of, shall I say, frustration, shall I say, envy, if you will, because I come from a place that does not have a museum of modern art, that has no right in any sense of the form to demand a critical space in those discourses that one saw in all those different museums. What I saw was great and also what I saw was a world that seemed to me to have a certain type of historical amnesia. My work as a curator began right from there. I mean, it was learning on the job but to learn one has to really sort of come up with a makeshift toolkit, if you will. You have to try whatever works in order to begin.

Vishakha Desai: Like guerrilla warfare?

Okwui Enwezor:
Well, in a sense. I don’t quite see it as warfare in the sense that I really had no sense I would end up being the curator I am today. It was really just, you know, a matter of a very ad hoc movement?I get to make a slight intervention on behalf of my contemporaries, if you will. I had lived in the United States since 1982 and I had worked in as many different kinds of jobs you can imagine, you can say that I’m the quintessential American story, if you will. The immigrant who comes and makes it, in a sense. So this is for me the beginning, the beginning of really thinking, reading, and I saw the world in a transversal manner. I didn’t see the world in a straight, rigorous, narrow manner. I saw the world in the context of the multiplicity of perspectives that were right before me in New York, and that’s where I started working.

Vishakha Desai:
Apinan, for you it’s about you really being in this part of the world and
then going back.

Apinan Poshyananda:
Like Okwui, I think I have to do a fast rewind back more than a decade because I was born in Bangkok?we do have one or two museums in Thailand?but I left Bangkok when I was ten, was sent to England to a prep school and forced to talk with a stiff upper lip. Then I did my degree at Edinbourough University, a fine art degree which was a mix between art history and fine arts. I did return to Bangkok wanting to be an artist actually. At the age of twenty-eight, I won three national awards at the National Exhibition of Art and I thought my career was going to be an artist. Then, mistakenly, I was given this fellowship to do a Ph.D. at Cornell and I spent another five years there and I had to return to Bangkok because I had to repay my university. That was 1990, you see. I met my wife at Cornell, got married. I was going to be a civil servant, a teacher, an artist, a little bit, then something happened because this one curator came along. I didn’t really know what it meant. I thought a curator was supposed to cure an artist, you know? You know, massage the ego. I later found out it is vice-versa. Anyway, I had a trial of curating at the National Art Gallery in Bangkok with seven Thai artists in 1991. And the second exhibition I curated was representing Thai artists at the Sydney Biennale. Then I bumped into Vishakha Desai in Bangkok and my life changed. It’s been a really great experience. During that time I was working for the APT, the Asian Pacific Triennale in Brisbane that was going to open in 1993. The conference we had, in fact I was here almost ten years ago giving this similar speech, I mean I was much younger then, but it was an experience?the roundtable discussion, because it was so lively, so vibrant, and there was a lot of expectation in terms of what was going to happen. During the two days of meeting at the roundtable discussion, it was almost like getting to know you but not quite. Almost this gap where the testing the water was such that sometimes it went very lukewarm, there were other times it went very hot. Because, you know, in these early days, names, translation, ability to represent or not represent the passwords such as local, global, were not clear. Vishakha suggested that something could happen in terms of exhibitions here in contemporary art. Here, ten years ago, I actually was quite rude because I ended my speech saying to the Asia Society it’s about time to show living art. It’s time for art and Asian art to talk back and it talked back. Ten years since then it has really talked back and I’m so pleased and so proud of the Asian artists, the amount of leap?and I would call it leapfrogging?that they have done.

Vishakha Desai:
I think that’s in a way what both of you are suggesting. This notion that “beginning” is really something that is just beginning here but it is as you said, something fully arrived, kind of an adult, but people don’t always treat you that way because of the historical amnesia. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that notion of historical amnesia that you refer to Okwui, and I think to some extent that idea as if the art in other parts of the world hadn’t happened until somebody else discovered it.

Okwui Enwezor:
Well, for me the most instructive experience coming to the United States is first and foremost learning that I was a minority and it really is, I think, something that transforms you but at the same time in many ways remains disturbing, if you will. I’m in an exhibition The Short Century which was here earlier this year and want to say, picture this, that in 1945, more than three-quarters of the world were colonized. I mean, this was not three hundred years ago, this was in 1945. The sheer numbers of people, billions, and to think that post-1945 that the idea of self-determination was not just simply a question of politics. It was a question of the affirmation of a sense of self-understanding that has clear cultural, social and moral import. I think that coming to the United States was the challenge that I met. I come from a post-colonial world in which people like Chinua Achebe and many other people were writing with such incredible force and clarity that their work has also transformed what is known as literature in English. And why
is that possible and not in the visual arts? This is a question and this is for me the gap of
understanding in talking productively in a trans-cultural sense that is the difficulty of this historical amnesia. If anything I’ve been constantly insubordinate to the idea that my passage through the contours of the so-called western society is one that I ought to be completely grateful for. I saw my work as a possibility to open up a space of dialogue and equations and also to confront the limits of the institutional domain within which we work. I carry some of these equations with me all of the time because I think that it is ethical and demanding of us to think much more critically and historically when we engage the world. When we make judgements about art, we do not really necessarily understand the motivation for making those works. What many people, I’ll use an example, what many people may call political art here may in fact have a whole different historical basis from which it arose. So what do I do? I don’t always begin by reading people’s catalogues. For example, for The Short Century, the title came from my productive reading of Eric Hobsbawn’s book The Age of Extremes. That’s where the title came from, The Short Twentieth Century. I wanted to just imagine that if the twentieth century was that short, how short will the post-colonial world be in this sense, post-1945? So this is for me the work across disciplines, to think productively across genres and not to become too fixated on the idea that one singular way of experiencing and understanding art is passing through the wall of established categories.

Vishakha Desai:
It’s sort of an interesting segway into curatorial practice and this idea of how one makes decisions and what is the space of curatorial practice, especially in the kind of world we live in today. It has as much to do with decisions artists make about the kind of work they make and decisions that curators make about the kind of work they select and for whom and where and then the decisions art critics make as well as the audiences make. I wonder if you, because you’ve kind of referred, Okwui, to this notion of the gap that somehow in literature doesn’t seem to exist the same way, but in the visual arts we seem to have an idea because it is historically determined, that art must be transcendent. That art must be as, in fact, sometimes people have said “sublime.” Therefore while we think about its historical basis, it must be beyond history at the same time. So how does that work out? Especially in the contemporary art practices where things are colliding, colluding and connecting at so many different levels. I wonder if, Apinan, you would talk about curatorial practice.

Apinan Poshyananda:
Yes, but before I forget, I’d like to return to amnesia because I think in Asia, and we discussed this also, regarding that short period of colonization and the wounds of imperialism still throbbing and many Asian countries which were colonized do want to forget this very painful period. So it becomes a longing for nostalgia, the return of the pre-colonial period where the ancestors, the forefathers, were there and this return actually leapfrogged back to that time of pain in order to reinvent what they had been missing and longing for. I think that for many countries in Asia this time has also became a time of reinvention. This is where art and culture came in and government created policies to promote certain kinds of art that could revive these ideas of going back and looking at our own “true art” with pride and in a way creating a sort of Asiancentric view of non-western purity and focusing on privileging what has been in the past!
This actually leads to how government has a certain control of what is to be presented and the Asian Orientalist discourse by those who were in power at that time. [They] actually created a sort of blockage where they were trained to look at contemporary art, in this case contemporary Asian art, as something derivative. We have two prongs here where the western discourse may look at contemporary Asian art as not excellent or third-rate from third-world but at the same time we get the kind of feeling of inferior art within the Asian countries. But at the same time, there was this idea of Asia as one that remerged. “Asia as one” or “unity within diversity” actually became a motto for many countries that wanted their pride back, this period after, of course, independence. They actually wanted to have art that became nationalistic so in that way if artists want to be successful, a lot of them have to be quite safe, quite on the right side, right track in order to be promoted and when in the early 1990s this Asian spectacle exploded, that became something that challenged what was happening or what was being placed in the infrastructure, within those governments. So we can talk about that a little later.

Vishakha Desai:
That opens up a place in which curatorial practices changed in the 1990s.

Apinan Poshyananda:
Yes. Because “curator,” when it is translated in each country it has many meanings, a lot of the times like those “who look after art objects” and a lot of times it becomes those who only do that, and the word, as you know, has changed a lot.

Okwui Enwezor:
I must say, in regards to curating, I am fixated on this notion that all discourses are located, they come from somewhere, and that they have in that location a sense of how it sees itself being transformed when it confronts other worlds and so on. So in this sense, I think that when I make an exhibition as a curator I come with two things: with the idea of the historical awareness of the space in which the exhibition is going to be made, making it in the United States or in Europe. It is very important to understand the art traditions there. What are those traditions and what are the parameters of visual experience and how do institutions work with these bodies of knowledge? Consequently, one has to then try to find a space within such a discourse in order to say something from whatever position you come from. So in this sense, I think it needs repeating, especially in this age of endless dislocation and fragmentation and movement and so on, nothing is really located, nothing is authentic anymore, that ideas themselves are not that tangible. You cannot just simply take them and immediately put them in a space and voila it will have the same value. What I try to do in exhibitions is really say that both for the public and for the institution it is a process of engagement that requires a great deal of giving of oneself. Beyond that, I think that my ambition as a curator has never really been to go and to make the great exhibition of Rembrandt, the great exhibition of Pollock. That does not mean one cannot aspire to do that, but I believe there are so many people doing such great exhibitions and that I can be a different kind of voice in order to be able to shape and define what is contemporary in our experience. I think this is really the question of how the presidia of the curator has to be understood and people have to make the choices of what it is they want to contribute.

Vishakha Desai:
But to some extent, one is always juggling between understanding the context and changing it. For example, Documenta, on the one hand, has a special importance in the world of contemporary art. One might argue that you, and Catherine David before you, did actually try to do something in which that institution of Documenta would be changed by the very curatorial practice you brought to it. In that sense, one might say you are an inside subversive, which is the way I describe myself. That you understand the institution but you also try to change it at the same time. And Apinan, in your case, it seems to me that you were also thinking about this issue of how to change the institution itself through the curatorial practice that you bring to the table. Both of you, I’d like you to talk a little bit more about this idea of how to define “contemporary” in the contemporary art world and what would be your strategy to put it into practice. If you don’t want to do the Rembrandt show, what is the strategy by which you redefine the notion of contemporary? What would you want people to think about as contemporary art in 2002?

Okwui Enwezor:
Well, again it depends on the space and I think as you mentioned with Documenta, I fully believed from the very beginning that Documenta ought not to be a museum even though everybody christened it the “museum of one hundred days.” I think it is a space of a different kind of experimentation and I don’t think it is really that possible to be subversive? simply because they will just hire the next person! So everybody just has to do their thing. And I think that the work I did for me, really, follows in the long tradition of what Documenta has been and I’ve tried to respond back to Documenta historically. I’ve tried to do that by attempting to be a good student of Documenta’s history, looking at its historical speciality, looking at the way in which it was founded on the basis of a national reconstruction or reconstitution. What to do with that? I think these are really clear issues in Documenta and I began by studying them. You mention Catherine David, but let me just simply say, I categorically decided that there are three periods of Documenta. The first period to my thinking, I called the Arnold Bode years from 1955 to 1968, because these were the Documentas that were really obsessed with the historical avant-garde. The second period began with Szeemann and this is very important because I believe that Szeemann’s Documenta was really the first time in a large-scale exhibition of that nature, a temporary exhibition, where the subjectivity of the curator became feasible. It was no longer just simply an arrangement of people’s taste, an arrangement of sovereign judgment. It was the imperative of the curator that was in full display and that’s what made it such a seminal exhibition. Consequently, I think from Szeemann to Catherine David, I believe that this period between Documenta V to X really represents a second period. In as much as I see clear intellectual outlines between my project and Catherine David’s, I see also a point of departure that in a sense I think Documenta XI is really the third period because finally post-1997, one could say that the very notion of globalization had come to a space of visibility in which it was no longer something that one could simply call a theme. It had some very, very serious contemporary repercussions and so for us, how do we really think about some of these transitions, or this world of permanent transition? This is the way I think of the contemporary that the contemporary is a world of permanent transition and so how do we come to terms with that? In a sense, many people will say that Documenta XI was very documentary. Whether it was or not is a different issue. One of its key questions was about the social life of the world and how communities of ideas and practices in different places are formed and what do we do with that? This was our challenge. So we decided that Documenta could begin by being extraterritorial in order to engage and confront its own limits and this is, for me, one way I can begin to talk about the contemporary. That it is this world of permanent transitions, however large, that we want to say is a civilizational one. I don’t believe it is.

Apinan Poshyananda:
I think there is this institutional burden that is always going to be with the curators, especially those who work at various institutions when they do curatorship independently. I think in Asia and the Pacific, these so-called triennales or biennales have a young history but already they have a burden within those particular decades, I mean in the past ten years. As you know there have been an emergence, explosions of so many biennales in Asia. We ask how do they define contemporary art in that region in order to give it a counter-balance to what’s been happening in the west, in Europe and America? By inventing these cultural spaces, they actually have their own adventures, inventions, as well as restrictions. I’m sure we’ll talk about censorship and self-censorship later on, but everywhere there are certain amounts of restrictions, wherever you are, in China, Korea or Thailand. I think the audience is so important? the specificity of the place and the locale. You bring certain artists from within the region or outside of Asia to show to whom? To show to certain artists, to a certain audience who we know that in some places have different agendas. The variety is so great in terms of expectation and novelty, innovation. I was able to work with the Queensland APT Gallery Asia Pacific Triennale for several of their triennales. On the second APT, which was in 1996 in Australia, I was invited to do the Australian section so they were giving this a new slant. This Thai curator could come in and look at Aussie art from a different angle, which was an amazing experience. I learned so much. Destiny Deacon was one person who I admired for her ability to create art. I visited her in Melbourne in her studio, at her house, and we had a long conversation and I thought wouldn’t it be nice to bring her sitting room to Brisbane to show it as a part of APT and we did that. In Sao Paulo, when I organized the Asian !
section in 1998, we had to consider the Brazilian audience.

Vishakha Desai:
Let me just stop you there. Does that mean that you always think about what will play well in the audience and not actually give a full voice to the range of expressions that might exist in contemporary Asia because you are constantly, one might argue, playing with what would play well in a particular community?

Apinan Poshyananda:
You have to consider at a certain level?it depends on the budget also?you can’t do everything, you know! They tell you, “Sorry Apinan, congratulations?you do this section but we only have this amount of money but do it well.” Now we come to smaller shows and I like to do smaller shows and individual artists as well. The Japan Foundation has been great in promoting art, just to move on from Australia to Japan a little bit. They’ve created many international shows within Asia and without. They had this policy, you know, especially in the 1980s, of sending Japanese artists to South-East Asia and literally selecting without consulting. I felt there should be a counter-balance there. They didn’t like that, of course, but things change. They actually changed in the sense that they work more with South-East Asian curators to create an arena where ideas could be exchanged. I was pushing it a little bit further in terms of small !
exhibitions. I thought why not invite some really well-known Japanese artists to Bangkok, individual ones. I started with Nobuyoshi Araki and that was bad news for the Japan Foundation. Luckily, Araki came and we had a really big show and he created a new series of works in Bangkok. Then we invited Yasumasa Morimura, who spoke on the last night of the show, but this time it was backed by the Japan Foundation, which was great. So after Araki, the following year I did Yasumasa Morimura in Bangkok and Morimura was so kind to come over. He showed many works as well as did the performance in Thailand. Not only that, he invited artists for individual shows from without Asia.

Vishakha Desai:
I think partly what you’re talking about is that the role of various different arenas in which artists get seen and art gets seen and all of it is fodder for looking at globalization as a phenomenon where often people have import/export model in which things come from that part of the world to what we call the centres of contemporary art. I know, Okwui, you’ve thought a little bit about this notion of centres, imagined or real, and I wonder if both of you who’ve travelled, and you’ve travelled because of the Documenta platforms to India and to other parts, if you would talk a little bit about the energy of contemporary art centres that are outside of the Euro-American axis, and your sense of what is going on there and how does that play out when you come back to a place like New York.

Okwui Enwezor:
Well, just to pick up a little bit from what Apinan said about biennales, triennales, their proliferation. I happen to be one of those people who really think that it is great that there are so many biennales and triennales. I have no problem that there are so many of them simply because one has to understand the circumstances that made them possible. For many places outside of Europe and North America, these proliferations must be understood in relation to the ongoing questions of modernization in many of those places. I think that these are powerful contexts within which some of these biennales are being formed. I’ve traveled to many of them from Fukuoka to Dakar to Cairo, of course, Johannesburg, and so on. I think that what’s interesting in all these questions is not only just simply that the exhibitions were great, they also offered moments where people could really begin to think about art being produced within these regions. They could begin to write about them, speak about them in intelligent ways. They could begin to produce ideas around them. I think it’s not so much that one makes an exhibition, of course people always make exhibitions, but they provide opportunities for other activities around art. It creates contexts for artists to be aware of each other, aware of what’s happening elsewhere and spurs on new conversations and so on. So even though some of these biennales may ultimately not be as good as we would wish for them to be, they also do provide very serious services and questions that linger on in places where they have been done. In relation to the ideas of centres, I truly believe it’s complete nonsense to talk about a centre or centres because there really isn’t such a thing. Maybe ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, one could talk about a centre. Let me just say very briefly, in the place I come from, Nigeria, 1986 was a year of incredible catastrophe. Catastrophe came in the guise of the Structural Adjustment Programme which the government signed. I’ll tell you, between 1986 and now, ninety percent of active producing intellectuals have left the country. Now that’s a disaster, right? I think they are spread all over the place. What is happening today is there’s a kind of understanding in which people do not want to see themselves nudged into the idea of a centre. Going to India was very instructive for us because it suddenly showed the distance between Kassel and the rest of the world. Kassel became that much more isolated. That much more disengaged. In a sense, because the Indians had this uncanny way of converting everything into an Indian problem, particularly a problem that they had already dealt with twenty years ago. They said to us, “you guys are coming here to talk about it now.” But it was very interesting to be confronted with the vitality of ideas that were being produced. We were there for five days. Of course at the end of each day, we would run out of time!
because it was no longer possible to continue a conversation. We always had to go outside to continue. This is particularly interesting because the idea I learned much more clearly was the idea of the artist intellectual. The model could be really from the few Indian artists I met in the audience because of their worldliness, because of their breadth of their ideas and knowledge. This was particularly good for Documenta. As the volumes from the different platforms come out, it begins to really say clearly that the very question of talking about centres is no longer for me the way that is most productive to work, but really how to work on a multi-lateral transcultural basis.

Vishakha Desai:
We’re going to move to a different question and then we’ll open it up to all of you in the audience. I want to actually have you talk a little bit about art itself. What kind of work really excites you both, that interests you? The kind of art you really like to look at. And, if you were to project out five-ten years, especially in light of what the world has gone through in the last year since September 11th, what do you think the world of contemporary art is going to be like when we move out, especially from the perspective of non-Euro-American contemporary art? The first part I’d love for you to talk a little bit about the kind of stuff you like to look at and what it is about that kind of work.

Apinan Poshyananda:
I like to look at artists…because they make art. You know a lot of the time I have to look at the art I don’t like because that’s the profession of curators. You don’t just look at the art you like. You really have to look at the art you don’t like as well, and a lot of it. You have to ask yourself why you don’t like it. Because otherwise, everybody’s prejudiced. But it’s to the point where, because we do so many shows and so many audiences, it’s very reciprocal at different places. Sometimes you have to?one example, I just did the Irish Biennale earlier this year in Limerick. And in the end, we showed seventy artists. A lot of the northern Irish, from Northern Ireland, as well as from the Republic but juxtaposed with Asian artists as well as European artists. Part of the deal was that I had to look at a lot of Irish art. You have to be objective to a certain extent, in the end when you cut the pile you have to decide.

go back to top