Welcome to Asia Pacific Art Papers: Contemporary Contexts, Practices, Ideas, QAGOMA’s ongoing survey of the diverse creative contexts that animate the vast geopolitical region surveyed by the Gallery’s Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. This online publication was launched to coincide with the tenth Triennial in 2021, and is now expanding with new papers in association with the eleventh chapter, presented at the Queensland Art Gallery │Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 30 November 2024 to 27 April 2025.

First staged in 1993, the Asia Pacific Triennial marked a conscious turn towards a region with which Australia had, at best, patchy cultural connections. To build those relationships, the Gallery initially convened a large Australian-based curatorium — local and national — to work side-by-side with curators and experts from within each country involved in the Triennial. Over the subsequent 30 years of cultural, social and geopolitical change, ten editions of the Triennial have presented the work of 650 artists, collectives and projects from 50 countries to an astonishing four million visitors. Inevitably, the Gallery’s expertise has deepened over time, maintained through constant dialogue with influential players across the region, and anchored by the Triennial’s acquisitive approach. Now, a Gallery-led curatorium works with regional interlocutors, who cultivate rich networks across Asia and the Pacific, together with the Gallery’s Collection, which reflects the Triennial’s abundant artistic ecosystems.

This digital publication considers how exhibition and cultural platforms like the Triennial represent and reflect Asia and the Pacific and how, in turn, the region’s artists have assessed the meaning and value of that engagement from their own perspective. In a globalised world, what is the purpose of delineating a particularly Asian and Pacific story of contemporary art? The Triennial’s first outing established a trajectory that has allowed us the great privilege to be both a channel and a champion for otherwise unknown artists and practices, from the restlessly progressive to those keeping customary modes of working alive with persistence and innovation. It has allowed us to follow careers, ideas and threads that have evolved, informed and surprised our understanding of our place in the region, and ultimately drawn us closer together.

Asia Pacific Art Papers considers how exhibiting and writing about contemporary art across the region shifts global discourses by introducing local, indigenous and post- or decolonised perspectives. It asks how the type of work shown in the Triennial has expanded traditional dichotomies of art, craft, ethnography and culture. And, it emphasises the centrality of contemporary Australian First Nations art in unsettling Western worldviews and aesthetics, while simultaneously supporting dialogues with other indigenous cultures.

Now in its second phase, Asia Pacific Art Papers retains the original series of papers from guest writers and QAGOMA curators — contributions dating from 2021 to 2022 — to which we add new texts that consider the region’s cultural milieu in the intervening years, while also exploring territories that appear for the first time in the 11th Triennial, including Timor-Leste. As always, these writers address the continuous creativity and innovation in First Nations’ art practices, performative work, material concerns and specific regional contexts.

The Gallery is deeply proud of the Asia Pacific Triennial, and grateful for the opportunity to introduce emerging writers and foreground vital perspectives that give voice to diverse experiences of living in this dynamic region. I would like to acknowledge everyone who has contributed to this digital publication, and to the curators, writers, researchers, interlocutors, supporters and sponsors of the Triennial — and, most importantly, the artists, whose resilience, ingenuity and inspiration open countless doors for understanding and exchange, and bring us together in Brisbane every three years.