6 Museums


Art Gallery of Western Australia and Asian Art


programme, paid for by the Simon Lee Foundation. Ciesla has much riding on her shoulders, but if the first year’s programme can be used as a template, it looks as though the institute will be a success. ‘Our 22/23 programme reflects our commitment to supporting Asian artists while offering audiences some of the most inspiring art of today,’ Ciesla told journalists


at Exterior of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth. Photo: Frances Andrijich by Michael Young


An unexpected curatorial initiative by Australia’s most remote art gallery – the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) in Perth, will see its future focus turned toward Asia, courtesy of a relatively new gallery director and the philanthropy of a local retired Malaysian businessman. Two years ago, Colin Walker was recruited as the gallery’s new director and immediately set about turning his gaze toward Asia. ‘Our future is north and into Asia’, he said, perhaps a little defensively, when Asian Art Newspaper caught up with him by telephone recently. It may seem bullish, but Asia is unequivocally in his sights, as indeed is harnessing the tools of social media to pull into the gallery a younger demographic – one that sees the world through the fast- paced platforms of Instagram, Tik Tok, Snapchat and a plethora of similar social media sites, to address the


gradual decline in visitor


numbers. Walker’s enthusiasm for social media is boundless and he mentions a young Malaysian woman, who visited the gallery recently, and then posted a short video on Tik Tok of her


visit. Te video attracted


230,000 views in a couple of days. Walker was more than impressed and saw it as something he needed to replicate. ‘User-generated content is how messages get across to young communities. Tis is the way to keep ourselves relevant,’ he explained. Originally from Liverpool, in the


UK, Walker – who curiously has limited actual gallery experience – settled into his new role just as Covid-19 began to roil the world and it has not all been plain sailing for him since. Also, he inherited a critical


and general’s damning report from 2018 on the Asian Art


Foundation’s recent launch. Te gallery’s first group show of


Untitled from the series Cui Cui (2005) by Rinko Kawauchi, C-type print, 30.5 x 25.4 cm. Courtesy the artist © Rinko Kawauchi


conditions at the gallery: lack of storage space; poor record keeping; conservation failings; and a poor online outreach programme. Tese were just some of the report’s critical findings that cast a cloud over the future well-being of the gallery’s collection of 18,500 artworks. Walker has not been shy in coming


forward to address the criticisms in the report either. On route to recalibrating the gallery’s future, one of Walker’s immediate initiatives was to shed the gallery’s ties with corporate sponsors, such as the fossil fuel industry, in favour of generating money from donors, philanthropists, and trusts. Enter local Malaysian-born


auditor-


businessman Simon Lee AO, who lived in Perth for many years and is now enjoying retirement in Singapore and who, in 1994, established an eponymous philanthropic foundation that aligns itself with ‘cultural investment in the community’. Lee’s foundation was a perfect fit with Walker’s new philosophy and talks between the two led to the establishment of the Simon Lee Foundation Institute of


Untitled 7 from the series Blind Date (2008) by Lieko Shiga, chromogenic print, 60 x 90 cm. Courtesy the artist © Lieko Shiga


Asian artists is I Have Not Loved Enough, which opens 18 November and runs through to 23 April 2023, and draws heavily on Ciesla’s background in photography and moving-image work, but also draws in painting and sculpture. Other artists involved include Daisuke Kosugi, Japanese born, but who lives in Norway, Taiwanese Hai-Hsin Huang, Japanese photographer Lieko Shiga, Shanghai/New York based Chinese photographer Pixy Liao, Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi, South-Korean video artist Sejin Kim, Chinese Tao Hui, who focuses on video and installation and Lin Zhipeng aka No 223, a writer and photographer based in Beijing, all exploring how deeply enmeshed our bodies, and the subjective forces of love and desire, are


within


Grand Amour, Meimei’s Flying (2018) by Lin Zhipeng (aka No 223), archival pigment print. Courtesy of the artist © Lin Zhipeng (aka No 223)


Asian Contemporary Art at the gallery to promote inspirational, ground-breaking contemporary Asian art over a five-year period. Te first thing that Walker ticked


off his to-do list was the transformation into a bar and popular meeting place of the brutalist gallery’s rooftop space. ‘It is now the largest rooftop bar in Perth,’ Walker said with some pride. It has proven a hit with the younger demographic and he has seen healthy visitation numbers. Te bill however for the transformation was a whopping AUS$10 million. At the launch of the foundation


earlier this year, two special commissions by Asian artists were unveiled. One by the increasingly popular Bangkok-based, Australian- educated, endurance performance artist Kawita Vatanajyankur is Mental Machine: Labour in the Self Economy. Vatanajyankur uses her body


extraordinarily


as a shuttle to large


weave complex


structures with rope until she is virtually entrapped in a sprawling web that references the struggles Tai women endure in their home country’s patriarchal society. Te live performance pulled in 400 people over several days. In the short term, Walker said the


older generation of die-hard gallery visitors would be sacrificed in favour of his favoured young demographic. ‘Te older audience, who expect to


ASIAN ART | NOVEMBER 2022 | #AsianArtPaper | asianartnewspaper | asianartnewspaper | the formations


The gallery’s future focus


is now north and facing


towards Asia


see works by 19th-century landscape artist Hans Heysen on the walls, are not the connected voices anymore. Te Heysen works will go up again, but they will be in conversation with Indigenous and Asian works. I have moved on to a more discursive conversation,’ he stated. Walker sees the gallery as uniquely


positioned both geographically and culturally, to foster a deeper engagement with contemporary Asian art. Tere is, he said, a large Asian diaspora living and working in Western Australia. One immediate beneficiary of the


new relationship between the foundation and AGWA was Rachel Ciesla, who has been hired as a dedicated contemporary Asian art curator – although she is called a ‘lead


creative’ Asian Art Newspaper for


of globalisation, colonialism, technology and capitalism, an arena in which Ciesla’s photographic skills seem to excel. It may sound a touch obscure and academic, but more precisely Ciesla’s thinking identifies how each artist’s work observes the social structures that bind or separate people, and how these structures determine how people ought


to


behave. At the top of this artist cohort is


Lieko Shiga, who in 2011 was working as a photographer in the small coastal village of Kitakama in northern Japan documenting the local community when it was struck by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Sixty locals died and most of the village was destroyed. In the months that followed, Shiga rescued from the devastation over 30,000 photographs that had been washed ashore. She washed and dried them and created a discursive installation – a silent ‘In Memoriam’ to those who had lost their lives – called Rasen Kaigan (Spiral Coast), from 2008– 2012. Te work was shown at Brisbane’s


2015/16 Asia Pacific the five-year


Triennial to great acclaim. At AGWA, she is showing an earlier series Blind Date (2008), photographs of young Tai couples on date-nights in Bangkok, where young women cling dreamily to their beaus upfront on motorbikes in a touching demonstration of fleeting sentimentality as their eyes engage with Shiga’s camera, but somehow do not see. Te series is a wonderful cross-over between documentary and pure art photography.


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