In the weeks before the opening of the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT9) in Brisbane, a New Yorker article by Margaret Talbot materialised again and again on my Twitter feed. “The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture” explores our ignorance of polychromy – the practice of painting artefacts in different colours. This ignorance erased non-Europeans from defining aesthetic traditions. It also – quite literally – helped cast whiteness, in the form of pristine white marble, as both signifier of beauty and arbiter of value. Sure, today’s rollcall of biennales and triennials, often helmed by globetrotting celebrity curators, challenges our populist post-Trump era. But they often do little to upend these endemic power structures. Too often, artists who have been producing exemplary work, sometimes for decades, beyond the limited reach of the Western art world, are given a platform in service of a diversity checklist. They are invited to perform their identity. Or worse, their trauma. To borrow a term from the African-American philosopher George Yancy, the white gaze remains intact.

APT’s 25-year history predates our current fixation with performative wokeness. It is the largest exhibition devoted exclusively to contemporary art from the Asia-Pacific region. And, remarkably, the only one to position Australia within this context. The show was overseen by Dr Zara Stanhope and an in-house team who’ve deeply immersed themselves in the region’s art scenes – an imperative that does far more for the presentation’s depth and vitality than the nebulous “themes” so beloved by curators. It features upwards of 80 artists and collectives from 30 countries including – for the first time – Bangladesh, Laos, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Solomon Islands and the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, a constellation of atolls that was once part of Papua New Guinea.

The 400-strong series of artworks, exhibited across the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), represent a universe of artistic styles and practices – monochrome photographs and rainbow-bright assemblages, woven basketry and high-concept video art. Threads recur. Some pieces deal with tangled colonial histories and the attendant feelings of displacement and longing. Others with nature, flux and matriarchy. But navigating the bottom floor of QAG and GOMA’s airy, sun-splashed galleries, the idea that sprung to mind isn’t diversity – diverse to whom? – but plurality. The notion that there is no one way to make art or, indeed, see art, shouldn’t strike me as fresh, exhilarating or downright radical. However, I’ve become so accustomed to the invisible presence of the white gaze, especially in rarefied spaces such as the gallery, that it does.

During the past two years, the art world has been preoccupied with politics, understandably. In some ways, grappling with the tyranny of borders, the scourge of racism and the fallout from the refugee crisis has never felt more necessary. The trouble is that so much work that brands itself as political – take Ai Weiwei’s Law of the Journey at this year’s Biennale of Sydney – comes off as empty and bombastic, designed to mirror rather than expand our world view. As Stanhope, referencing the Indian art historian Geeta Kapur, pointed out at the APT’s media preview, the Triennial is as concerned with poetics as it is with politics. The show pays attention to how the forces of history don’t just shape global events but can refract, fragment and transform the consciousness of its subjects. This gives rise to some of its most poignant moments.

In a darkened gallery of GOMA, I sat mesmerised in front of Monira Al Qadiri’s DIVER (2018). The four-channel video work, in which synchronised swimmers duck, dive and spin to haunting Kuwaiti pearling songs, is a study in viscous, prismatic surfaces. It draws aesthetic parallels between the Persian Gulf’s 19th-century history of pearling – Al Qadiri’s grandfather was a singer on a pearling ship – and the modern-day oil boom, an industry equally implicated in human and environmental exploitation. The work conjures both the languid pleasure of gliding under water and a push-pull between desire and terror, the sensation of drifting towards something whose contours are both familiar and unknown.

Elsewhere, the aftermath of historical narratives sparks new ways of recouping cultural practices and reclaiming collective memory – to powerful effect. Ly Hoàng Ly’s Ashes (2013), the result of the Vietnamese artist’s attempt to simmer cow bones for her daughter while living in Chicago, tenderly evokes the way homeland rituals become phantom limbs in the lives of immigrants, doomed to be replaced but never re-created. Over at QAG’s Watermall, Singaporean artists Donna Ong and Robert Zhao Renhui riff on the ways that the city-state’s lush tropical jungles are filtered through the colonial imagination in My forest is not your garden (2015-18). The installation channels the botanical displays that adorn the lobbies of luxury hotels in big Asian cities. Exoticism internalised and spat out for Western consumption. To me, it also nods at the troubling yen for Empire-era interiors across bars in cities such as Melbourne and Sydney.

Back at GOMA, the Western Arrernte portraitist Vincent Namatjira, the great-grandson of the legendary Arrernte landscape painter Albert Namatjira and part of the Triennial’s largest cohort of First Nations artists, playfully skewers the hypocrisy that underpins the distribution of privilege in Australia. Three of his series from 2016 – Seven Leaders, Prime Ministers and The Richest – pit the artists and lawmen who helm South Australia’s APY communities with Australia’s richest magnates and the country’s past seven leaders. The latter represents an in-joke that references their wilful disregard for Indigenous sovereignty. The work also winks at the self-interest that has seen each leader’s hapless grin become interchangeable during the past few years.

APT has always shown monumental pieces, sometimes in partnership with major Asian institutions. This year’s highlights include For, In Your Tongue, I Can Not Fit (2017-18), a room affixed with microphones that relay fragments of verse from Indian new media pioneer Shilpa Gupta; and an audacious technicolour mural by Iman Raad, an Iranian artist whose practice references Mogul painting and the intricate artwork that adorns buses in South Asia. Along with freewheeling mixed-media paintings by Philippine artist Kawayan De Guia and giant rings of cane or Loloi – created for APT by the Tolai people of New Guinea – Raad’s work reflects the exhibition’s commitment to elevating vernacular art forms alongside the pieces we might see in a gallery. This feels subversive for a Western institution. It’s also a reminder that those of us who grew up outside this context have long suspected that the aesthetics of everyday life may have as much to say as paintings and sculptures when it comes to how we see the world.

So much of the work here is wildly ambitious, aimed at widening our visual horizons and elevating undersung artists. The sensibility is kaleidoscopic. But not everything is executed to equal effect. Chinese artist Qiu Zhijie’s Map of Technological Ethics (2018), an epic painting that adorns the main wall of GOMA’s Long Gallery, draws on calligraphic traditions to map the moral landmines – artificial intelligence, climate change – that define our cultural moment. The brushwork is gorgeous, but the notion of imagined geographies doesn’t feel distinct enough to live up to the work’s aspirations. I tended, instead, to connect most with quieter explorations of the natural world. The exquisite Untitled (giran) (2018), an installation of 2000 winged sculptures made from tools such as emu eggshell spoons, animal bones and feathers, mines the connections between the breath and wind, language and country by Kamilaroi-Wiradjuri artist Jonathan Jones.

Similarly, Women’s Wealth, a first-time project that foregrounds the cultural practices – weaving, pottery and adornment – at the heart of matrilineal communities in Bougainville, is admirable in its intention. It could have delved more deeply into the way in which the erasure of female labour continues to uphold capitalist systems. But the fact this edition of APT plays host to more female than male artists also allows for a range of intriguing and specific perspectives on female agency. There is Taiwanese artist Joyce Ho’s video work Overexposed memory (2015), in which a manicured hand plunges its fingers – ever so slowly – into pulpy hyperreal fruit, revelling in the juices that spurt out, a nod to the porous nature of the female body. Dark Continent (2018) is an image by Latai Taumoepeau featuring the Tongan performance artist covering herself in fake tan – an exploration of white Australia’s fetish for tanned skin and the relationship therein between colour, power and value. It also tries to reframe it. In the end, this may be the best metaphor for APT’s project itself.

Arts Diary

MULTIMEDIA The Ideal Home

Penrith Regional Gallery, NSW, until March 24

MULTIMEDIA HyperPrometheus: The Legacy of Frankenstein

Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, until December 23

CLASSICAL Australian Brandenburg Orchestra: Noël! Noël! Follow Your Star

Melbourne Recital Centre, December 8

City Recital Hall, Sydney, December 12 and 15

VISUAL ART Picasso: The Vollard Suite

Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, until February 3

CLASSICAL Handel Messiah

QPAC Concert Hall, Brisbane, December 8

INSTALLATION Steven Rhall: Defunctionalised Autonomous Objects

The Substation, Melbourne, until December 7

OPERA The Merry Widow

Festival Theatre, Adelaide, until December 6

MUSIC Let There Be Rock

Home of the Arts, Gold Coast, until February 17

Last chance

MUSIC With One Big Voice – With One Voice 10th anniversary concert

Melbourne Town Hall, December 2

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