Striking voices from the Asia-Pacific region
Photo: Takahiro Iwasaki, Reflection Model (Perfect Bliss), 2010–12 © Takahiro Iwasaki.jpg
Daniel Nelson
Instead of the grimacing Maori warrior or dancer you might expect at Rising Voices: Contemporary Art from Asia, Australia and the Pacific,you are confronted at the exhibition entrance by a pot-bellied figure of a Polynesian security guard.
Modelled on the artist’s brother, it’s a promisingly amusing, cliche-disrupting opening to an exhibition that delivers brilliantly on that initial promise.
The show is full of delights, colours ranging from exquisitely subtle to arrestingly eye-opening, an exuberant diversity of images and materials including featherwork, and a range of topics embracing war and religion, humour and drama, colonisation and independence.
Most of the works by more than 40 artists from 25 countrieshave never before been on show here, drawn from a vast, diverse area inhabited by 60 per centof the world’s population. They are from three decades of an Australian gallery’s triennial of regional contemporary art rather than representing a particular type of art or a single theme, so they can be enjoyed as standalone visual pleasures. Even the pearlescent shell necklaces, baskets, adornments and Hawaiian lei — examples of which most of us have seen — are spectacular, as is the Papua New Guinean barkcloth.
But violence, political dissent and colonial hangovers rear their ugly heads throughout the exhibition: Adeela Suleman’s peaceful Himalayan scenes are painted on metal cleavers; and her knockout plates painted in traditional South Asian miniature style are tilled All Hell Let Loose, 2020-21; Between Two Fires, 2021; and Death Before Defeat, 2020. A John Siune painting is a response to PNG soldiers fighting a rebel secessionist army in the deadliest conflict in Oceania since the end of the Second World War. Svay Ken’s paintings recall the onset and end of the 1975-79 Cambodian genocide.
Peace gets a look in, typified by Naomi Hobson’s photographs highlighting the nurturing side of Aboriginal men. The imagination and skill of indigenous arrtists is a feature of the exhibition.
Every visitor will have their favourites. A popular exhibit is the late Montien Boonma’s monumental curved wall of bells, Lorus Sound, 1992. Buddhism is strongly represented in the Evolving Faith section. The other categories are Re-Visioning History and Enduring Knowledge
Then suddenly, after three rooms, you realise that's it: there’s no more. You’ve seen a lovely variety of objects that represent the interests and tastes of a small group of Antipodean curators. But no matter: it’s a lovely show, well worth seeing and enjoying.
Rising Voices: Contemporary Art from Asia, Australia and the Pacific, more than 40 artists from 25 countries, £17, V&A, Cromwell Road, SW7 2RL until 10 January. Info: Rising Voices