Third Asia-Pacific Triennial
Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
Brisbane’s two-million-odd inhabitants just love a good expo, and with the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, that’s pretty much what they’ve got. Unabashedly populist, the APT3 is for the most part a spectacular pedagogical construct, promoting a therapeutic image of protest (the persecution of East Timorese civilians by Indonesian forces swamped the media throughout the opening events), interracial harmony, and mutually beneficial hybridity. It is unquestionably a palliative that is utopian in aspiration—but with good reason. Having finally crawled out from under the thumb of