Islanded: Adam Art Gallery - By Mark Amery
Courtesy of The Dominion Post - 21st April 2006

New Zealand can get pretty hung up about having a small island mentality. Perhaps it makes us conscious of our contradictions: feeling both isolated and susceptible to foreign influence, of the edge yet of the middle.

You'd hope this might lead us to being interested in testing the edges of perceptions in all sorts of ways, in engaging in the complexities of location. Certainly it's at the heart of Islanded an exhibition of 12 contemporary artists from three island nations: New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan.

Image: Common Cold - Regan Gentry (video still) Islanded: Adam Art Gallery - By Mark Amery
Courtesy of The Dominion Post - 21st April 2006

New Zealand can get pretty hung up about having a small island mentality. Perhaps it makes us conscious of our contradictions: feeling both isolated and susceptible to foreign influence, of the edge yet of the middle.

You'd hope this might lead us to being interested in testing the edges of perceptions in all sorts of ways, in engaging in the complexities of location. Certainly it's at the heart of Islanded an exhibition of 12 contemporary artists from three island nations: New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan.

Image: Common Cold - Regan Gentry (video still)When in video work 'Common Cold' Regan Gentry lets off rolls of toilet paper in a gale on Wellington's South Coast, it's like desperate flare lighting to gain attention beyond the edge of things from passing planes out there. Watching the streamers of paper dance like Len Lye line across the rough hills and a beautiful sunset (and there too was an artist jumping with line from his experience of the dramatic environment and insular culture of island life), I was struck by this action's poignancy. It's about how things of import can come from the most ordinary of things (a sunset, some toilet paper, a common Wellington 'cold'), dependant upon their context.

What's telling is that it's a big, little gesture in the face of emptiness, just like the huge McCahon Gate painting it faces, there in permanent installation at the Adam Art Gallery. As familiar as this cultural position has become to us Gentry returns to it in a way that seems to recognise it remains as true as it is now trite.

In, there are many examples of art born from the context for actions, their cultural and geographical location. Often it is born from these artists (and no doubt the three curators from these three countries) stepping in and out of their expected location, rather than trying to preserve its edges. 'Islandhopping', as Singapore artist Tam Kai Syng calls it.

Take Yao Jui Chung's witty loaded reversals, or "historical offensives" as he calls them, in which he reclaims cultural territory by documenting actions on historically loaded sites. In Long March he traces the Red Army's legendary journey during China's Second Civil War, the Taiwanese artist stopping to be photographed before impressive Chinese monuments standing to attention - but standing on his hands, with the world upside down as if he has literally turned it on its head.

Or take Ani O'Neill's Kikau Broom Project. O'Neill lives in Auckland and Rarotonga (where her mother is from), and for this project she worked with local school children in Rarotonga making the most ordinary of traditional objects the Kikau Broom for exhibition locally, before a few then were selected for exhibition in New Zealand, Taiwan and Singapore.

This project (the first of what she hopes will be many) like Gentry's act makes the most ordinary special but also takes the contemporary art exhibition as opportunity to elevate the humble handwoven broom (endangered due to cheap mass-produced plastic imports) to valuable global commodity, reviving a craft the artist sees in decline in the process.

With O'Neill's characteristic delicious wit, this is art with direct real effect through putting into practise a number of cultural reversals. Here in New Zealand we're left watching the original exhibition in Rarotonga through the screening of news reports, leafing through the documentation of the broom's making, and considering whether to buy what are undeniably beautiful objects, complete with labels that provide a badge of authenticity. After years marrying cultural and artistic practise for the gallery, O'Neill here has found a way to put contemporary art to use out in the community.

Curated jointly by Sophie McIntyre from the Adam Art Gallery, Lee Weng Choy from Singapore's The Substation and Eugene Tan from the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, one of exhibition's strengths I think is that it doesn't try too hard to push an overarching curatorial framework in terms of what these three island nations share. Rather it lets the many threads be gathered by the visitor from the conversations opened up by the artists.

All arguably share an interest in exposing the edges of things, an interest in opening up for reconsideration what has been treated as defined in a nation's history or culture through the jostle of different perspectives. While Richard Killeen's cut outs as always shake up notions of which way culturally is up, Taiwanese video artist Tsui Kuang Yu's absurd action of head butting things with seeming indiscrimination, leads to considering our relationship to the different facets of our environment more seriously.

While the execution is of variable quality, what particularly struck me was, comparatively, how fruitfully engaged through the use of documentary, dramatisation and action the artists from Singapore and Taiwan are in questioning history and cultural identity.

I left wondering whether artists in New Zealand currently are generally quite so directly engaged in our equivalent complexities. Perhaps this explains why 'Islanded' has no contemporary Maori perspective (where is the work in our galleries touching on the Foreshore and Seabed legislation?), and why the curators' decided to feature works by Killeen from 1979 and 2001 respectively. This exhibition suggests we still have plenty of edges to be tested, and conversations to be opened up.

Islanded: Contemporary Art from New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan, Adam Art Gallery, until May 14