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04.11.2009 THE 4TH ASIAN ART MUSEUM DIRECTORS FORUM, SEOUL, 21-22 OCTOBER 2009 SINGAPORE - Kwok Kian Chow The Asian Art Museum Directors´ Forum (AAMDF), the only Asian art museum association, began as a meeting of Asian art museum directors held in conjunction with the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Plus Three (China, Japan, Korea) Summit in Beijing in 2006. Art museum directors from Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, China, Japan and Korea gathered at the National Art Museum of China to formalize the AAMDF as a “platform for a comprehensive network, forum and collaborative framework,” and to “systematically discuss the common concerns in the Asian art museum circle.” The subsequent annual meetings were held in Singapore, Tokyo, and most recently the 4th AAMDF at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul. Future meetings are planned for New Delhi, Manila and other Asian cities. Several new art museum projects were announced at the Seoul meeting, notably Seoul (which will be built on a land parcel of 27,000 sq m), Singapore (GFA of 60,000 sq m) and Beijing (GFA of 90,000 sq m) respectively. Singapore’s new National Art Gallery will be housed in the city’s most prominent historic buildings of the former Supreme Court and former City Hall, while the National Art Museum of China’s new building will be built adjacent to the ‘Bird’s Nest,’ the Beijing Olympics Stadium. For the Korean project, which will be a new downtown branch of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, participants were invited to the Samcheong-dong site where selected buildings of the former Defense Security Command already housed the exhibition, Beginning of New Era. In his keynote address, Dr Soonhoon Bae, Director of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, who was formerly Minister of Information and Telecommunication, Republic of Korea, and CEO of Daewoo Electronics, noted that the new museum branch would emphasize new media art, given Korea’s status as an IT powerhouse, and “digital art as a culture-based content industry can only be possible when (they) merge or combine with existing technology and genres.” Another emphasis is to embrace both tradition and the present in the field of visual arts, a theme that was echoed by practically all the presentations in the conference, and this was also convincingly manifested in the “Museum Project” section of the Samcheong-dong show, where the NMCA’s collection was offered to contemporary artists to reinterpret, dialogue or critique through parallel display with their own new works. One cannot help but to wonder about the need for new buildings when the persuasiveness of the biennale-like presentations in Beginning of New Era already successfully utilizes the facilities with many outstanding site-specific works. The new museum´s civic ambition, however, is broader than merely contemporary art, and site-specificity takes on a larger frame of the entire historic and cultural neighbourhood spaces so that the museum becomes an “open public park of culture that attracts historical and cultural elements in the vicinity through its open space to the outside world,” noted Dr Bae. The civic centre concept for the new art museum was also underscored in the presentation by Mr Qian Linxiang of National Art Museum of China. In the Singapore presentation, Kwok Kian Chow noted that the old debate about museums or theme parks was no longer relevant as given the advent of creative, cultural, knowledge and experience industries, and integrated city planning, the museum is very much entrenched as a component of the spectrum of offerings in knowledge delivery, public programmes and civic participation. However, we should not forget the core value of an art museum, that is, it does not simply participate in helping to deliver a generic, universal pool of knowledge, but it positions itself always in a creative tension between global knowledge and local art history, and through the array of history museums, modern art museums and biennales, a dynamic art culture fertile to criticality, creativity and respect for identity and diversity is engendered. The architect for the Singapore project Mr Jean Francois Milou also presented the new architectural plans while Beijing announced that it was about to launch an international architectural competition for the new museum. The conference on the one hand called for an affiliation with the international art discourse, and on the other hand, an Asian frame in the consideration of Asian museology. This dual position was non-contradictory as became apparent in the course of the conference. Presentations were also delivered by Japan Foundation (Ms Furuichi Yasuko, Exhibition Coordinator) and Asialink Arts of University of Melbourne (Ms Alison Carroll, Director), two organizations which have been doing many pan-Asian and Asia-Pacific art projects. Ms Furuichi concluded on the need for “solidarity among artists, curators, critics, museums, institutions in the imagined communities for defining and shaping Asia.” Taiwan, likewise, in the presentation by Mr Huang Tsai-Lang, Director of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, noted that Asia should be “seen as a collective noun for dynamic, suspended, and incomplete cultural consciousness and action;” Asia as a scope, thus, “provides us with new material to challenge and inspect Western art views and offers an enlightening standpoint.” Moderator Kwok Kian Chow noted that ‘Asia’ was that kind of term which needed deconstruction as soon as it was invoked, but the ‘Asia’ frame was a constructive and strategic one in cultural development, given the many shared trajectories of art history coupled with the concurrent need to respect cultural diversity within Asia. Asia’s shared modernity in art may been seen in terms of the relations between traditional aesthetics and new ideas and techniques of modern art imported from the West, and the interplay of modern art expressions with social modernity especially in media and communication (newspaper, film, television, political campaign, etc. being important), and nationalism in the course of the late colonial to post colonial transitions. Indonesia and Thailand, in the presentations by the respective Directors of the National Art Galleries, Mr Tubagus Sukmana and Ms Patchanee Chandrasakha, commented on how even modest projects of bilateral exchange exhibitions comprising modernist artworks from both countries yielded important insights into modernity in Asian art. AAMDF had served as a conduit for such exchanges which are more about art historiography rather than the usual cultural diplomacy. Such is the high discursive productivity of the ‘Asia’ frame. Prof Tatehata Akira, Director of the National Museum of Art, Osaka and the Artistic Director of the Aichi Triennale, Japan’s second major triennale series after Yokohama, discussed the history of ‘modern art museum’ as an institutional typology in Japan (since the 1950s), and concluded that the ‘white box’ model was neither a universal model nor one that should be discarded. Prof Tatehata looked at museums such as the Kanazawa 21st Century Contemporary Art Museum, Benesse Art Site Naoshima and his own National Art Museum, Osaka to discuss the emphasis on architectural design in the Japanese museums. We see the Japanese emphasis on form and materiality in these great designs, and are reminded of the contrasting emphases on social-environmental intervention and material-physical integrity in Western and Asian minimalisms respectively. Again, such different accentuations point to the productivity of the dual position of ‘global’ and ‘Asia’ and their creative tension. In concrete projects and programming terms, the multiplicity of various collaborative channels and models is certainly desired, as demonstrated in India’s presentation on the public-private-partnerships, in particular the exhibition project Edge of Desire that involved the National Gallery of Modern Art (which comprises three museums in New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore) and Asia Society India Centre, an international organization, as presented by Prof Rajeev Lochan, Director of NGMA, who also noted that while “Indian contemporary art had found its due recognition on the international stage the NGMA hoped to facilitate a meaningful engagement between artists and their works, to understand how the art resonates in its own environment.” Dr Hong-hee Kim, Director of Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art called the new Asian art museums “post-museums.” This is based on her thesis that after the era of Neoliberalism came a greater respect for local cultures; and within Asia, the earlier model of museum development as a systemic feature of new mega-cities took on a new introspection during the recent period of global financial crisis, which resulted in a new paradigm that looked at ‘Asia’ as a “geopolitical metaphor of a counter-community (in the prevailing art world order).” Within the compressed timeframe of museological development in Asia the ‘alternative’ art spaces and mainstream museums are synthesized into a shared communal orientation that sought for new expressions that captured the imagination of Asian contemporaneity as well as new interpretations of tradition. It is in the arena of this new public culture that the “post-museum” does not function like a conventional art museum, but a new civic space that will transcend the art world categories of “traditional,” “modern,” and “contemporary” art. As Mr Qian of National Art Museum of China put it, given China’s (and by extension Asia’s) large population, the challenge for museum development “will not be from having too small an audience, but rather too large of one.” Mr Qian referred to the phenomenal pace of art museum development in Asia, and the vast civic and public space within which the art museums as a refreshed institutional model will undertake very key roles. At the business meeting of the AAMDF, there was much enthusiasm shown for the forthcoming ICOM International Committee of Modern Art Museums and Collections (CIMAM) annual meeting in Shanghai in 2010 as AAMDF looks into organizing its next annual meeting consecutively with the timing of the CIMAM conference. - Reported by Kwok Kian Chow, Director of National Art Gallery, Singapore and Board Member of CIMAM