Looking back: Extraordinary Triennial Watermall projects

Thu 17 Oct 2024

Opening on Saturday 30 November 2024, the 11th chapter of the Gallery’s flagship exhibition series — the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art — will feature seventy artists, collectives and projects from more than 30 countries.

We look back at all ten of the previous Triennial’s memorable installations on the Queensland Art Gallery Watermall, dating back to the first Triennial in 1993 — and give you a peek at the current installation by Thai artist Mit Jai Inn, featuring in our 11th Triennial.

The Queensland Art Gallery was designed in harmony with the Brisbane River, and the Watermall runs parallel to the waterway that threads through the city. This grand indoor water feature is a visitor favourite — the perfect backdrop for spectacular contemporary art installations. Do you have a favourite Watermall artwork from the Triennial?

11th Asia Pacific Triennial | 30 November 2024 – 27 April 2025

Now on display for the 11th chapter of the Triennial, Thai artist Jai Inn has carefully orchestrated a series of works to inhabit the Watermall. Drawing on the structures of suspended ‘totems’, a scroll and a tunnel, Jai Inn’s response to the space’s unique architecture explores time and transformation. With these large-scale sculptural works, the artist has created layered views that reveal and conceal to enact portals between worlds.

10th Asia Pacific Triennial | 4 December 2021 – 25 April 2022

Kamruzzaman Shadhin has been at the forefront of developing new possibilities for contemporary art in Bangladesh. Suspended over the Watermall for the tenth Triennial in 2021, The fibrous souls was a collaborative installation with the Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts. Constructed with 70 giant shikas — embroidered, reticulated bags typically made of jute strings that are tied to an exposed beam — the installation explores part of Bengal’s colonial history, inspired by the families that followed the railway tracks after the British East India Company established the Eastern Bengal Railway. Shadhin worked with 13 women along with a handful of local craftspeople to create the pots and connecting jute ropes that laid out a map of the historic railway.

9th Asia Pacific Triennial | 24 November 2018 – 28 April 2019

My forest is not your garden was a collaborative installation by Singaporean artists Donna Ong and Robert Zhao Renhui. A critical take on attitudes towards the natural world of the tropics, this work for the ninth Triennial in 2018 integrated Ong’s evocative arrangements of artificial flora and tropical exotica — titled From the tropics with love — with Zhao’s The Nature Museum, an archival display narrating aspects of Singapore’s natural history, both authentic and fabricated.

8th Asia Pacific Triennial | 21 November 2015 – 10 April 2016

South Korean artist Haegue Yang transforms spaces through light, colour, objects and movement to ensure a constant shift in perception and experience. Installed for the eighth Triennial in 2015, Sol LeWitt Upside Down — Open Modular Cubes (Small), Expanded 958 Times consists of 1012 white Venetian blinds, arranged into grids and suspended from the Watermall ceiling in an inverted and expanded rendition of the ‘open modular cube’ structures, signature works of American conceptual artist Sol LeWitt (1928–2007). Yang has created an arrangement of ready-made household blinds whose overlapping slats may be read as either open or closed, depending on the position of the viewer.

7th Asia Pacific Triennial | 8 December 2012 – 14 April 2013

Ressort by Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping, was one of the signature works of the seventh Triennial in 2012. The gigantic aluminium snake skeleton dominated the Watermall as it spiraled 53 metres from the ceiling to the floor, coming down from the sky with its skull floating just above the water, metaphorically linking sky and water. Part of a series of large-scale sculptures that depict a snake or dragon, a central symbol in Chinese culture, as well as in many other countries around the world, the work plays on different interpretations of the snake, from creation and temptation to wisdom and deception.

6th Asia Pacific Triennial | 5 December 2009 – 5 April 2010

Pakistani artist Ayaz Jokhio’s major architectural project in the Watermall for the sixth Triennial in 2009, entitled a thousand doors and windows too…, took the form of an octagonal building, with each wall containing a mihrab, the niche in a mosque that points toward Mecca. The soaring structure takes its inspiration from a verse by Bhittai, the great Sindhi Sufi poet of the late Mughal era. Jokhio considers the work a piece of ‘conceptual architecture’; a physical translation of Bhittai’s expression of the omnipresence of God.

5th Asia Pacific Triennial | 2 December 2006 – 27 May 2007

Composed of 270 000 crystal pieces, Boomerang — first exhibited in the fifth Triennial in 2006 — is an imposing example of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s strategy of working playfully across cultural contexts. Shaped after the iconic Australian Aboriginal throwing tool, this oversized, intensely lit, waterfall-style chandelier filled the soaring space above the Watermall as if it were in a hotel’s grand foyer. Ai Weiwei has a history of bringing everyday things into art museum settings. He has long acknowledged the influence of early-twentieth-century artist Marcel Duchamp, who famously brought otherwise banal objects into a gallery and declared them art, thereby creating the ‘readymade’. Accordingly, Boomerang takes the chandelier, with its connotations of wealth and opulence, and enlarges it to absurd scale, shaping it into the motif of an object associated with exotic conceptions of Australia.

4th Asia Pacific Triennial | 12 September 2002 – 27 January 2003

Narcissus garden is an incarnation of the reflective work that has held Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s attention for many years. Kusama creates a floating carpet of mirrored spheres, the balls reflecting the building’s architecture back onto itself from an infinite number of angles, creating a world that is both trapped and indefinite. Comprising approximately 2000 mirrored balls, the spectacular and mesmerising installation is shaped by both the currents and the limits of the water.

3th Asia Pacific Triennial | 9 September 1999 – 26 January 2000

The third Triennial in 1999 emphasised artists whose works crossed boundaries between past and future, and between traditional and contemporary life, with many inviting audience interaction. Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang explored the meeting of cultures with his narrow bamboo suspension bridge Bridge Crossing. Spanning the Watermall, the crossing made you consider whether to back up and make way for the other to cross, or consider how to allow each other to pass, eventually enchanting those who successfully made it past the central meeting point with a spritz of fine mist.

2nd Asia Pacific Triennial | 22 September 1996 – 19 January 1997

For the Triennial’s second chapter in 1996, the Watermall featured works by 11 members of the Waka Collective. This group of Aotearoa New Zealand and Polynesian artists was conceptualised around the symbol of the Pacific migratory water vessel, the waka, and were further divided into two groups, one of five men (Chris Booth, Brett Graham, John Pule, Peter Robinson and Ben Webb) and the other of six women (Bronwynne Cornish, Judy Millar, Ani O’Neill, Lisa Reihana, Marie Shannon, and Yuk King Tan). Together, they created one Pacific narrative while reflecting the perceived duality of gender and biculturalism.

1st Asia Pacific Triennial | 17 September 1993 – 5 December 1993

‘The First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ in 1993 focused exclusively on the contemporary art of Asia and the Pacific, bringing together nearly 200 works by 76 artists from 13 countries and territories, informed by concepts of tradition and change in the region. Among the most memorable contributions to the inaugural Triennial, Japanese artist Shigeo Toya’s Woods III became one of the first large-scale installations to enter the Gallery’s Collection. Consisting of 30 squared-off tree trunks elaborately carved with a chainsaw and arranged in an orderly open grid, Woods III is celebrated for its formal beauty. For Toya, the recesses and crevices created by his chainsaw laid bare the internal material qualities of the wood. The act of carving is at once an inscription — evidence of the artist’s intervention through writing or mark‑making — and an excavation, removing accumulated layers to reveal what they might conceal.

Curatorial extracts, research and supplementary material compiled by Elliott Murray, Senior Digital Marketing Officer, QAGOMA

Art that makes you wonder
Asia Pacific Triennial
Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art
30 November 2024 – 27 April 2025