A mirror into Asia

Pang has found the work personally transformative - and, indeed, artwork might well be one of the most effective conduits for building relationships between the many cultures of the Asia-Pacific, including Australia.

Tram's work is deeply spiritual, founded on Buddhist philosophy and ancient traditions of Chinese calligraphy - aided, no doubt, by Tram being a Saigon-born Australian whose family had come from China's Fujian province.

Yet the work - the NGV's first solo exhibition of a living artist whose work is in the Asian collection - is thoroughly contemporary. It addresses human concerns beyond specific cultures: birth, old age, death, impermanence, delusion.

Likewise another show now at the NGV. A survey of contemporary Chinese photography, Body Language, curated by Isobel Crombie, is a startling, elegant collection of edgy 21st-century works whose underpinnings run deeply into traditional image-making but at the same time address global issues - politics, population, the environment, language, the body.

Pang and Crombie (and the artists whose work they curate) are fortunate because their boss, NGV director Gerard Vaughan, this year announced a concerted drive to build the contemporary and historic Asian art collections. With the February announcement of a $10 million Asian Art Acquisition Fund (with $6 million donated by philanthropist Allan Myers, QC), purchasing will be in concert with a bolder, longer-term plan to build a separate wing for Asian, Oceanic and indigenous art over the railway tracks alongside the Federation Square venue.

It is yet another positive sign of a shifting focus in an increasingly multicultural Melbourne.

Vaughan hopes that a new wing - which he says at this stage is a "big idea" that has attracted much interest from the private sector - would help to focus his efforts to make contemporary and historic Asian art a critical part of NGV coverage.

While its historic Asian art collection has long been considered top-notch internationally, Vaughan is also eager - regardless of a possible new wing - to cater to younger gallery visitors who are increasingly savvy about all sorts of international art.

He has repeatedly said he wants young people in Melbourne to know not only the names of cutting-edge contemporary artists in New York, London and Paris but also the names of those in Shanghai, Mumbai, Tokyo or Bangkok.

Vaughan also sees the importance of catering to Melbourne's enormous emigrant population, especially Asian communities, as well as the city's burgeoning number of temporary Asian students, many of whom live in the CBD.

"People in Melbourne, particularly younger people, who come into the gallery regularly will see global contemporary art - Asian art will be a major part of that," says Vaughan.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales opened new Asian galleries in 2003, and at Canberra's National Gallery of Australia, director Ron Radford announced in mid-2006 that over the next decade the gallery's collecting and exhibition programs would more strongly demonstrate Australia's position within the Asia-Pacific region.

Vaughan says he has long been inspired by the Queensland Art Gallery's renowned Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, launched with canny foresight in 1993.

"An awful lot of young Australians' professional careers will be linked to doing business in Asia," he says.

"It is not just about learning to speak Japanese or Thai or Mandarin or Hindi - it's also having an understanding of the cultures of those countries."

From the NGV, it is a fascinating walk up Swanston Street, whose demographic profile has altered dramatically in the past couple of decades. Now it is a vibrant cultural potpourri, peppered with Chinese, Japanese and Indonesian restaurants and bubble-tea houses, not to mention the crowds of overseas students from India, Malaysia, Singapore and elsewhere who have moved here for a qualification and, perhaps, a whole new life. Melbourne is a welcoming place.

Further up Swanston Street is the Asialink Centre, a non-academic arm of the University of Melbourne and an initiative of the Myer Foundation that promotes understanding and links with Asian countries.

Here, Alison Carroll is director and founder of Asialink's successful arts programs. She is wearing a brightly coloured cheongsam-style jacket when I meet her at her office and she is clearly besotted by all things Asian. No wonder: her long service with Asialink has seen it enable more than 500 residencies in Asian countries for Australian artists, writers, performers and arts administrators since it was founded in 1991.

Carroll speaks clearly, even unsentimentally, about the benefits of cultural engagement with Asia-Pacific countries. While she says the reasons given for such engagement are often about political and economic gains, and "second-track" diplomacy, Carroll argues that the main game is simply the wealth of cultural benefits on offer.

"One of the great things about Asia, to me: thank God it's the unknown," she says. "Asian cultures are different than Australian cultures. Of course. And they're different from each other. Of course. And we, as a liberal democratic society, are closer (to Asia) than any other society like us - physically and mentally - certainly than Europe or America. And that's to our benefit."

Engagement, she says, means more than being nice or social. "More than half the world's population is going to think in slightly different ways from each other and that, to me, is the huge thrill of working with Asia: we learn, we benefit from it. It enriches our understanding of ourselves and the world. Whatever you want culture to do, engaging with a huge dynamic, complicated, rich place - relatively on our doorstep - is a great gift to Australia.

"And the fact that we don't embrace it more easily and more obviously is the reason that it gives me pain and it makes me despair at times - and it's the reason I keep doing what I do. All I can see is that it's to our advantage."

Former prime minister Paul Keating was legendary for his commitment to wanting to build ties with Asia, though his intentions were often misconstrued (sometimes wilfully) by some sectors. In his book Engagement, published in 2000, he reiterates part of a landmark speech he made in 1993, a point he was to make many times: "Put simply, Australia is not, and can never be, an 'Asian nation' any more than we can - or want to be - European or North American or African. We can only be Australian and can only relate to our friends and neighbours as Australian."

Keating's intent was pragmatic: how to maintain possession of the continent. In a speech some years ago to launch the book The History Wars, he asked how Australia could create genuine security for its small population of 20 million - security within Asia, rather than security from Asia: "Where we are other than a client state perennially searching for a strategic guarantor."

One of the answers lies in hands-on cultural interaction and understanding, the crux of work by Australia's big publicly funded art galleries and, vitally, Asialink.

Larissa Hjorth is one of many artists who have been awarded an Asialink residency and her work has been a fascinating example of how such programs actually build relationships and understanding. She was thrown into a three-month stint in Seoul, South Korea, in 2005 in which she had to sort out not only language barriers but cultural hurdles. It worked so well that she has been back twice for more (non-Asialink) residencies on the strength of contacts she made: she does not like the "parachute" concept of conventional tourism.

"An ongoing relationship is important. It is really interesting with the political change with Rudd coming in - I mean, the guy can speak Mandarin. If that's not a sign of commitment to reconfiguring Australia within the region, which is so important, what is?"

Hjorth has been doing her own reconfiguring, via art research about mobile-phone technology - looking at the way we use our phones as women or as men to say something about who we are. The enterprise has produced artworks by Hjorth that reveal both the differences and similarities between genders and between two mobile phone cultures: Melbourne's and Seoul's.

What she discovered was that while Koreans immediately understood the work she made for her exhibitions, Melburnians seeing the art when it was shown here received it differently.

"In Melbourne, people were obsessed with the technology itself, rather than seeing it as a form of symbolism," she says. "Whereas in Korea, the symbolic nature was perfectly clear. The mobile phone there is so highly customised and personalised, it is an extension of their personality - and they are not in denial about that."

Through her artwork and as an educator at RMIT (lecturing in digital art), Hjorth has been able to enlighten other people in Korea and Australia about those sorts of subtleties - a genuine cultural exchange.

"It's much more significant than learning a technique," says Alison Carroll. "It's something about what you do when you cross culture, and you see yourself much more clearly."

That, perhaps, is one of the most enticing things about Asian cultures - those shifting nuances of perception and expression that no doubt led to it first being described by European colonialists in terms, now cliches, such as "mystic", "mysterious" or "inscrutable". What for them was "the Far East" is for us the local neighbourhood.

No surprise, then, that when senior NGV photography curator Isobel Crombie starting conceiving the Body Language contemporary Chinese photography show a few years ago, she found that the work she was seeing had a particularly "unique intensity".

As part of the drive to build up the NGV's contemporary Asian collection, many of the works by the seven artists in Body Language have been purchased. It is a new collecting area for the gallery, but both Crombie and Vaughan describe it as the start of their aspirations to buy in a much more concerted way, with the help of the relatively new Asian Art Supporters Group, made of up benefactors, collectors and other interested parties.

But, more importantly, it is the cross-cultural connections - and the cultural differences - that the Body Language works reveal and provoke that led Crombie to select them. She says that while they are grounded starkly in contemporary events - the repercussions of the Tianamen Square massacre, mass populations in cities such as Shanghai and the burden on the physical environment - it is the language of the human body that is used so frequently to tell a story. And the body is something everyone can relate to, regardless of cultural background. "This was really the start, conceptually, of the show," says Crombie, "the relationship between body and language. China is a country of the communal - if you want to make it (the art) about the individual, you bring it back to the body."

Here are the bodies among the 13 works on the walls of the gallery: Sheng Qi's left hand, with a finger severed, holding photographs of himself, his mother and Mao Zedong. Or artist Zhang Huan's body tattooed with calligraphic script. And Chen Nong's frightening, dark panorama of Chinese citizens standing amid the massive three gorges dam project.

As well, there are running bodies (Chi Peng), bodies resembling the Yellow Mountain ( Lui Wei) and amputees in traditional statuary poses (Wang Qingsong).

It is a foreign world, a tantalising one.

As Mae Anna Pang says, relating to Asian art such as Kim Hoa Tram's calligraphic paintings can simply be about intuition - feeling a way through, via the "inner landscape" she so eloquently describes.

"It is like listening to opera," she reflects, looking at Tram's paintings of the moon.

"Because I don't understand Italian, I can listen to it. I love it because I can feel the emotion, not distracted by the words. In a sense, calligraphy is like that."

Moon in Reflection, the Art of Kim Hoa Tram is on until September 21 and Body Language, Contemporary Chinese Photography, until May 18 at the National Gallery of Victoria. ngv.vic.gov.au