Christian Thompson. Bidjara People, Western Queensland Trinity I (from Polari series), 2014; C-type photograph; 100 x 75 cm. Courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery|Gallery of Modern Art Foundation.

Showing the work of eighty-three artists from more than thirty countries, the triennial is a barometer of artistic and social change, responding to global forces and the shifting cultural, economic, and political environments of the region. The emphasis of APT 8 is on the performative body: in live actions, immersive installations, video, sculpture, and—a wonderful surprise—the dynamic resurgence of figurative painting. The exhibition reveals boundaries of geography, history, gender, religion, and art practice in constant, fluid motion. Curator Aaron Seeto says, “We understand that while Asia and the Pacific represent quite specific geographies, these terms are also convenient constructions. Within these territories we see great diversity, histories, and attitudes to current global issues.”

The work of indigenous Australian artists speaks of strength and survival in the face of historical oppression and dispossession, and Christian Thompson’s self-portraits are a powerful act of reclamation. Thompson reframes 19th-century ethnographic photographs as symbols of mourning, interwoven with influences from pop culture, cinema, and theater. Gunybi Ganambarr’s distorted burial poles, painted with the intricate cross-hatching of Arnhem Land, are juxtaposed with works in which he used an angle grinder to inscribe traditional patterns into sheets of metal from old water tanks and discarded conveyor belts from the bauxite mines.

Justin Shoulder and Bhenji Ra, in collaboration with Jai Jai Ex Nilalang. Balud, 2015; single-channel 16:9 HD digital video, color, sound. Courtesy of the Artists. Photo: Gregory Lorenzutti.

Queer and transnational identities are taken into surprising new territory in Ming Wong’s appropriations of iconic Australian films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, and in the beautiful and kitsch Filipino folk-tale-inspired performances of mermaids and spirits by Justin Shoulder and Bhenji Ra. Brook Andrews’s re-hang of colonial paintings onto walls covered with the dramatic chevron designs that once adorned the bodies of his Wiradjuri people underline the curatorial thesis of questioning accepted historical, geographic, and political discourses.

Transgender Samoan artist Shigeyuki (Yuki) Kihara is represented by a series of black-and-white photographs that satirically reference Gauguin’s fetishization of the Polynesian body as the Other. Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? (2013) depicts the artist with her back to the camera, dressed in 19th-century mourning clothes at sites of Samoa’s colonial history, such as the German Monument, Molinu’u. In the single-channel video Siva in Motion (2012) she performs a graceful taualuga dance, reenacting the tsunami that swept across Samoa in 2009. Her fluid hand gestures are intended to recall the early photographic experiments of Étienne-Jules Marey.

Baatarzorig Batjargal. Nomads, 2014; synthetic polymer paint on canvas; 100 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art Foundation.

Works by three Mongolian painters are a revelation. Mongol zurag painting, suppressed during years of compulsory Soviet socialist realism, reemerged with perestroika. These immensely detailed paintings emerge from a long tradition of figuration, a synthesis of Tibetan tangka, Chinese guohua, and Liao Dynasty equestrian art. Add a dash of political pop and contemporary satire, and the resulting works demonstrate extraordinary technical accomplishment, great beauty, and keen social observation. Nomin Bold’s Tomorrow (2014), painted on a surface of old scripture sheets, at first appears to be a traditional devotional Buddhist image, until you see that the background is a teeming city of grid-like streets, skyscrapers, and power lines. From the tradition of religious tangka, too, the paintings of Tibetan exile Tsherin Sherpa hang on dark scrolls that are suspended from poles featuring gold hands and feet in each corner; they are psychedelic in their swirling intensity of crimson, gold, viridian, and ultramarine.

From the Kyrgyz Republic, a five-channel video installation by Guknara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev, A New Silk Road: Algorithm of Survival and Hope (2006), embodies the spirit of many artists selected for this APT. The five screens show a lonely road winding through a bleak landscape. Along the trade route that once saw camel trains bearing silks and spices, now a convoy of battered trucks hauls scrap metal to China from the Soviet Union and Central Asia. In the opposite direction, shiny new Chinese road trains carry manufactured goods bound for European markets. A man sings a traditional Kyrgyz ballad, an ode to his homeland. A young boy on horseback races a truck along the road. The video focuses on the inhabitants of the farms and Kyrgyz towns en route, who reveal entrepreneurial agility and resilience in their dealings with the truck drivers. Eking out a precarious living in an unforgiving but beautiful place, they represent the contradictions and difficulties faced by all but the richest of the world’s population in a time of uncertainty.

At a time of unprecedented human movement across the globe, the focus on the body is timely. Curator Aaron Seeto says, “Artists are using the body through figuration and performance to express complex ideas and positions with respect to the environment, labor politics, migration, politics and history, sexual expression, and liberation to name just a few. […] These are responses to very specific politics and cultural trajectories, and so it is never a generic body that is being presented.” At a historic moment when human bodies are crammed into boats, trucks, and trains, making dangerous journeys, traversing oceans and crossing borders, seeking safety, this exhibition reveals the resilience of cultures, peoples, and individuals living in a time of doubt.

The 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art is on view at the Queensland Art Gallery and the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art through April 10, 2016.

An-My Le, Vietnam/Usa B. 1960, 'Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam' (from 'Events Ashore' series) 2010 Archival inkjet pigment print ed. 2/5, 101.6 x 143.5cm, collection Queensland Art Gallery

Twenty years ago in the Asia Pacific Triennial’s first catalogue Caroline Turner wrote, “Euro-Americentric perspectives are no longer valid as a formula for evaluating the art of this region”. Today this seems obvious – but to a significant degree this is due to the previous 6 exhibitions which introduced audiences to the richness of contemporary art practices in the region. It was through the APT that Australian audiences saw the work of Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, Lee Mingwei, Yayoi Kusama, Cai Guo-Qiang and Gongkar Gyatso. It has facilitated dialogue, debate and scholarship, providing a space for multiple voices and competing ideas. It has exhibited works by over 500 artists from 30 countries, over time expanding its geographical focus, now encompassing works from Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia; from South Asia, the Middle East and Turkey; from West Asia and the former Soviet Union.

The biggest surprise (and biggest disappointment) is the inexplicable absence of Chinese artists. With the notable exceptions of Huang Yong Ping’s sinuous snake skeleton, ‘Ressort’, arching its way through the water mall; an installation of tiny paintings from Zhou Tihai (definitely in the ‘too clever by half’ category); some Chinese animations; and ‘MadeIn’ Company’s cartoonish tropical island of plastic shrubbery, there are very few works from the country which has dominated international biennales and art fairs for the last decade.

Made In Company, 'Spread 201009103', nylon, plywood, plaster, acrylic, paint, spray paint, palm fibre, plastic, 500 x 400 x 400 cm (installed, approx) image courtesy the artists

Instead, the lower level of the gallery is dominated by the largest representation to date of work from Papua New Guinea, including masks and structures from the Sepik River. They are intended to represent one of the exhibition’s stated themes: how the built environment influences the way that people engage with their surroundings, with an emphasis on ephemeral structures and collaborative works. Whether powerful ritual objects such as these can easily be made to fit into such a curatorial conceit is debatable. QAGOMA Acting Director Suhanya Raffel says the exhibition is about “registering difference, considering change, mapping regeneration” –  the politics of identity and geography in a rapidly changing world. This latter idea is more easily identified, and many works reflect on colonialism, dispossession and power relationships.

Michael Cook poses indigenous models in the ornate historical clothing of Britain, France, the Netherlands and Spain (the four European nations who sent ships to Australia both before and during the early period of colonisation) against evocative sepia backgrounds of waves breaking on the shore. They are magically dreamlike and politically potent, a restaging of the past which asks some difficult questions of white Australia.

Michael Cook, Australia, b.1968, Bidjara People Queensland, 'Civilised #13', Inkjet print on paper, ed. 5/8, 100 x 87.5 cm, Purchased 2012 Queensland Art Gallery, collection Queensland Art Gallery

Similarly Greg Samu’s dramatic tableaux recontextualise art historical images to address religious and political colonisation of Pacific peoples. In ‘Auto-portrait with 12 Disciples’ the artist inserts himself as Christ into da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’, surrounded by Kanak tribe members from Noumea. ‘Battle of the Noble Savage’ parodies history painting. Tattooed Maori warriors are posed against a native forest backdrop, the rider on a rearing horse recalling heroic European equestrian images from Uccello’s Battle of San Romano to David’s Napoleon, an acknowledgement of the parallel history of the Maori nation. Backlit in a darkened space, with a Maori ‘karakia’, a prayer to the ancestors, as soundscape, this is powerful stuff.

Greg Samu, New Zealand/Australia b. 1971. 'Untitled (from the 'Battle for the Noble Savage' series), (detail) 2007, reprinted 2012, digital print on PVC canvas, light box, ed. of 10, 150 x 250 cm, copyright Musee du Quai Branly, Paris, Photograph: Greg Samu, image courtesy the artist and Galerie Metropolis, Paris

Graham Fletcher paints cool, parodic images of high modernist domestic interiors in his ‘Lounge Room Tribalism’ series. Oceanic masks and carvings are “domesticated within private dwellings” in a deliberate reference to Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1892 ‘The Beach of Falesa’. Is this what makes me uneasy about Oceanic and New Guinea artefacts within the modern museum context? They appear somehow stripped of their original power, removed from the purpose for which they were made. Lorraine Connelly-Northey uses corrugated iron, old mattress springs and rusted fencing wire to make enormous ‘narbongs’, the string bags woven by Waradjiri women. Witty reminders of the role of women in traditional cultures, they offset the ‘once were warriors’ emphasis of other works.

Lorraine Connelly-Northey Australia b. 1962, Waradgerie (Wiradjuri) people NSW/Vic 'Narbong' (stringbag) 2012, found materials, 10 pieces, dimensions variable (installed) commissioned for APT 7, image courtesy the artist

Parastou Forouhar’s ‘Written Room’, a white space in which walls and floor are covered with deliberately unintelligible and fragmented Farsi script is a revelation. Another highlight is Almigul Menlibayeva’s dreamlike video installation,  shot at Kurchatou, Kazakhstan, the site of hundreds of nuclear tests – “ the empirical heart of Soviet science” as one Russian researcher recalls sadly. The bleak landscape with its ruined buildings provides a dystopian background for her real and imagined narratives. Works from India, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam are also raw, powerful and exciting. Despite reservations about curatorial inclusions and exclusions there is much to enjoy: the shattering of preconceptions and the blurring of geopolitical boundaries is exciting.

Almigul Menlibayeva, Kazakhstan/Germany b. 1969, 'Kurchatov 22' (Still), 2012, 5 Channel HD Video Projection, 26 minutes, 5.1 surround sound, colour, English subtitles, courtesy the artist and Priska C Juschka Fine Art New York