V&A Rising Voices review – can decades of extraordinary international art be packed into three rooms? | | V&A

Ethree years, Queensland Art The gallery travels to Asia, Australia and the Pacific (which is probably why it takes three years) to find the best art being produced across the region. The Asia Pacific Triennial is a huge, incomprehensible undertaking.

Now, the V&A is trying to summarize three decades of art from several continents, many island nations, countless indigenous peoples in… three rooms. Help!

It may be impossible to wrap your noggin around, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a lot of skill in it. The opening room features bark carvings from Papua New Guinea, Australian tribal prints, shark sculptures from the Torres Strait and Tahitian textiles. There are many ideas from many cultures and different purposes in this one room.

Indigenous and First Nations artists are the biggest hits on the show. The paintings of bark cloth, by Lila Warrimou and Pennyrose Sosa, are mysterious, magical, complex geometric writings where every shape has a meaning: relationships, tattoos, wood signs. Tahitian artist Aline Amaru tells the story of her husband’s next generation.

But years of colonialism mean that many of these jobs have a heavy history. Elisabet Kauage paints Melanesian head paintings that are carried in the holds of Captain Cook’s ship. Sri Lankan artist Pala Pothupitiye is mapping history from the colonial era to highlight the injustices his country suffered at the hands of the British. Brenda V Fajardo paints Filipino women who survived and endured colonial rule.

When the burden is not history, it is politics. Many of these artists worked, or still work, under repression. Svay Ken quietly filmed the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia and its murderous hatred of artists and intellectuals. Heri Dono’s adoption of Indonesian culture was created under the leadership of President Suharto. Maryam Ayeen and Abbas Shahsavar portray a family that turns to drugs to cope with the challenges of life in modern Iran.

The exhibition ends with spiritual works from Mongolia and Japan. But almost everywhere you look here, art is escape, rejection, and resistance to violence, injustice, and oppression. These artists, from a wide range of backgrounds, are using art to criticize and mock, or simply to express their own identity and history. It’s fun, and often beautiful.

There are problems with the design of the show, however. I don’t know why you would make this beautiful art and display it in such a sad way. The entire space uses dull, gray and depressing lighting similar to a funeral home. And anyone who thinks it’s a good idea to have one song – a shrill, shrill piano – play it out loud thinking that no one wants to go more than five minutes here.

But the real problem is that this is not enough, everywhere. This show seems like a broken window to the big world. Each part of the show – small Pakistani painting, Australian painting, Papua New Guinean textiles – can, and should be a whole show. I’m sure if it’s three years old, it will work fine. But it’s too big and too unwieldy for a single display of this size. What story is being told by art from Iran, Mongolia, Australia, Japan and beyond? There is no related thread to follow. If you’re going to do it, do it right: go big and celebrate the abundance of diversity, changing global mindsets.