Shanghai accelerates: bringing together over 100 Chinese and international artists, the fifth Shanghai Biennale examined methods of visual representation, old and new, in the context of the PRC's most beguiling and progressive city

Art in America, Feb, 2005 by Richard Vine

Everyone is astonished by Shanghai, above all the Chinese themselves. The city's heady mix of futuristic towers and throbbing street life, its current multibillion-dollar building boom, its quest for new money and brand names (with an attendant explosion of pirated labels and counterfeit goods) raise memories of its storied past, especially its decades as a Western-occupied "open port," and visions of an impending reign as Asia's economic showcase for the 21st century. The population of 18 million seems to hurtle itself toward middle-class comfort, still a distant dream for many, while the government and a growing number of emergent tycoons strive to prepare for the World Exposition slated to be held there in 2010.

In all these respects, Shanghai is an ideal setting for the diverse, hyper-energized art produced in China today. Moreover, the city's long-standing (if deeply troubled) status as a door to the West well suits it to the task of placing contemporary Chinese works side by side with international fare. The fall 2004 Shanghai Biennale--the event's fifth installment, though only the third to be global in scope--opened just two days after the city's first Formula One race and one day before the start of an international film conclave. It also coincided with the annual Moon Festival, billed as an auspicious time for reunions, and massive National Day celebrations for the 55th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic.

Of more critical import, the new exhibition came on the heels of a cultural retrenchment seen at the 2003 Beijing Biennale, where authorities limited work to popularly accessible, purportedly salutary painting and sculpture [see A.i.A., June/July '04]. Thus the Shanghai exhibition's nonmoralizing theme, "Techniques of the Visible," and its openness to avant-garde practice in all mediums gave a reassuring signal to local and foreign art-scene observers. Indeed, the mood of the Biennale was perhaps best expressed in artist Xu Zhen's intervention at the clocktower of the event's principal venue. The Shanghai Art Museum occupies the former clubhouse of a colonial-era horse racing track. At the moment the Biennale opened, the 5-story building's clock began to race ahead at 60 times its normal rate--a kinetic emblem of the New China's breakneck rate of development.

At the Biennale

Some 118 artists, 39 of them non-Chinese, were represented in this installment on a budget of $1.3 million, garnered from local, regional and national government sources as well as about 50 corporations and arts-sponsorship organizations. Selections were made by a four-person curatorial team headed by Xu Jiang, a painter serving as president of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou and vice chairman of the Chinese Artists Association. (Xu is also a nephew of Jiang Zemin, China's president until his retirement in late September. Jiang spurred the recent boom in Shanghai--where he was once mayor--with liberalized trade policies and massive public funding.) The other team members were: Argentinean-born art historian Sebastian Lopez, director of the Gates Foundation, Amsterdam, which disseminates information on non-Western visual arts; Zheng Shengtian, independent curator, managing editor of the English-language contemporary Chinese art journal Yishu (published in Taipei) and board member of the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Arts; and Zhang Qing, a Shanghai Art Museum curator who sits on the editorial board of the bimonthly Art China.

Intended to explore links between art, technology and social conditions, the team's choices occupied three major sites--the interior and exterior of the museum proper, plus a string of temporary new-media sheds and a tentlike 330-foot-long corridor featuring large-scale reproductions of historical photos, both located in the adjacent People's Park, where a sleek new museum of photography is currently under construction. An accompanying two-day symposium focused on the rapport between technical capabilities and image consumption, and one work in the museum brought the point home in a personal way. Wang Yonshen's literally titled Darkroom (2004) was a red-lit retreat filled with developing and printing equipment, where visitors were invited to process the artist's negatives or their own. The lack of response from viewers carried its own implicit commentary. Nearly every person attending the show carried a camera--invariably digital.

One of the most striking works in the show was one of the most conservative. Visitors entering the lobby found themselves surrounded by hanging panels bearing huge red-paper cutouts, echoed by smaller versions on the walls of the second-floor balcony. The patterns and images--some autonomous designs, some used for traditional or Revolutionary shadow plays--were accompanied by examples of the 15,000 personal profile sheets collected to identify paper-cutters in Shaanxi Province for "The Great Survey of Paper-cutting in Yanchuan County," part of Lu Jie's Long March project (ongoing since 2002), in which artworks are brought to or created at sites along the 6,000-mile route followed by Mao's tattered army in 1934-35 [see "Front Page," Sept. '02].