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

Nowhere was this exhibition's contrast with the Beijing Biennale more striking than in its relative neglect of painting. Choosing fewer than 10 painters, the Shanghai curators seemed to consider the medium one of the least interesting, or most exhausted, techniques of the visible. Apart from one postmodern work, a large self-reflexive "paintant" by Fabian Marcaccio (Argentina/U.S.), the selections were formally cautious and historically erratic. Qiu Ting, an exponent of traditional Chinese painting (whose inclusion, one suspects, had more to do with internal politics than with curatorial desire), offered brush-and-ink landscapes that to this Western eye looked like amateurish versions of a once-great genre. Zhang Xiaogang was represented by black-and-white paintings of faces and by the image of a fountain pen lying across an open notebook with partially scratched-out entries--new works that hark back to his reintroduction of personal references in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution.

The naturalistic paintings of Kerim Ragimov (Russia)--featuring Western-brand SUVs or luxury sedans hopelessly mired in the former-Soviet countryside (and, in one woodland scene, clambered over by bears)--are mordant allegories about the difficulties of introducing capitalism to the land of tsars and commissars. Yue Minjun's clever "missing person" pastiches (e.g., David's Death of Murat minus the slain demagogue) are so eerily like the work of both Sophie Matisse and George Deem that only copy-cat tactics or a bizarre case of simultaneous inspiration could account for the similarity. In the show's one refreshing variation on the medium, Yu Hong abutted portrait photos of widely diverse Chinese women to large canvases depicting them in sometimes surprising daily activities. A gray-haired farm lady, for example, is seen working out on an exercise machine incongruously located in her modest home.

Photography, per se, played two widely different roles in the Biennale. In the People's Park corridor, banner-sized enlargements of historical images documented, according to an English wall text, both a century's worth of cultural memory and, more insidiously, the subjugation of Chinese reality to a taxonomic Western gaze. Fortunately, the shots reproduced were more visually engaging than programmatically correct: Edwardian ladies meeting their more sumptuously dressed Chinese counterparts, extended-family group portraits, an Asian girl seated in a studio-backdrop version of a turn-of-the-century motorcar, a caritas scene in which a young mother offers her breasts to a wounded soldier on the battlefield, a rooftop pile of executed bodies from the 1937-38 Nanjing Massacre, a serene Mao in swim trunks relaxing in a wooden chair on a beach.

In counterpoint to these backward-glancing views, the exterior of the museum bore Gu Xiong's modern-day color portrait banners of youngish Shanghai residents, each imprinted in Chinese and English with an upbeat phrase like "I can overcome all difficulties" or "a new beginning for my life and career"--individualist credos slyly echoing old collectivist bromides. Inside the building, photographic works--nearly all of them figurative--ranged from fetishistic close-ups of black sitters by Moroccan-born French artist Touhami Ennadre to Tseng Kwong-Chi's famous 1980s Mao-suited-tourist series to Taiwan-based Hung Tung-Lu's 3-D grid lightboxes that contain "moving" cartoon doll characters (often in Buddha poses) reminiscent of Takashi Murakami figures or bit characters in Mariko Mori's 1996-98 video Pure Land.