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

Eight months after its inauguration, the swank Shanghai Gallery of Art seemed well along toward its goal of marketing top-rank Chinese contemporary artists to today's emerging Chinese collectors. (The People's Republic now has 136,000 "high worth" individuals with net assets of over $1 million each, exclusive of personal real estate. Some have fortunes of multiple hundreds of millions.) "Odyssey(s) 2004," guest-curated by art historian and critic Martina Koppel-Yang, brought together works by l0 internationally recognized artists currently living in Paris. Typical pieces like drum-chairs by the late Chen Zhen and a painterly skull image on canvas by Yan Pei Ming mingled with less familiar offerings such as Shen Yuan's table-sized Blue Freeway (2003-04), a serpentine blue ramp holding toy boats, cars, trucks, etc., handmade from found materials by African children. The space was dominated, however, by three large installations. Yang Jiechang evoked Shanghai's "political lotto" past with a concatenation of throw pillows and folding screens hung with historically charged photographs (glamour portraits from the 1930s, Chinese and Nazi officials sharing a prewar toast, Madam Mao at the height of her power and under arrest). The myriad elements were distributed on a mirrored platform bearing a fallen column and an unfinished portrait of Wang Hongwen, youngest member of the Cultural Revolution's tyrannical Gang of Four. Michael Ming Hong Lin, meanwhile, transformed the gallery's elegant atrium with an undulating red-and-white skateboard ramp put to vigorous use during the show's tony opening. Most impressive of all was Li Jie 2004, Huang Yong Ping's partially erected timber framework for a traditional pavilion designed as part of the city of Zhengzhou's never-realized 900-year anniversary memorial to the famous Song Dynasty architect. With its sawhorses and woodchip litter, the structure, which worked spectacularly in the gallery space, conveyed a compelling sense of China's living, five-millennia-long artistic tradition.

The SGA show's theme of wandering and return, of Chinese art coming once again into its own, brought vividly to mind the question that currently looms over the PRC art scene as a whole. Call it the quality issue. Now that the U.S. has finally caught on to a basic cultural fact recognized by European critics and curators a decade ago (kick-ass contemporary art in mainland China--who knew?), the first reaction has been a kind of omnivorous acceptance. Shows proliferate in Western museums and galleries, more and more foreign visitors make their way to events like the Shanghai Biennale, and the blood lust is up in an increasing number of collectors abroad. Inevitably, then, a second query must arise: given that so much work is now being produced and consumed, just how good is it? And how can supporters, especially outsiders, identify the best?

Definitions of quality vary as widely in China as they do anywhere else. If one debate is clearly between Academy-based traditionalists confronting wild-and-crazy postmodernists, another-particularly evident in Shanghai last fall--is between two "progressive" camps. On the evening of the Shanghai Gallery of Art opening, many visitors shuttled from its fashionable 3 on the Bund locale to the hard-core grunge of 50 Moganshan Lu and then back to the home of the Shanghai art world's Jay Gatsby figure, Handel Lee, co-chairman of the investment group behind 3 on the Bund and other luxury developments. There, lulled by a Cole Porter soundtrack, garden-party guests included artists, curators, business aces, Miss World Australia and the British actor Ralph Fiennes, in town to star in a Merchant Ivory film set in the decadent Shanghai of the 1930s. Clearly, for any leftover idealists, the reemergence of a huge--and widening--gap between China's rich and poor invites a paraphrase of an old Maoist slogan: art for which people?