After Exoticism - review of art festival, Shanghai, China

Art in America, July, 2001 by Richard Vine

During its first truly international biennial, surrounded by a dozen independent shows, Shanghai confronted head-on the question of national identity vs. global homogeneity.

Picture an environment that is one part Tomorrow Land, one part Chinatown and one part Williamsburg circa 1995, and you begin to get a sense of the cultural context for last fall's Third Shanghai Biennale, the city's first attempt at a truly international survey. (The two previous installments, in 1996 and 1998, were largely showcases for officially approved work from China.) With a population of 13 million, an architectural boom that embraces vertical fantasies straight out of Fritz Lang's Metropolis and roving bands of young artists ready to mount ad hoc shows of a few days' duration in the old port's countless disused warehouses and excess office-tower spaces, Shanghai now seems too diverse, too energetic and (reclaiming its former trading role) too commercial to be held in check much longer by Party bureaucrats or Confucian social strictures. Indeed, the more relevant question--one much discussed by about 40 seminar speakers over two long days at the show's inauguration--is whether its art can remain, in any meaningful sense, "Chinese" at all.

Sited in two buildings--one colonial, one modern--belonging to the sponsoring Shanghai Art Museum, the exhibition brought together 34 Chinese artists and 33 international practitioners from 15 countries. (A bit of legerdemain was employed to beef up the foreign contingent, with expatriate Chinese artists like Huang Yong Ping labeled as representing the countries of their current residence. Unless otherwise noted, the artists named in this article are Chinese.) The Biennale was only part of a much larger arts festival that also included a commercial art fair and the world's largest-ever production of Aida. But the real visual-arts action took place, guerrilla fashion, in a dozen group shows with no official link to the international biennial. These alternative displays, focused exclusively on cutting-edge Chinese work, were mounted at various sites around town, drawing foreign visitors (along with artists from Beijing and elsewhere in China, some 500 of whom reportedly paid their own way to Shanghai) into a dynamic dialogue with the local artistic community.

The theme of the Biennale proper was "Shanghai Spirit: A Special Modernity," and, as organized by a team of four curators headed by the Paris-based Hou Hanru (under the auspices of Shanghai Art Museum director Fang Zengxian), the exhibition aimed to counter "Western-centricism" with a healthy mix of self-realizing "Orientality" and eclectic globalism. After 40 years of isolation, Shanghai, according to Hou's optimistic catalogue essay, has reemerged as the prime site of China's new push toward modernization, offering the entire Asia Pacific world a model of cultural hybridity that, retaining the best of indigenous traditions, assimilates Western goods and concepts without being utterly captive to foreign ways. Yet perhaps the most striking feature of all the Biennale activity was the seamlessness with which "advanced" Chinese work--and, by implication, progressive Chinese thinking--merged into the standard categories of Western art practice. Such openness to cultural fusion is, so to speak, no small matter--given that China, with its nearly 1.3 billion people (4.7 times the U.S. tally), is home to one-fifth of the entire earth's population.

At the Biennale

Mercifully, the official exhibition was not gerrymandered into national sections or pretentiously titled thematic subdivisions. Works seemed instead to be situated according to their formal rapport with the space and each other--a radical curatorial concept that some Western museums might do well to readopt.

Painting was the most contested category, for it was here that the organizers most diligently sought to accommodate, without utterly capitulating to, conservative hometown taste. There is power behind old-school local preference. This was the first Shanghai Biennale in which modes other than painting made up at least half the works. Indeed, installation art--viewed by government authorities as alien and potentially disruptive--could not be shown in official venues until 1996. "Experimental art" is still a much-debated novelty in China--where ancient forms of calligraphy and ink painting remain basic requirements in the art academies, where old-guard traditionalists hold many positions of bureaucratic influence, and where shows are sometimes forcibly closed for displaying work that is overly daring in its sexual or political content. In January 2000, reports emerged in the Western press that entries by at least three artists had been rejected by the Biennale selection committee as too overtly anti-Maoist or "pornographic."

Many foreigners found themselves mildly astonished by pieces like the vertical, scroll-length portrait heads in pale green wash by Lu Fusheng--work that would be dismissed as kitsch in the West but that here represented a tactful concession to nationalist academicism. (In startling contrast were the black, bold--if now overly familiar on the international circuit--gestural portrait heads of the "French" artist Yan Pei-Ming.) Equally insipid were the wispy social scenes of Tian Liming, the gray-black cloud studies of Central Academy professor Jiang Dahai, the tiny calligraphic fields of Li Huasheng and the much too pretty landscapes of Chen Ping and neo-Impressionist Zhang Dongfeng.