The wild, wild East: the first-ever Guangzhou Triennial and the fourth Shanghai Biennale, in their concurrent runs, caught the energy of the entrepreneurial New China and its art - Report From China

Bad jokes--or, depending on one's temperament, grim omens--could be made of the coincidence of the opening of the Guangzhou Triennial with the (then unknown) outbreak of SARS at the same time and place. Guangzhou, formerly known as Canton, with a population of nearly 10 million, is the capital of southern Guangdong Province. Located near the mouth of the Pearl River, the furiously commercial city has a long history of interaction with the West through sea trade and Silk Route exchange. The roughly 200,000-square-foot Guangdong Museum of Art, sole site and organizing institution of the Triennial, was founded in 1997 for the display of modern and contemporary work.

There is little doubt that Wu intended the show to operate as a kind of contagion for its Chinese audience and foreign visitors alike. Working with museum director Wang Huangsheng and independent curators Feng Boyi and Huang Zhuan on a budget of just under $1 million, he brought together 166 works by 135 individuals and groups, including 14 artists and one team (Guangzhou's own Big-Tailed Elephant) commissioned to make new pieces for the event. The survey was given a tripartite theme--developing a historical consciousness, relating to vanishing traditions, and bridging the local and global--but was experienced on-site by viewers as an assembly of familiar contemporary mediums and issues with a distinctly Chinese inflection.

Most striking in this extremely well-appointed show were the many examples of sculpture and installation, often notable in size as well as esthetic impact. A dialogue between old and new already existed at the multistory museum in the contrast between the realist busts of worthies such as Einstein and Premier Sun Yat-sen ensconced in the inner courtyard and a fountain-sculpture by New York's Barbara Edelstein of three abstracted palm trees, their "trunks" consisting of stacked copper rings and their "leaves" of sprayed water, permanently sited at. the main entrance in 2002. Bringing that stylistic tension into one work for the exhibition, Wang Guangyi crowded a side terrace with dozens of heroic Socialist Realist sculptural figures, each cut off below the waist and covered with yellow millet. Overhead, Gu Dexin's 4-foot-high letters in stainless steel covered with red automotive paint spelled out "In God We Trust," the (already arguably sacrilegious) phrase from U.S. currency distracting attention from the name of the cultural institution itself. Elsewhere on the grounds, large scale installations included Ai Weiwei's towering, 300-light chandelier hung from metal scaffolding; Xu Bing's herd of donkeys painted to resemble zebras (a tactic borrowed from local peasants who sought to attract tourists to their area); and Song Dong's clear-plastic yurt, surrounded by refuse from the unpacking of other works in the Triennial, which housed a "media center" with plastic-bottle "TV cameras" on tripods and photo banners featuring promotional scenes of Guangzhou. Clearly, the dialectic between culture and commerce is much on the minds of Wu's experimental artists these days.