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

Richard Vine

China today, with its bustling commercial districts and its antic, independent young artists, must be a tough place for the October crowd to visit. For nowhere is there a clearer demonstration of the deep kinship between progressive art and emergent capitalism, long considered mortal adversaries by Western avant-garde ideologues. Despite reactionary setbacks like the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident, China's increasingly business-friendly policies, initiated in the late '70s by Deng Xiaoping, have been galvanizing. Currently only 25 percent of the nation's GDP is produced by state-owned firms. The populace of 1.3 billion has recently experienced considerable political liberalization, a new receptivity to the West, and an economic growth of 8-10 percent each year for two decades. Government leaders now aim to increase the current $1-trillion economy four-fold over the next 20 years. Under the country's one-party system, many political frustrations remain. But the social effect of this new consumerism, quickly reflected in art and architecture, has been to render the land of Confucius and Mao unrecognizable to anyone who knew it even 10 years ago.

Last winter, two major art roundups manifested these startling changes in complementary ways. The First Guangzhou Triennial, organized by Chinese-born University of Chicago scholar Wu Hung, surveyed experimental art produced in China during the years 1990-2000. Meanwhile, the 2002 Shanghai Biennale--under a curatorial team headed by Fan Di'an, vice director of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and Alanna Heiss, director of the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York--presented a Chinese-heavy overview of the global scene (31 participants out of 67 were from the People's Republic), with special emphasis on new architecture and urban planning. The two shows--one superbly selected to confirm a neat historical thesis, the other a hodge-podge of conflicting curatorial agendas reflecting the complexity of 21st-century social and artistic transformation--gave viewers, especially foreign visitors, a widely inclusive glimpse of the ferment that makes Chinese art so vital right now, for everyone.

Gonzo in Guangzhou

The developmental scenario informing "Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art, 1990-2000," and made explicit in Wu's catalogue essays, followed a classic avant-garde trajectory. Progressive art, which emerged in the late 1970s (i.e., with the demise of Man and the end of the Cultural Revolution), was at first a collective affair, generated by groups of impoverished artists living together on the margins of major cities. Over the course of the 1980s, independent artists and curators--most of them traditionally trained in the nation's rigorous art academies--conducted a campaign of self-conscious modernization. This effort was roughly equivalent, in the eyes of supporters and detractors alike, to an embrace of contemporary Western forms, mediums and theories. A much-repeated process that Wu calls yun dong (mass movement), since it entails a Cultural Revolution-style combination of agenda, propaganda and organization (but also bears an eerie resemblance to a Western marketing blitz), produced a flurry of short-lived movements: Cynical Realism, New Wave Art '85 (with some 80 groups), Gaudy Art, Chinese Pop, etc. By the end of the decade, semi-formal "artists' villages" were being established, most famously in and around Beijing. The culmination of this first period of official tolerance (if not approval) was a 1989 exhibition at the National Art Gallery in Beijing--"China/Avant-Garde," organized by editor Gao Minglu (who subsequently curated the epochal 1998 show "Inside Out: New Chinese Art" in the U.S. (see A.i.A., Mar. '99]). In a classic instance of official response to radical provocation, the show was closed early, after live ammunition was fired during a performance piece.

Following the Tiananmen Square crackdown, experimental Chinese art became increasingly individual and increasingly international, as many important figures (Huang Yong Ping, Chen Zhen, Cat Guo-Qiang, Wenda Gu, Xu Bing) went into self-imposed exile abroad and began to show worldwide. Meanwhlie, within China, a few commercial galleries started selling avant-garde work--but almost exclusively to foreigners resident in the country or to dealers and collectors overseas. (Such material remains alien and mysterious to the general public in China, while newly rich collectors tend to seek status-enhancing traditional works or famous-name high modernist art from the West.) Wu detects a shift toward greater self-examination and social critique in the mid-'90s. Certainly by the time of the third Shanghai Biennale in 2000, Western observers could see that unofficial shows and personal outrageousness for example, working with corpses and body parts, or claiming to have cannibalized a human fetus--had become an established gambit for attaining artistic celebrity [see A.i.A., July '01]. The fact that, in fall 2002, all private shows mounted in Shanghai at the time of the Biennale had to be vetted in advance by government authorities indicates the kind of political monitoring that today's Chinese artists still must finesse. Indeed, two days before the opening of the Guangzhou Triennial, Bat Project 2, a major outdoor installation by Huang Yong Ping, was removed by order of the national ministry of foreign affairs, purportedly out of concern that the work a full-scale duplication of the left wing and front fuselage of an American spy plane that collided with a Chinese fighter in 2001--would offend foreign sensibilities [see "Artworld," Jan. '03]. Unpredictability, in both policy and enforcement, is viewed by some art-world regulars as a deliberate governmental ploy--one meant to induce creative hesitancy, and thus a chilling effect. In a way, then, the work shown at the Triennial was a sample of what Chinese artists have dared to make--and been able to get away with for shorter or longer periods--over the past decade.

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.

Inside the museum, attention was immediately captured by Xu Bing's hill-height rubbing from the Great Wall, displayed as a loosely hung mural in the main entrance lobby and, in a first-floor gallery, by his well-known pseudo-calligraphy classroom, here continuously crowded and busy. (Despite the general-survey format of the show, Wu had no compunction about granting repeated exposure and large amounts of space to those artists he considers most seminal.) Cai Guo-Qiang, who received extravagant treatment in the 2000 Shanghai Biennale, presented a kind of slide-summary of his many worldwide projects, plus a scroll-like painting and a video of a massive fireworks piece, To Extend the Great Wall 10,000 Meters: Project for the Aliens No. 10. Up the middle of the central stairwell rose Gu Dexin's 65 1/2-foot steel cage filled with burnt plastic. Ai Weiwei, too, made another appearance, with Ming-style furniture cut and rejoined into improbable, nonutilitarian sculptures--a material argument, it seems, for the expendability of tradition and the "uselessness" of true art.

Several works, however, represented a continuing engagement with the past. Fu Zhongwang's Earth Door is a floor piece in which a 20-by-20-foot plane of unfinished wood, assembled with old-fashioned mortise and tenon joints and bearing 24 traditional wooden door bolts, is surrounded by soil and broken stone. Impermanence, Zhu Jiushi's house of bamboo and rice paper (each of the hundreds of sheets scrunched and resmoothed by hand), recalls a venerable Eastern esteem for handicraft, meditation and spiritually harmonious environments. Standing halfway between such respectfulness and the flat-out irreverence of many other pieces on display were mordant works such as Wang Jin's My Teeth (a group of tooth-and-jaw forms in fired clay up to 4 1/2 feet high) and Lin Yilin's stunning assemblage in which a stone dragon, perhaps emblematic of the New China, has crashed halfway through a masonry wall topped by a tiny model of the Empire State Building.

Poetic ambiguity is the defining trait of Chen Yanyin's large, elegant wooden boxes radiating ominous wooden spikes and Yin Xiuzhen's suitcases poignantly layered with her outgrown little-girl clothes. But many other works reveled in a kind of "this is the present, get used to it" attitude. Zhang Wang's 15 stiffened Mao suits, evocative of missing bodies, lay in coffinlike wooden crates scheduled to be buried at the close of the Triennial. Huang Yihan's We Are the Kids Who Never Grow Up is a phalanx of plastic three-quarter-size figures with toy train and car tracks, and sometimes a column of air supporting a Ping-Pong ball, where their brains ought to be. Wu Shanzhuan satirized the hassles of daily life in China's rapidly--though not rapidly enough, it seems--modernizing urban environment, with fluorescent tubes covered by multi colored plastic bearing the titular phrase in Chinese: Water Pipes Will Be Installed This Afternoon.

As presented in the Triennial, experimental Chinese painting and drawing did not, to this foreign eye, offer great excitement over the past decade. Maybe one has to be thoroughly steeped in the conventions of ink painting or the mendacities of Socialist Realism to appreciate what was once so striking about Zhang Xiaogang's "Big Family" series, combining naturalistic likenesses with Pop-like flatness and occasional splotches of arbitrary color, or the intentional brutishness of Fang Lijun's equally famous--and more defiant--cartoonish portraits of know-nothing men with shaved heads.

Nevertheless, some works made a telling impression. Remarkable for their physical presence, Hu Youben's monumental, low-relief black paintings on silk and wrinkled paper exude sheer abstract beauty. Chen Shaofeng's series "Dialogue with the Peasants of Tiangongsi Village" offers the novelty of a matchup between his portraits of the villagers and their crude but wonderfully varied rendering of him. A more intellectual exercise, Qiu Zhijie's five-year project, represented by its finished product and a work-in-progress video, consists of 1,000 superimposed transcriptions of the classic calligraphic text known as the Orchard Pavilion Preface. Memorable for both its monochrome vividness and its political mockery is Zhang Hongfu's Untitled," Big Red Door, consisting of twin panels reminiscent of a Forbidden City gate "studded" with extruded metal bolts that look remarkably like an array of semi-erect penises.

For anyone even slightly familiar with the contemporary photography scene in China [see A.i.A., Apr. '03], the Triennial was largely a matter or' usual suspects and greatest hits. (Though some recent stars, notably Wang Qingsong and the husband-and-wife team of Shao Yinong and Mu Chen were conspicuous by their absence.) Standbys included panoramic group portraits of workers and soldiers by Zhuang Hui; a predictably disturbing mental-hospital sequence by Yuan Dongping; rephotographed streetscene cutouts by Chen Shaoxiong; Zhao Bandi's wry banners of himself and the doll character Little Panda; examples from Song Yongping's heart-and-gut-wrenching documentary study of decrepitude, "My Parents"; and Rung Rong's "Ruin" series showing glamour photos stuck on wrecked buildings. Also familiar were Hai Bo's decades-later reunion shots featuring aged (and sometimes missing) sitters, scenes from Lin Zheng's award winning new-meets-old series "The Chinese," Yang Fudong's battered-Yuppie tableaux titled individually and collectively "The First Intellectual" and Lu Chunshen's set of six images of a man standing in a progressively widening pool of water.

Photography was largely at the service of performance in works like Song Dong's 36-image grid of shots of himself sitting in the Lhasa River in Tibet, repeatedly striking it with a seal inscribed with the Chinese character for "water." Similarly, Wang Wei's 1/30 Second Under Water is composed of eight large close-ups of a man's submerged face, laid out as a walkway in low-tying lightboxes. Zheng Lianjie's image group Binding Lost Souls: Huge Explosion, meanwhile, showed the results of a 17 day project in which the artist and 11 assistants hauled 10,000 broken building blocks to the top of the Great Wall and gift-tied each with a red strip of cloth.

Among the more imaginative uses of the medium were several large-scale installations. Flu Jieming created a labyrinth of images from TV sets playing Shanghai's 25 channels, photographed every five minutes over a 24-hour period. Lin Tianmiao's Plait/Braid is a 13-foot-high digital portrait head on fabric, interwoven with threads that trail away behind into a massive braid snaking across the floor to a video monitor, where hands are seen braiding the threads. In Wang Youshen's Washing: The Mass Grave at Datong in 1941, a famous news photo of skulls has been transferred to plastic that is constantly rinsed in a shower-bath. And the almost unbearable Shin Brace, by Feng Feng, engulfs the viewer with wall-sized shots of a healing, once-mangled leg now penetrated by the holding pins of a gruesome but medically beneficial steel rod.

A few video installations--such as individual, memory-based works by Xing Danwen and Weng Fen, or Yang Zhenzhong's straight-to-the-camera testimonial compilation I Will Die--conveyed a poignant nostalgia. More representative of the many video works shown in a gallery devoted entirely to monitors, however, was Hu Jieming's satiric New Journey to the West, an update of the classic tale, in which a period-dressed lord, his retainer and a monkey set off on an adventurous sojourn to modern-day Canada. The darker aspects of new media were explored in installations such as Chen Shaoxiong's Hero, offering a behind-the-gun point of view as the protagonist moves through stores, pedestrian passageways and subway cars "shooting" everyone in sight with a toy pistol. Feng Mengbo, once known in the West for his touching family-recollection CD-ROM slide shows, here presented an immense interactive--and sickeningly violent--video game in which a commando figure blasts noisily away at adversaries, each hit yielding graphic gore, in response to the viewer's movements on a dance pad.

In a much more conciliatory spirit, Wenda Gu staged an elaborate marriage-ceremony performance, complete with 20 white limousines, in a street just outside the museum on opening night. The artist played a tuxedoed Chinese groom wedding a Caucasian bride, their union capped when her writing of sentiments in English, using a broom-size brush, overlapped and merged with his simultaneous avowals in Chinese characters.

Beyond the confines of the Triennial, visitors could find other venues and shows of considerable interest. Vitamin Creative Space, a new commercial gallery directed by Zhang Wei, occupies a chicly designed space in an unprepossessing high-rise near an open market. On view wore works by stalwarts Chen Shaoxiong, Xing Danwen and Hong Hao, along with a participatory installation involving an air mattress and overhead "walking hands" video by 8hi Yong. Chinese-American photographer Tony Law showed large-format color portraits and wall-text interviews of U.S. street people dressed, for their shots, in high-end sportswear and expensive sneakers.

But even more in the spirit of continuing experimental art was the nonofficial, artist-organized show "To Each His Own," held in a distressed warehouse space in the middle of an open-market hubbub. Dominated by elaborately staged figurative photos by Wang Qingsong, the show contained works from 35 other artists, including paintings by Suo Tan and Ye Heng Gut, and photos by Li Hai Bing, Chen Guang and Sun Guojuan. Especially intriguing were Shu Jie's images featuring digital substitution of smeary puppet faces for those of suburban family-group sitters, while the general tenor of the show was captured by documentary shots from Hua Jiming's literally titled series "Crawling on the Great Wall" as well as Shag Yinong's hand-dyed sex scenes and studies of a group of nude young women shopping at outdoor" stalls. In a nice commentary on both China's governmental caution and its rampant Westernized consumerism, principal organizer Liu Jin mounted a photograph banned from last September's international photo festival in Pingyao. A staged image, adapted from an infamous Vietnam War news photo, it shows a young woman "prisoner" being shot in the head on a street in Beijing's main downtown shopping district, with a McDonald's logo glowing above her hi the distance.

Shanghai, Baby

One of the more intriguing graphic works at the Guangzhou Triennial was Zhou Tiehai and Zhao Lin's collage featuring a cut up image of an old-style courtesan, annotated with handwritten Chinese and English versions of the very pertinent question "Shanghai: Asia's top city of the future?" Certainly this idea was much in the air during the Third Shanghai Biennale in 2000--for example, as the event's three-day seminar topic and as the theme of chief curator Hou Hanru's catalogue essay--and it clearly underlay the thematic emphasis on urbanism at the fourth installment in 200'2. And little wonder The city, with its long history of trade, its openness to the West and its legendary decadence, is now a mad welter of sprawling commercial development and high-rise fantasies, home to breakneck consumption and driving competitiveness. The spirit of its younger educated citizens--artists included--is suggested by "Coco," the heroine of Wet Hut's 1999 sex-and-drugs parable Shanghai Baby (the lusty Coco's drug-addicted Chinese boyfriend is impotent, her voracious lover is a philandering German): "Every morning when I open my eyes I wonder what I can do to make myself famous. It's become my ambition, almost my raison d'etre, to burst upon the city like fireworks." (One cannot help but wonder if Wet witnessed Cai Guo-Qiang's pyrotechnic display over Shanghai for the 2001 Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation conference [see A.i.A., May '02], or if Cat had earlier read her notorious novel.)

Chinese officialdom, needless to say, slaws deep ambivalence about Shanghai and its Biennale, The city's market fervor is vital to the nation's economy, but its cosmopolitanism--especially as expressed in the recurrent display of global art--can be an embarrassment both to traditionalists and to Party functionaries, The 2000 Biennale, the first to be truly international in scope, garnered considerable press attention--though much of it focused on unofficial satellite shows and on the Biennale's own most discomfiting elements. This time around, guerrilla shows were kept outside the city limits, and the slightly less than $1 million budget for the sanctioned exhibition at the Shanghai Art Museum was made possible only by the diplomacy of cultural impresario Weug Ling and the direct intervention of a group of private investors currently developing a site on the Bund that is slated to contain a 13,000-square-foot commercial art gallery, out lets for Western designers like Giorgio Armani, and branches of the New York luxury restaurants Jean Georges and Nobu.

The yes-an attitude of authorities was reflected in the Bieanale's organizational structure, with a trio of cultural officials overseeing the Chinese selections, while international artists were chosen by Alanna Heiss, along with Klaus Biesenbach, artistic director of Kunst-Werke Berlin and chief curator at P.S. 1, and Yuko Hasegawa, curator of the 2001 Istanbul Biennial and chief curator at the Contemporary Art Museum in Kanazawa, Japan. Altogether, the six curators assembled some 300 works from 20 countries, with an emphasis on architectural drawings and models by participants like Holland's MVRDV group, in keeping with the "Urban Creation" theme discussed in Weng Ling's accompanying symposium.

Some of the international entries, while no doubt still fresh for the Shanghai public, were overfamiliar to a New York eye: crowd scene photographs by Andreas Gursky, sparkly panda paintings and a video on the creatures' vanishing habitat by Rob Pruitt, the seven tent "Trasportable City" by Los Carpinteros, Haluk Akakce's Measure of All Things video, a room installation by Pipilotti Rist, and Tadashi Kawamata's bamboo scaffolding on the museum's exterior. Less widely shown, Jude Tallichet's human-body-size models of famous buildings in sandblasted Plexiglas perfectly matched the Biennale's focus.

Several foreign selections were notable for their formal wit. Japan's Kosuke Tsumura offered voluminous rainwear that could be adapted to cover both a person and surrounding objects, as well as skateboards covered in unlikely materials--fur, AstroTurf, tatami matting, etc. Navin Rawanchaikul, from Thailand, did a taxi-themed installation incorporating suspended cab roofs, traffic signs, and black wicker furniture with throw pillows patterned after carhop signals. The Japanese group Atelier Bow-Wow put together an open-slat "Furnicycle" series that includes one bicycle fitted with a rolling chaise longue and another with a tea-service ensemble. The drollery of a clear tunnel structure both shaped like a plastic bottle and made mostly of plastic bottles, by Japan's Shigeru Ban, was spoiled only by the work's tendency to collapse from time to time.

Per sheer simplicity and effectiveness of means it would be hard to beat Argentinean artist Leandro Erlich's Ballet Studio, a room with stretching bars and mirrored walls that, at the comers, created multiple reflections of performers in traditional Chinese attire practicing dance passages or tai-chi movements. Also notable for its elegance was Kyoto, My Love! by Hong Kong's Alan Chan, composed of leaning rectilinear aluminum rods covered with collaged close-up photos of a dense stand of bamboo. Among the most stylized works seeking to be utterly modern were a multiple wave furniture model in high-density foam by the U.S. artist and architect Greg Lynn and a model for a private residence designed, in the spirit of Zaha Hadid, by Austria's Gunther Domenig.

Making Eastern motifs accesible to Western viewers, Zhang Jian-Jun, who divides his time between New York and his native Shanghai, installed Sumi-Ink Garden of Re-Creation a gallery-filling environment. Its five 6 to 9 foot high blocks of sumi ink (some mixed with resin and fiberglass) were cast from scholars' rocks and constantly modified by the wear of trickling water. Set on old bricks from a demolished house, the contemplative objects stood surrounded by an open-frame wooden fence suggesting various views, and matched by five Black Dragon fish in a tank on the floor. In a similar vein, China's Yang Qirui placed on the museum lawn a towering sculpture in the titular form of a Shanghai Button, with four holes awaiting gigantic thread. Miao Xiaochun presented his life-size statue of an ancient Chinese scholar alongside lightbox photos showing the calm, contemplative character in today's hectic urban settings. Liu Qinghe, meanwhile, employs traditional ink-wash techniques to explore contemporary subjects--e.g., a couple in lawn chairs or a girl in a red bikini watching distant hills burn.

Mystery could be found in both whimsical form--such as Tang Hui's rounded biomorphic wood scalptures with tiny flashing lights--and in serious guise: most notably in Lin Tianmiao and Wang Gongxin's group of blank-faced tailor's dummies draped with bizarre, sometimes hairlike, handmade garments--the most disconcerting installation in the entire show. Wet Qingji, conversely, made his message perfectly clear in simple brown-on white drawings, especially one featuring an early-Warhol-like shoe sketch and the words "I am fashionable therefore I am happy."

The Chinese photography and video work on view tended to be utterly contemporary in sensibility. Xiang Liqing showed large photo grids of multiple apartment facades, and Weng Fen displayed several well-known shots of schoolgirls straddling low walls and facing away toward ultra-new city skylines. In Yang Zhengshong's Let's Puff, a video projection of Shanghai's phantasmagoric nightscape faces another of a cute girl in a tank top, who takes huge breaths and blows directly into the camera, causing disturbances on the other screen's streets. Flutter, Flutter ... Jasmine, Jasmine by Yang Fudong, unleavened by such humor, is a veritable three-screen music video replete with urban scenes and hip, impossibly attractive young lovers mugging emotional rapture and distress.

Experimentation and censorship continued their usual dance during the Biennale. Authorities urged that Chinese participants in the sanctioned exhibition should not offend the People's Republic of China or the general public. Teams of officials visited galleries around town to inspect "independent" shows scheduled for the Biennale period. Hence nothing in Shanghai proper approximated the infamous "Fuck Off" exhibition of 2000. Determined viewers had to travel for hours to the canal city of Suzhoa to see the feisty survey put together by independent curator Go Zhengqing.

Nevertheless, Shanghai galleries and alternative spaces continued more-or-less normal programming. One could see worksite photographs by Yang Yong at Eastlink Gallery, a multiple-serf-portrait digital print by Shi Yong in a hanging with other gallery artists at Shanghart Warehouse, or Hong Let's famous dead-bird photo, Dusk in the Forbidden City, at Aura Gallery. But the liveliest show in town to pass muster with the authorities was at the alternative space ddmwarehouse. Among the hightlights of the 10-artist exhibition there were a crawl-through ceiling tunnel by Ward Shelley with interior paintings by Zhao Gang, and Zi Wei Wang's peephole box with instructional diagrams on the best way to commit suicide with a handgun (shades of Damien Hirst's how-to video). Zhao Liang presented two very different works: one, a floor piece with narcissus and garlic bulbs lined up on facing halves of an illuminated platform; the other, appropriately titled Mess, a glass booth in which a suit filled with small explosives and fake blood pellets went off in a shattering, audience-threatening "performance" reminiscent of the climax of Bonnie and Clyde. Yang Maoyuan commanded attention more quietly--with an enormous ball covered in horsehide and sporting a horse head and tail, and two smaller but equally bloated blue-dyed sheep turning on pedestals. American-born artist Emily Cheng contributed two colorful wall paintings, one of which--incorporating stacked aureole forms--served as background for a series of photo portraits of gallery visitors cast, serendipitously, as enlightened beings. (Many of the images are now incorporated in a Web-movie at www.inthesign.com/emily/index.html.) The irony of the situation--Cheng, a New Yorker of Chinese descent, and Zhao Gang, a Chinese expatriate living in Harlem, were the only artists in the show to use traditional Eastern motifs--indicates the thoroughness of Western avant-garde influence on the Chinese scene today. For better or for worse, practitioners in Guangzhoa: Beijing: Shanghai and other major centers have joined the global: monocultural art discourse--with one important motivational difference. They are joining it long after the original avant-garde revolt, after the failure of Communism, after the worldwide burgeoning of consumerism.

Thus these artists are able to see in a flash what their Western peers, long accustomed to material comfort and befuddled for decades by guilt-inducing, quasi-socialist Continental theory, have been largely blind to. They recognize the profound link between the modernist imperative to "make it new" and the entrepreneurial chive to supply ever-fresh products to an ever-expanding market. They have not simply forgotten Foacault, as Baudrillard urged, but--better--forgotten Marx, too. A new options-based paradigm, and with it a new take on the outside world, currently holds sway. As one young Shanghaiese put it to me, "Everything I know about New York, I learned from pirated 'Sex and the City' DVDs." How long can it be before the deep structural accord between shopping in a free marketplace (whether for consumer goods, love or art) and exercising wider political options begins to assert itself?

The First Guangzhou Triennial, "Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art, 1990-2000," took place at the Guangdong Museum of Art [Nov. 18, 2002-Jan. 19, 2003] and was accompanied by a 550-page catalogue in seperate Chinese and English editions. The Shanghai Biennale 2002, "Urban Creation," was held at the Shanghai Art Museum [Nov. 22, 2002-Jan. 20, 2003] and documented in a 290-page catalogue in Chinese and English.

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