Future Perfect Review of the Shanghai Biennale By Daniel Szehin Ho Reactivation: The 9th Shanghai Biennale 2012 October

2, 2012March 31, 2013 (City Pavilions: October 3, 2012December 31, 2012) The Shanghai Biennale opened to great expectations in October 2012. With an international team of curators, an ambitious curatorial program, a brand new building, and nearly 100 artists from China and abroad, the bar was set high. So it was disappointing to see the biennale falling into many of the same problems that bedeviled previous iterations and indeed art in China in general. The main site of the Biennale was located in the newly restored Power Station of Art, originally the Nanshi Power plant, about 5 km south of the colonial architectural set pieces of the Bund. The incredibly tight timeframe for the project approved just in 2011 and in frenzied construction right up to and indeed past the opening was just one of the many hurdles faced by the Biennale organizing committee. The building itself looked like massive shanzhai (knock-off) version of the Tate Modern in London. Like the Tate, the Power Station of Art (PSA) was envisioned as the first public museum of contemporary art with over 15000 sq m of exhibition space (and of course, it had to be bigger than the Tate); it is equally on the waterfront next to the Huangpu river, within the former grounds of the Shanghai World Expo in 2010. The theme of this ninth iteration of the Shanghai Biennale was Reactivation, not very obliquely referring to the former power plant but also more problematically rhyming with the boosterism of a city hot on the heels of the razzle-dazzle of the World Expo. There were four sub-themes: Resources, about the generation of power, energy, and motion; Revisit, about rebirth and the revisiting of history; Reform, about the transformation of energy; Republic, about republics of all kinds of people, about networking and resonating of energy. All this chatter about energy was maddeningly vague viewers might be forgiven if they felt transported to the 1970s and failed to cohere in any serious or significant way. The looseness of the theme in itself was not a major flaw, since it was unlikely (and arguably undesirable) that a biennale of such scale and ambition could be shaped and melded into neat, coherent themes (though others disagree; see Carol Lu Yinghuas review on Art Agenda)(1). The real weakness of the Biennale lies in its execution: from elemental details concerning slapdash installation (photographs about to come loose, or distracting jumbles of video cables) or weird structural design (fire hydrants smack in the middle of two works) to the curatorial flaw of including far too many works for the space. And no wonder: installation was done at breakneck speed. A few weeks before the opening,

foreign artists and curators were startled at the lack of a roof in some of the city pavilions, while at the press opening, most of works had not been installed (in the end, some local gallerists were corralled into helping). Yet one also wants to be forgiving: with nearly 100 artists from around the world participating, and yet with ten months of preparation at best, under a budget of 2.5 million USD, it was no wonder that one of the co-curators, Jens Hoffmann, declared that its completion was a surprise. (2) The chief curator Qiu Zhijie recognized a lot of these problems, and responded to many of the criticisms on his website. He stated that the chronic lack of funding meant he had to rely on students and volunteers, rather than qualified staff; he also pointed out that qualified personnel was lacking, and many art professionals in China had not had firsthand experience of biennales abroad. There were also hurdles with payment, since the biennale organization was not authorized to handle foreign currency, and the question of face in refusing artists, resulting in the overly large number of works and artists. (3) In retrospect, it was easy to predict that the simultaneous renovation of this mammoth space and the relocation of the Shanghai Art Museum there within such a short period would cause tremendous strains on an under-financed biennale, particularly one that set itself an ambitious range of projects. To this, one should add that the chief curator, Qiu Zhijie, had been named to the post a mere ten months before the opening. In China, all this seemed possible after all, wasnt the glittering, retro-futuristic Pudong skyline built in less than twenty years? Thus the PSA stands as a symbol of Chinas breakneck transformation economic and artistic and unwittingly, the art worlds poster child for all the pitfalls this obsession with speed entails. Just even on entry, an unsuspecting visitor could already get a flavor of the organizational miasma and red tape in the quest of obtaining a ticket. The hapless visitor had first to reserve a ticket online (in Chinese; the advertised English hotlines did not work) then picked it up on the very next business day at six appointed offices throughout the city but bafflingly not at the PSA itself. Thus properly documented, the visitor could enter the day after. (Like all bureaucracies, there wa of course a reason: it was basically a crowdmanagement legacy of the 2010 World Expo. In other words, just in case millions decided to swarm a contemporary art biennale). All this would have made for an incredibly infuriating experience if not for the fact that, in China, such rules are made only to be broken; perhaps tiring of the streams of non-Chinese-speaking art aficionados, the guards in the end lazily waved everyone through. It may seem churlish to complain, but it was a detail that reveals the dead hand of government in this biennale. Once inside, there were many big, spectacular showpieces. Towering over the main hall was Huang Yongpings Thousand Hands Guanyin (1997-2012), a massive circular column which reached right up to the ceiling and on which are purportedly a thousand (broken) arms of the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy (Guanyin) wielding various talismanic and everyday objects. This stupendous assemblage of ready-mades heralded a spirituoaesthetic power of the everyday. It may have looked monstrous but perhaps that was

the point, a juggernaut of a ready-made goddess. Of note and of considerable elation to the crowds in the early weeks of the biennale was Chico MacMurtries Totemobile (2007), where a Citron DS changes, Transformers-like, into a totemic object of worship that simultaneously mocked and celebrated our obsession with the automobile and technological progress. Due to a malfunction with the airbag, however, which was supposed to inflate to the tip-top as an eerie, seemingly living organic membrane, the intended nexus between the inorganic and the organic was absent. A little further behind, above a very prominently situated cafe, was Wang Yuyangs Light, Falling Like a Feather (2012). At first sight, the work looked like an ostentatious hotel-art set-piece, radiating in fluorescent white several stories down the atrium in complex shifts of artifice perhaps a pastiche of Dan Flavin meets Nude Descending the Staircase? Upon closer perusal, one could perhaps appreciate the idea of light in the form of fluorescent light tubes fluttering feather-like down in space. Whatever else one can say, it was a show stopper. One also noticed an odd obsession with verticality: Huang Yongpings column was echoed by Pascale Marthine Tayous Clonne Pascale (2011), a stack of porcelain up to the roof, suggesting a fragile grandeur (and perhaps a comment on China?). A little further was Ouyang Chuns Infinity Column (2012), where an apparently random range of objects was stacked, forcing us to reckon with the connections between objects, weaving links between the fragments of our vast material culture. (Weirdly, there was yet another one of Ouyang Chuns column in another section.) Certain works were situated terribly. Why, for instance, did Rahic Talifos Hurricane Project (20072012) a collection of cheap plastic slippers, which for the artist was the one material unity in Austronesian peoples across the Pacific have to lead us through one corridor right to the cafe? Did this not become a commentary of how the cleansing power of typhoons might lead one to a nice latte? Or upstairs, with Sui Jianguos Wanderer (2010), a stainless steel ball sculpture designed to move around slowly, at 25 cm per minute: though programmed to stop when it touched a wall, it was perhaps not the wisest idea to place it in a narrow corridor next to six of Lu Zhengyuans video works, which were displayed on tiny TV monitors on the floor. All this uncomfortably resembled a bowling alley, though one supposed that this vision might please some viewers immensely. No wonder the movement mechanism had to be turned off, and the work hemmed in within a tight space, thus completely obviating the meaning of the work. By far the most serious problem was the cramped placement of loud, large-scale installations, which created a carnival-like atmosphere not unlike an art fair, minus the money. Many individually interesting pieces were left to founder for the lack of space. The open area on the second floor was a case in point. It may have been alright for Lucy + Jorge Ortas Nexus Architecture (2001), a piece where worker-overalls were linked together to highlight connections and uniformity, to be placed next to their Antarctica World Passport Delivery Village (2007), an installation with huts elevated by 0.51.4 m

the predicted rise of sea levels the possible transnational solidarity in the extreme and pristine environment of Antarctica. However, half a dozen pieces surrounded this: JeanMichel Bruyre Congress of Shanghai (2012), a commanding presence of a work with elaborate stacks of chairs (which, incidentally, were installed weeks after the opening); the very tall Clonne Pascale in porcelain; Yang Jiechangs Republic of Fritz Hansel (2012); Ouyang Chuns Infinity Column; and finally Danh Vos We the People (2012), drowning amid the mass of works, and Loris Cecchinis wall-scarification sculpture-installation (Gaps Wallwave Vibration) along the walls. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to cram one piece too many looks like an accident; to cram six looks like carelessness. All this superfluous addition ended up subtracting from the aesthetic experience, and in the end the Biennale felt like a massive jumble of pieces, an ADD warehouse of art, rather than a curated biennale. That said, once one was resigned to this, there was plenty to discover plenty of works and artists rarely seen in China. This perhaps explained the excitement of the crowds and was no mean feat (least of all in China, where the appreciation of contemporary art is still in a nascent state and too often accompanied by dollar signs). In short, the experience of the Shanghai Biennale was akin to a treasure hunt.

One notable piece was Simon Fujiwaras wry installation, Rebekkah. A 16-year-old rioter (from the 2011 English riots) was taken on a two-week trip to China, where she witnessed first hand what can be achieved when a massive-scale, national population pulls together towards one common goal, individual improvement through mass production and organization, visiting factories where items of her life clothing, phone, TV are produced. Then she visited the Terracotta Army, where she was also cast as a modern-day terracotta replica. Multiple copies of Rebekkah line the staircase, forging links between Chinas single-minded totalitarian past and present while also subtly pointing out the mass-leveling effects of consumerism and social media (the Chinese explanation text was also subtly harmonized). The recasting of a contemporary British girl under a historic symbol of China creates a rich ambiguity of contrasts between Britain and China, order and disorder, authoritarianism and capitalist consumerism, and global economic and trade patterns. However, it should be noted that some of the copies had been broken and in the end the artist gave up and resigned himself to the fiasco. Another point of interest was Wang Taocheng (in the Revisit section), whose paintings stood out for their ingenuous combination of the format of a traditional Chinese horizontal scroll and very tongue-in-cheek, tragicomic tales of urban life. Traditionally, the scrolling and unscrolling of a horizontal scroll gave a temporal dimension to such long works, which often reach 6 m in length; the eye followed along depictions of misty landscapes, or bustling canals or palace interiors, allowing for a continuous narrative. Wang Taochengs Romantic Person, however, cut across the back lanes of Shanghai to relate the everyday minutiae of life in one family with humor, cussing, and an unsentimental

visual style. Each painted scene tended to be long and revolved around an incident some domestic argument or slight with explanatory text in English and Chinese. The visual effect lay somewhere between a graphic novel, illustrated book, and painting with words. Within the context of one particular current in contemporary Chinese art that harks back towards traditional forms and content, Wang Taochengs works arguably harnessed the resources of tradition better than his contemporaries (like Ji Yun-fei, for instance, a painter renowned for his Three Gorges Dam Migration scroll) because he adapted tradition in terms of technique (graphic novel details and non-traditional colors) and narrative and threw in a good measure of humor. His works felt truly and genuinely reflective of the present, rather than a pastiche of a historical style. The Reform section had a number of good works by foreign artists. These included Monika Sosnowskas Stairway, a work with a pressed-down staircase (too high for the exhibition space) and Ryan Ganders installation of arrows having pierced the exhibition space (Ftt, Ft, Ftt, Ftt, Ffttt, Ftt, or somewhere between a modern representation of how a contemporary gesture came into being, an illustration of the physicality of an argument between Theo and Piet regarding the dynamic aspect of the diagonal line and attempting to produce a chroma-key set for a hundred cinematic)(2012). There was also Wael Shawkys fascinating Cabaret Crusades (shown at last years Documenta in Kassel, Germany), an elaborate film staged with 200-year-old marionnettes relating key episodes during the Crusades. It was an absorbing experience for the way it painstakingly reenacted the actions and motivations of key figures, particularly from the Arab perspective, and for its contemporary relevance in the last decade of wars in the Middle East. Surprisingly, perhaps, crowds in China were thinner than in Kassel; one would have thought that a country that presents the Opium War as a key event of national memory and trauma would be more interested in parallel experiences. One could ponder the reasons, but the lack of sufficient explanation wall text could not have helped. There were of course also some great pieces by Chinese artists. Jiang Zhis works stood out. In the front room (of two) is The Quiet Bodies (20112012), an installation of used fireworks packaging which mocked the official bungling that had led to the inferno at the Television Cultural Center, next to the Rem Koolhaas-designed CCTV headquarters in Beijing. Officials at the state media corporation authorized an illegal fireworks extravaganza despite warnings from the police; the resultant blaze destroyed a section of the building and led to nearly 1 billion dollars (USD) in damages. The installation was, as usual, a bit cramped. The second work, Light of Transience (2012), was more personal. At an idle moment, Jiang caught the light of the sun over cellophane, which created a reflective aura. That evening, he received news that his wife had died. By interweaving personal tragedy and myth into little moments of everyday magic, Jiang created a touching and absorbing work. The best section of the Biennale exhibition proper was probably Republic. In the entrance section, Ho Sin Tungs Hong Kong Inter-Vivos Film Festival (2012) was an installation that posed as artifacts from an imaginary film festival. With about a dozen drawings from

invented film moments, large film posters, and four video displays, it was as much a gentle mockery of the Hong Kong International Film Festival as a homage to film makers. There was also a strong thread of very local, Hong Kong-oriented sentimentality in the film posters, reminiscent of some other HK artists of her generation (Wilson Shieh came to mind). Zhuang Hui & Dan Ers Yumen Photography Studio was also an engaging piece, with a photography studio taken over for a year to allow residents of Yumen to document themselves in photographs, this in a context where the once-booming town in hilly, arid Gansu province is in a phase of terminal decline due to the drying up of petroleum. Photographs of earnest smiles abounded amid kitsch backdrops. One of the best works in the exhibition was State of Shades, a ironic conceptual piece by Socit Raliste. With a serious face, the group embarked on a project aimed at determining and collecting a series of national art colors. In this case, they analyzed 175 representative national oil paintings from the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) in Beijing. Each painting (done by a national) thus catalogued was analyzed digitally with an average color seeker software and converted into a single monochrome tone the average color of the painting in question. These 175 paintings are presented alphabetically according to the title; thus, in the large hall, one saw 175 monochrome vertical stripes. The visual effect was not unlike an imaginary Pantone store and reminded one of Color Field artists (particularly Gene Davis). This sum of all 175 colors was then averaged to produce a larger wall painting of the Chinese national color, State of Shades: Chinese National Oil Painting Pale Brown (for those curious, C 42% M 52% Y 71% K 21%). Again, this work should have been allowed to shine, and yet a large white cube was installed in the middle to accommodate more works a number of works on the outside and two video installations within. Still, State of Shades trenchantly mocked the ideas of national identity, national essence, national art precisely by pushing them to their logical, digital extreme and it had all the more conceptual bite in China, where debates about art (or politics, or economics, or history, for that matter) descend into arguments over the national essence depressingly often. That this critique was executed through a scientific digital sampling was the icing on the cake, so to speak, since it tackled the reductive equivalence of art into bits and bytes this in an age where much of our visual culture is mediated through the internet and digital imagery. It was a marvelous postInternet approach to nationalism and tradition.

Away from the main sections of the biennale proper were the City Pavilions, split between the Power Station of Art and a building near the Rockbund Museum, closer to the city center. The City Pavilions on a whole offered a much better aesthetic experience, though again the quality and execution was very uneven. Then again, it was perhaps the aim to allow for multifarious approaches to the selection of artists and the overall curation. Yet the lack of resources and perhaps of curatorial design meant that invited cities were left to their own including missing ceilings and walls, all of which prompted frantic international calls and meetings in the run-up to the opening.

The concept of the City Pavilions was refreshing though. To a degree, this harked back to the origins of the grande dame of all biennales, that of Venice, where national pavilions sprouted very near its start as a continuation of the nineteenth-century format of the Universal Exposition and World Fair. It was fair to say that the Biennale committee chose the City Pavilions format wisely. The aim was to move away from the nationalistic competition that can make an ugly spectacle of sports competition like the Olympics towards a focus on cities as important transnational nodes in the flow of people, capital, and ideas. It also allowed curators to focus beyond the horizons of the national, with its attendant concern with national representation, particularly in Asia, and questions of the unrooting of tradition under the sign of modernization / Westernization, to more of a concern with cities as living spaces and living machines that brought in, to China at least, possibilities of looking at works which interrogated the structure of spaces, logics of exchange, or just simply individual concerns. In his curatorial statement, Qiu Zhijie mocked the Olympics slogan Faster, Higher, Stronger: If we want to foster this spirit, we have to build higher skyscrapers, scrap the speed limits on highways, and take hormones. He also wanted to avoid mistakes of World Expos, where there is cultural equality but everything boils down to evolutionism and futurology: Developed countries flaunt their eco-friendly, energy-saving new technologies. Poor countries put their original ecosystems on display. (4) Given this critical spirit, it was a little disappointing that some pavilions had made rather uninteresting choices to emphasize local folk styles (Ulan Bator, for instance). The Sydney pavilion, though well thought out, still made the problematic selection of a video of a surfer, however visually inventive (Shaun Gladwells Pacific Undertow Sequence (Bondi)(2012)); the curator seemed to want to play to the expectations of the public. To be fair, Bababa Internationals Flue did offer an experience of illusions of recessed walls and hidden objects, while Shen Shaomins Landscape of Confinement (2012) provided a reflection on melting ice caps with the reverse, that of ice being frozen through the consumption of energy. Some pavilions highlighted their cities links to China and Shanghai. Dakar chose to present Kane Sys photographic series (Boulevard du Centenaire) on the Chinese presence in Dakar, while Sao Paolo had a quirky photographic series by Carla Zaccagnini which chronicled the street signs named after Shanghai in the Brazilian metropolis. The best in this vein was the Berlin pavilion. Raumlaborberlin, a network and collective of 8 architects, presented displays of Richard Paulicks architecture (The International Ghost 1: Richard Paulick). Paulick escaped to Shanghai from the rising fascism in 1930s Germany, and later became responsible for city planning in Shanghai. After the war, he headed back to East Germany and designed parts of the Stalinallee. It was an engaging display of a little-known individual connection tying Berlin and Shanghai. The collective also created a large architectonic structure of wood frames that served as a teahouse to the public. Its relational impact would have been much stronger in the middle of Peoples Square, say which, in Shanghai, would have been impossible due to the government.

There were some truly entertaining pavilions. Brooklyns CKTV presented artists interventions in karaoke in the form of video, challenging the notion of privileged authorship as well as the borders of high and low/pop culture. The Lima pavilion showed an installation by Jos Carlos Martinat, All the Republic in One (stereoreality environment 12). A vast amount of data produced by architects, anthropologists, statisticians, economists, and philosophers were presented on little colored bits of paper, strewn about in the hall. With a long line of electric fans bordering the piles of paper, the fluttering bits and pieces created a whimsical work. The Vancouver pavilion showed Brian Jungens sculptural installations. Cetology formed the shape of a whale skeleton with lawnchairs, while Prototype for New Understanding #2 used Nike Air Jordans to recreate masks in the manner of Northwest Coast First Nations (this series was however quickly removed due to concerns about the parlous installation conditions). The contrast between the throwaway dispensability of consumerist goods and objects with longer time spans (skeletons, traditional masks) pointed to our impermanent ethos and underlying environmental concerns. One of the most intriguing pavilions was the Pittsburgh Pavilion. In Jon Rubins Lovasik Estate Sale, the hall was filled with all kinds of knick-knacks and assorted items furniture, jewelry, figurines, personal photos, certificates, books purchased from the Lovasik family and shipped to China. A loving material portrait of a family (reminiscent of Song Dongs Waste Not), this not only commented on the willingness of people to throw away so much after the death of a family member but went much further, for the exhibition was a sale, where every item was available for purchase. In these terms, at the very least, it was a success: during the week-long National Day vacation in October, so many people swarmed the pavilion in search of cheap pick-ups that the organizers had to limit the works in quantity and in price (different prices on different days) for fear that the work would literally disappear over the course of mere days. After the sale, the proceeds would be used to purchase goods from a family in Shanghai and ship it to Pittsburg, where the project will appear in 2013. To label his work relational aesthetics is really to dilute the economic dimensions of the piece (though his work does start from the standpoint of human relations). It played with the logic of commercial exchange on a personal/family and international level, cut through the politics of exports and trade deficits, and engaged the audience tremendously to boot. In sum, the Shanghai Biennale had grand aspirations but lacked the means and the wherewithal to realize them. One could be charitable and take chief curator Qiu Zhijies view that the format and structure are being set for better, future biennales. Yet without substantial changes in its organization, finances, government support, and most importantly, its mindset, the Biennale will always have a great future always in the future.

(1) Carol Lu Yinghua, Taipei Biennial 2012 & the 9th Shanghai Biennale 2012, Art Agenda, Oct 8, 2012. http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/taipei-biennial-2012-the-9thshanghai-biennale-2012-2/ accessed Jan 20, 2013. (2) Xue Tan, The Making of the 9th Shanghai Biennale: An Interview with Curator Jens Hoffmann, Oct 31, 2012. Link: http://www.randian-online.com/np_feature/the-makingof-the-9th-shanghai-biennale/2/ accessed Jan 30, 2013. (Full quote: Im very happy and surprised; you have been here, you have seen the process. It was a construction site one week ago. Now there is a perfect cafe and museum shop things I would not even have thought about. All I wanted to do was to get the show ready. All of a sudden, there is a museum. ) (3) Qiu Zhijie, Where did the problems come from (Wenti chuzai nail?) http://www.qiuzhijie.com/blog/article.asp?id=547 accessed January 15, 2013. Translation of the writer. (4) Qiu Zhijie, Notes on the Map of the City, 9th Shanghai Biennale: Reactivation. InterCity Pavilion Project (catalogue), pages 30-33, 2012.