Life and Leisure

Art as rehearsal at Shanghai Biennale

By Zhang Kun (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-11-09 08:00

Viewers peruse works at Shanghai Art Museum, part of the ongoing Shanghai Biennale. Dong Hongjing / Xinhua

Contrary to expectations, the Shanghai Biennale, the city's largest celebration of contemporary art, is attracting huge crowds.

On weekends, visitors sometimes have to wait for up to 20 minutes before being admitted into the exhibition hall of Shanghai Art Museum, located in the heart of the city on People's Square.

The art festival's eighth edition, which opened on Oct 23, explores the mechanics of artistic creations. Titled Rehearsal, it will run till the end of January.

"We thought Shanghai audiences would be experiencing visual fatigue after the World Expo," says a staff member of Shanghai Art Museum, who asked to stay anonymous. "The theme of the biennale is also quite academic and we believed this too would keep away many people."

But the reality is turning out to be quite different. On one recent weekend, more than 6,000 people visited the biennale, four times the number of visitors on any other day.

This year, organizers want to draw art lovers' attention away from paintings, installations and videos and toward the working process of their creations, according to Gao Shiming, one of the three curators of the biennale.

Unlike past sessions, all three curators are from China, with the other two being Fan Di'an, director of National Art Museum of China, and Li Lei, executive director of Shanghai Art Museum.

The event features 47 artists (or artists' groups) from 21 countries and regions, including movie directors such as Wang Xiaoshuai and Tsai Ming-liang.

With many biennales being held worldwide in recent years to showcase contemporary art, "artists and audiences are sometimes bored", Gao says. "Our biennale has become quite an established event, and so we wanted to do something more challenging."

Most visitors, typically in their 20s and 30s, have said the biennale offers an appropriate illustration of its theme and that the art works are of high quality.

To those who complain the artworks are difficult to understand, the anonymous staff member mentioned earlier says, "contemporary art does raise questions and challenge existing ideas".

He suggests that people do some homework and read about the biennale before making a visit. "That will help them enjoy it more," he says.

Among the works on display is one by Verdensteatret, an art group from Norway. They present a complicated hybrid piece combining installation and performance art with a live concert.

The project, entitled And All the Question Marks Started to Sing, uses mechanical structures such as disassembled video cameras, loudspeakers and wheels taken from bicycles, and scatters them over a large room. Performers produce unsettling musical arrangements by turning the wheels, while various cameras project shadows on the walls nearby.

More than 10 members of the group have been working on the audio and visual presentation for a year, tweaking different parts and getting the engineering in, or out, of synch.

"The whole creative process is a never-ending rehearsal," curator Gao says.

A French photographer JR presents his giant portraits of Shanghai's old folks, in his solo exhibition Wrinkles of the City. He talks to elderly people in the park, has their pictures taken, prints them out and pastes them on the weathered walls of old buildings, letting their wrinkles merge into the bleak lines of the walls, mixing their personal history with that of the fast-changing city.

"It's my job to give my subject recognition and dignity," says JR, who declined to give his full name, and who hid behind dark glasses and a hat.

Xu Jiang, president of China Academy of Fine Arts, says: "People have experienced all sorts of visual extravaganza at the Expo, and they will expect to see something different at the biennale. We can't just bombard them with visual stimuli now and expect them to be impressed. They've already seen it all. We will give them something deeper, something more academic and thought-provoking."

Many galleries and private art museums in Shanghai have decided to hold their most important exhibitions of the year during the biennale, so that visitors can enjoy a variety of art events.

At Rockbund Art Museum, the exhibition By Day By Night not only showcases the works of nine artists, but also includes a lecture every Friday, Saturday and Sunday evening, by artists and the museum's curators.

Meanwhile, the first edition of the Nanjing Biennale began on Oct 28 in the neighboring city of Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu province. It will display the works of acclaimed Chinese artists such as Zhou Chunya, Zhang Xiaogang and Zeng Fanzhi, alongside those of graffiti artists from Western countries.

The Nanjing Biennale will run at the Nanjing Museum of Art till Nov 25.

China Daily