Shanghai -All at Sea?
The Biennale and it’s Dilemmas

Once when I was a child I was given this riddle to guess: ‘A boat sails out of the mouth of the Yangtze River - it’s the name of a place.’ The answer to the riddle was Shanghai (the name in Chinese means ‘set out to sea’). When you reach Shanghai you are indeed setting ‘out to sea.’ But ‘on the sea’ (haishang) and ‘Shanghai’, is not just a word game based on geographical location; Shanghai and the sea have 150 years of ineradicable political, economic, cultural and psychological involvement. One could say that Shanghai is in the critical position of being both home and abroad, both domestic and international.

And so that the newly opened Biennale of International Contemporary Art is being held in Shanghai is presumably compatible with the aspirations, interests and motives of the directors, curators and artists involved, and of art institutions both in China and abroad. To take a macroscopic view, at this moment when the trend of globalization becomes more obvious each day, and with China’s entry into the WTO just around the corner, it looks like the Shanghai Biennale has come at just the right time, making the most of opportunities and advantageous location. But coming down to the level of technical operations, the Biennale is far from being satisfactory. Perhaps this can be viewed as a series of teething problems or dilemmas experienced as Chinese contemporary art sets ‘out to sea’ from Shanghai.

Dilemma No. 1: An awful din at the opening ceremony.
During what should have been a solemn and dignified opening ceremony, regardless of whether a speech by the directors of the Biennale was taking place or a famous international art critic was presenting an award to the prize-winning artists, from the audience of up to a thousand people came an incessant babble of voices, it was like being surrounded by a swarm of locusts beating their wings. The noise didn’t stop even when the director of the ceremony, assistant director of the Art Museum Li Xiangyang, repeatedly called on the audience to be quiet. The most exquisite scene was when a Western gentleman seated as a guest of honour, suddenly stood on his chair and shouted at the audience “Shut up! This is an opening ceremony!” But the foreign gentleman’s exhortations did nothing to check the situation. It seems that learning how to behave during the opening ceremony of an international scale event is a necessary course of study for art lovers. I suggest that the organizers of the Biennale arrange an ‘opening ceremony propriety’ training course, to prevent this ‘international joke’ style dilemma happening again.

Dilemma No. 2: The distortion of artistic standards.
Before the Biennale opened, most of the participating artists from overseas along with Chinese theorists, curators and artists from outside Shanghai visited a few exhibitions organized by private galleries, these being the oft-mentioned satellite exhibitions. After comparing the works selected for the Biennale with the works in these satellite exhibitions, Chinese-Canadian artist Ken Lum (Lin Yinting) said to me, “In the Biennale, the works by Chinese mainland artists compared to those of overseas artists show a general weakness, but the works by many Chinese artists in the satellite exhibitions actually have a lot of energy, and I feel it’s a real shame that their works were not included in the Biennale.” This viewpoint represents that of many foreigners, and this topic was even discussed by participants during the Biennale symposium. This point makes it clear that there is a considerable difference between the viewpoint of overseas artists and that of the organizers of the Shanghai Biennale. A popular way of describing the situation amongst those from overseas is: If you want to ruin the reputation of a famous curator, just let him have a go at curating the Shanghai Biennale.

Dilemma No. 3: Border clashes between two languages.
The main manifestation of this dilemma was the problems experienced translating between Chinese and English at the symposium. Both speakers and the audience contained many people who only knew one of these languages, and those proficient in both languages were pitifully few. Faced with the very specialized terms used by participants during the symposium, the two interpreters, who were not Art specialists, seemed unable to cope with their task. In the morning the lecture hall was full to bursting, but by the afternoon half the audience had left. From this we can deduce the effects of poor interpretation. At a critical moment that morning Hou Hanru came to the rescue, but for a curator of international renown to take on the work of an interpreter seemed rather inappropriate.
Because of the language barrier, the dialogue between those who are already ‘on the sea’ and those who are ‘setting out to sea’ from Shanghai was for most people ineffective and irrelevant, unable to produce sparks of inspiration or incisive moments of ideological exchange.

Evidently, the fact that various dilemmas such as these occurred reveals the contrast between the organizers’ ‘grand narrative’ style intentions and what in practice they were able to realize. This contrast was caused by the accumulated superficiality of contemporary cultural and artistic theory, the insufficient and irrational preparation and distribution of human resources, the non-standard methods of organization etc.

At a time when the watchword ‘to join paths’ with foreign countries has entered the collective unconscious, we can console ourselves with the thought that ‘Shanghai now has an international Biennale such as can be seen abroad.’ This may in future come to be seen as the underlying value of the Shanghai Biennale 2000.

I have heard that in Beijing and Chengdu there are people eager to put on a Biennale, but wouldn’t this just be opening up another can of worms? One should bear in mind that the Biennales of developed countries are vehicles for exhibiting high quality contemporary art, and that they only came into being after new art, curatorship, and contemporary art institutions had all been honed to a similar standard. Only in the context of these exhibitions, that have profound effects on society of an accumulative and widespread nature, can we talk about quality and cultural creativity.

But in today’s China, the new art is still half hidden in the underground; this huge country still has no place that could properly be called a museum of modern art, and is even more lacking in well-trained curators. Under these extremely primitive conditions, it is hard to have high hopes as to what the Shanghai Biennale can achieve. If we really want to ‘join paths,’ then we should work steadily to prepare the basic foundations, so as to avoid again making ourselves into a laughingstock.

If we take these dilemmas as being Shanghai’s ‘Special Kind of Modernity,’ (the subtitle of the Biennale) then the theme of the Biennale will have profound significance for China’s new art and culture, and the building of new systems. At the very least, when Cai Guoqiang used that retrospective-style ‘newspaper wall’ installation to turn the Biennale into background material for a personal retrospective exhibition, he revealed the answer to the riddle of the ‘Rent Collectors Courtyard.’