Asia catches biennale bug
27.10.2006 - Biennial exhibitions have showcased the best in contemporary art for more than a century, since Venice started the fashion in 1895, and their number around the world has mushroomed in recent years.
Biennial exhibitions have showcased the best in contemporary art for more than a century, since Venice started the fashion in 1895, and their number around the world has mushroomed in recent years.
Come September, Asia will see the opening of no less than three biennales within a week: Singapore's first-ever biennale starts Sept. 2, followed by the Shanghai biennale three days later and Gwangju, South Korea's sixth biennale, on Sept. 8.
Each will have a distinctive theme, feel and curatorial approach. Singapore will adopt the theme "Belief," Shanghai the link between art and design - so-called Hyper Design - and Gwangju's show, 'Fever Variation," will reflect on the cultural abundance of Asia. Unusually, the three have agreed to cooperate rather than compete, with joint tour packages and media campaigns to raise their international profiles.
"Such cooperation would be unimaginable in Europe," says Fumio Nanjo, the lead curator of the Singapore Biennale and the deputy director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.
Nanjo has a lot of experience with biennales; he was the commissioner for the Taipei Biennale in 1998, co-founded the Yokohama Triennale in 2001 and sat on the prize jury at last year's Venice show.
Wang Haoyang, promotions manager of the Shanghai Biennale, said that the chosen themes reflected the political and cultural nature of each city.
Shanghai's headlong transformation is producing "a new 'metropolitization' form which synthesizes Western civilization in an Asian cultural background," he said, while Singapore is a meeting point of Chinese, Malay, Indian and European world views.
Gwangju's biennale emerged from a search for healing after the political trauma of the crackdown on the pro-democracy uprising in May 1980, said Kim Hong Hee, the show's artistic director.
For Kim, Gwangju is caught in a duality between globalization and nostalgia for its traditional culture.
"This is what distinguishes Gwangju from Singapore or Shanghai, which derive their urban characters from touristic value and property," she said. "Peculiar qualities of the cities may create differences among these biennales."
For this year's Gwangju biennale, Michael Joo, a Korean-American artist based in New York, will create an installation with an ancient Korean Buddha statue, using numerous mini-cameras to show fragmented details of the Buddha. "It tells about the complex mutual relationship between past and present, tradition and contemporary technique," Kim said.
Zhang Huan, a Chinese artist based in New York, will show an installation, "Peace," composed of a large bell with a casting of his own body as its clapper - "A sort of combination between performance, sculpture and installation," Kim said.
In Singapore, Nanjo said, the theme of belief was chosen because of Singapore's multiracial, multicultural and multireligious society. "To believe can be a cause for tension and conflict, but it can also lead to progress," he said.
The show will be spread over 16 sites, including places of worship - a Catholic church, an Armenian church, a Chinese temple, an Indian temple, a mosque and a synagogue - which will remain open to worshipers during the biennale, with artistic and religious activities coexisting on site.
"It is not our intent to be provocative. We want to create dialogue," Nanjo said.
Roger McDonald, a curator, said: "The way we're approaching working with religious sites is not to say, 'here you can do what ever you want' to the artist."
"We understand the sensitivities," McDonald continued. "We've approached as many different religious sites as possible and most have been welcoming. However, there have been some restrictions. For example we can use the façade of the synagogue but not enter it, and could not put anything inside the mosque."
Among the artists invited to Singapore is Xu Bing, from China, best known for his 1988 installation "Book from the Sky," which comprised long scrolls of what looked like Chinese calligraphy from the Song Dynasty, but was in fact a new alphabet that he had devised, mixing Chinese characters and Western letters.
Xu Bing will design a carpet in a Chinese temple.
"The design of the carpet is similar in concept to Hui Sui's Ming Dynasty creation the Xuan Ji Tu," the artist said in an e-mail message.
"In 1620, Hui Sui created a grid of 841 characters, which can be read in any number of directions and combinations. From this grid, one can, with effort, discern nearly 4,000 separate poems.
"I have selected passages from four significant, translated texts on belief (one Buddhist, one Gnostic, one Jewish, and one passage from Marx)."
The texts, written in English Square Word Calligraphy, would be synthesized into one text, and printed on a carpet, Xu Bing said. "The four original texts, as well as a number of others, will be legible to the audience."
Other artists invited include Yayoi Kusama, a Japanese artist obsessed with dots; the American sculptor James Turrell; and the American artist Barbara Kruger, known for her 1970s work involving billboards with text and photo montages addressing cultural representations of power, identity and sexuality.
For the Singaporean artist Amanda Heng, the theme of belief comes at a good time.
"It highlights the spiritual dimension of our life that has been neglected in the name of progress and development," she said.
"My interest as an art practitioner is to ask how to find the critical space for contemplation and reflection in between the spiritual and material in our everyday life."
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