Michael Lin, 'What a difference a day made', 2008
(The Shanghai Art Gallery)
The week that the world's financial markets went plop, I spent in an art induced haze, a miasma of schmoozing and boozing, all because of the enormous, vast, gigantic Shanghai Art Week. It isn't actually called that. It isn't actually called anything. But with 1 Biennale, 2 international art fairs, and over 70 museum and gallery openings, it should be.
Sadly the Biennale is disappointing. The theme this year is Translocomotion, bundling together transport and migration. It is somewhat clichéd and has not even pushed the boundaries of the clichés. Most people I spoke to agreed, with the exceptions of a sponsor who rather archly disagreed and a UK public gallery curator who ambiguously commented that it was better than he had expected. So was it bad? No, not at all. But Biennales have a special function: to show the absolute latest in art - the good, the bad and the ugly. Because they should be risk taking, they must to some extent fail. With a good Biennale however, the failures are minor characters or express an Icarus-like courage (or sometimes arrogance), while the Biennale itself, in addition to being a summation of new art, should have a vision of the future of art. Think of Dokumenta in Kassel and the Asia Pacific Triennial (APT) in Brisbane, both proven sure predictors of future trends and talents. This Shanghai Biennale, while more consistent than the last one, less chaotic, less full, is also less challenging, less intriguing and less entertaining. It's sin is that it is mildly boring. But it is on for three months, so we can revisit it again later with a fuller review that concentrates on the artists. Before I move on to the panoply of other exhibitions, let me just mention a few of my favourites. Yue Minjun's cavalcade of brightly coloured dinosaurs crowding a major corridor in the Shanghai Art Gallery, forcing you to walk among them to get to the rest of the show, was just brilliant. I also liked Never Take Off, a film on a loop of a taxiing plane. Mike Kelley's Kandors was a bit of a curate's egg. I found much of the process work repetitive, in a bad way. However a light which shone through the coloured bell-jar cityscapes created larger shadow versions on the wall. It is a trap in which to catch the viewer's own shadow, just like a resident of Kandor, the city trapped in a bottle in the Superman comic book series. Sometimes a simple idea says much more than a room full of process work.
Yue Minjun, 'Colourful Running Dinosaurs', 2008
(7th Shanghai Biennale)
Mike Kelley, 'Kandors', 2008
(7th Shanghai Biennale)
The 2nd ShContemporary, an international art fair, made the Biennale look somewhat shabby. All the leading art trade fairs, frieze in London, Art Basel, Art Basel Miami, are now attempting to underpin their intellectual credibility by various means, including commissioning specific works. ShContemporary's director this year, Lorenzo A. Rudolf, was also director of Art Basel from 1991 to 2000, so he knows all about this having invented it. Consequently the Best of Discovery and Outdoor sections were thoughtfully curated and presented a diverse array of challenging and beguiling art. Only a few can be mentioned here. In the forecourt of the Shanghai Exhibition Centre, a Stalinist wedding-cake of a building which in Chinese is called the China-Russia Friendship Building, we were treated to Shen Shaomin's cradle-rocker petroleum pumps which jerked and banged with a great cacophony (sadly the authorities would not let him make real holes in the concrete), and Wang Zhan's extraordinary reimagining of Delacroix' Raft of the Medusa as a giant polished steel Chinese 'Scholar's Stone', complete with raft. It floated calmly in the decorative forecourt pool but a film showed it riding the high seas (and not sinking!). Zhang Ding's The Dream of Yabulai, an 8-channel video and sculpture installation under the cupola of the Exhibition Centre was beautiful and baffling. Filmed near the artist's hometown in the Gobi desert, it depicts the artist's selection of the eight fundamentals of history: measurement, theorem, focus, resources, energy, poem, worship, and rivalry. It seems arbitrary but you need to read the list as a type of Sei Shonagan poem. Seven individuals represent seven elements of history and in the eighth a monkey is shown assigning tasks to them. Each video is rigged to one side of the wooden pentagon structure and sounds emerge from barrels under each video. The structure keeps each of the individuals separate but also links them. Blackboards explain the physics of the structure. Its installation in the China-Russia Friendship Building was inspired.
Shen Shaomin, 'Kowtow Pump', 2007
(2nd ShContemporary)
In the Best of Discovery section, it was clear that video is now a mainstream art form, including financially - an important point for video artists who once struggled on the periphery of acceptability. I particularly liked Berlin based Taiwanese artist, Effie Wu's Super Smile, in which she guides the viewer through her apartment with an ecstatic billboard grin, even eating and brushing her teeth whilst smiling. Its relentless. Bizarrely most people were too po-faced to giggle. I laughed out loud. Meanwhile, Reza Aramesh's re-stagings of famous reportage photographs, such as the summary Saigon street execution of a Viet Cong spy in 1968, had none of the razzmatazz of other exhibits but were many ways more compelling. Their stillness carried out into the surrounding exhibition space and slowly it would dawn on the pausing visitor that something was amiss. The images look familiar yet strange. We recall the positions, the expressions of the actors, but they are in the wrong context, not war zones but famous galleries and museums. And you don't see the protagonists of the imminent violence, just the passive objects of it, the victims. Also worthy of special mentions are Clare Healy and Sean Cordeiro's White Elephant, the shape of a charging elephant (or of things to come?) picked out an a white wall with Ninja stars, their points embedded in the wall to 'slow down' the pale pachyderm - you get to chose your metaphor but this month it's probably got something to do with financial markets. Erbossyn Meldibekov's violent psychological terrors were also captivating - half of one dog spliced with half of another; a chair made of matchsticks that appear to have then caught alight, possibly while it was being used. I also appreciated Yang Maoyuan's Silence! 88 Buddhas for Shanghai, involving evenly rounded-down marble Buddha busts on individual plinths. We are going to hear a lot more of each one these artists.
Yang Maoyuan, 'Silence! 88 Buddhas for Shanghai', 2008
(2nd ShContemporary)
Shi Jin Dian, 'Jeep', 2008
(Shanghai Art Fair)
By comparison, the 12th Shanghai Art Fair, a few kilometres up the road at the less atmospheric ShanghaiMart exposition centre, was rather provincial. Various international and local galleries that didn't make it into ShContemporary ended up here, although for the local market the Shanghai Art Fair remains important. There is a bit of elbowing going on between the two fairs, with Shanghai Art Fair apparently feeling miffed that the younger, more glamorous ShContemporary is stealing attention and business. This is worrying because ShContemporary's trade fair licence is dependent on a waiver from the established Shanghai Art Fair. The two should work together and complement each other. For that to be successful, the Shanghai Art Fair has to banish any jealous feelings it might have and move upscale. At present it looks too much like any other trade fair instead of the international art exposition it aspires to be. The fact that market leader ShanghART underpinned the Shanghai Art Fair helped greatly but one gallery is not enough. I also heard lots of complaints from both Chinese and international galleries about the lack of professionalism. So, Shanghai Art Fair, pick your game up. Petulance is not the answer.
These exhibitions were the foundation of Shanghai Art Week. For all their faults the combination of the three had a transformative effect on the Shanghai and indeed Chinese art scenes. One can only hope they will continue this approach in the future and build on their already considerable success.
Chris Moore
Shanghai Biennale, 9 Sept.-16 Nov., Shanghai Art Museum, 325 Nanjing Road West www.shanghaibiennale.com
ShContemporary, Shanghai Exhibition Centre, 1000 Middle Yan An Rd. www.shcontemporary.info
Shanghai Art Fair, Sept.10-14, ShanghaiMART, 99 Xingyi Rd. www.cnarts.net
Chris Moore is a writer and a partner in the contemporary art investment firm, mooreandmooreart.co.uk. He lives in Shanghai and specialises in contemporary Chinese art.
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