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Chapter IX: Global Art Biennials, the International Art World, and the Shanghai
Biennale
Part 1: International Art Biennials as Local Representations of Global Cultural
Shifts
Exemplifying large-scale and high-budget art exhibitions occurring biennially or less
frequently, the Venice Biennale attracts numerous tourists, elicits media coverage, and
globally positions its hosting city (Tang 2007: 247). While the Venice Biennale was
founded in Italy in the late nineteenth century, art biennials have proliferated globally
since the 1990s to become mainstream cultural events bringing important curators, global
publicity, and international artists to cities around the world. Being part of international
cultural arenas, biennial art exhibitions are sites of self-reflexive artistic practices,
culturally inclusive discourses, and critical articulations of difference (Tang 2007: 247).
Relying on government support and corporate sponsorship to finance event publicity,
accompanying receptions, art professionals remuneration, and site-specific projects, art
biennials are at times criticized for making little contribution to structural improvements
locally, despite being less expensive than art museums (Bydler 2004: 157, 244-245).
With artists, curators, and works continually circulating among international exhibitions,
art biennials localize the global art world and globalize local art scenes, as each year over
30 biennials take place worldwide (Asian Art Archive 2009). The scale of these
exhibitions allows artists, critics, and curators to gain name recognition, to discuss
cultural problems, and to disseminate global art internationally, since art biennials accord
competitive advantages in the global art world. Attracting unusually large audiences to
art exhibitions and showcasing local artists to global critics, curators, and museum and
gallery directors, biennials put local art communities into the international limelight,
while stimulating cultural tourism (Tang 2007: 248).
Given that 65 percent of them, such as the Athens Biennale, the Havana Biennial,
and the Gwangju Biennale, are state-supported, biennials present opportunities for both
cultural competition and regional cooperation in the international art market. In 2006,
Shanghai, Gwangju, and Singapore shared the promotion of their art exhibitions,
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coordinated their press coverage, and organized the inter-city movement of journalists, in
order to jointly compete for audience attention and international publicity with numerous
other biennials (Tang 2007: 248). Sharing regional identity, biennials in Shanghai,
Singapore, and Gwangju capitalized on the growing global prominence of China and
other Asian countries since the 1990s, while expanding their relationships to other
international art events. Similar to European biennales, these collaborative efforts at
regional branding, cultural coordination, and interdependent development make art
biennials part of strategies of creating regional identities and forging cultural alliances
(Tang 2007: 248). As European biennials align their exhibitions into a summer route of
cosmopolitan activity, they invoke historical forms of cultural tourism between Western
and Southern Europe, such as tours of Italy’s ancient architecture in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries (Black 2003: 8). As former global and regional peripheries, such as
Istanbul, Lyon, and Shanghai, become increasingly significant centers of cultural
production, art biennials are seen as a means for developing local cultural creativity and
innovation through artistic and intellectual collaboration, dialogue, and exchange (Tang
2007: 249).
Aspiring to be events representative of local specificity and international art,
biennials, such as the Venice Biennale founded in 1895, can reflect the global state of
cultural affairs (Bydler 2004: 151). While after the Second World War biennials
responded to relations between political blocs and industrialized and developing nations,
such as the Documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany, in the 1990s and 2000s art
biennials resulted from event-oriented strategies of urban and regional development that
Asian biennials and European Manifesta represent (Bydler 2004: 151). After the fall of
the Berlin Wall and the European integration in the late 1980s and 1990s, the Venice
Biennale combines curated exhibitions at permanent spaces at the Arsenale and Giardini
with temporary pavilions in heritage sites where over 76 participating countries
independently represent their contemporary art (Bydler 2004: 155). Venice had
historically been lending a permanent presence to Western national pavilions, such as
those of the United States, France, Britain, Germany, Spain, Poland, and Brazil, that were
recently joined by China’s and Africa’s spaces (Tang 2007: 249). Since contemporary
artistic practices predominantly relate to avant-garde movements, aesthetic interventions,
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and cultural critique of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States and Western Europe,
this art history, its legacies, and its influences are continually reassessed with regard to
parallel developments in other regions. At biennial exhibitions, such as the Venice
Biennale, representations of geographical divisions, social problems, and global identities
are contrasted with works of conceptual and neo-avant-garde artists, such as Sol LeWitt
and Bruce Nauman, in order to critically interrogate international artistic practice (Tang
2007: 250).
Though contemporary art seeks to give visibility to underprivileged and marginal
groups, biennial exhibitions hardly have any larger effect beyond artistic representations,
education programs, and curatorial statements (Tang 2007: 251-252). As art history
remains disavowed in curatorial practices of art biennials, social relations become a
central element of artistic practices and performances since the 1990s. Approaching
aesthetic experience and contemporary art as historical constructions, curators seek to
counter the lasting effects of colonialism, discrimination, and imperialism implicated in
European art history by emphasizing the inclusion, presence, and visibility of subaltern,
ethnic, and minority artists at biennials as global platforms of cultural representation
(Mercer 2005b, Tang 2007: 253). In the 1980s, academic discussions of postcolonial
representation pointed to superficial positivism, formal modernism, and
decontextualizing comparisons that museum exhibitions stressed (Foster 1985). By
contrast, the global pluralism of the Centre Pompidou’s Magiciens de la terre 1989
exhibition sought to level international hierarchies, refute narratives of progress, and
mitigate the differences between the center and periphery. Nevertheless, its alignment of
Western art with conceptualism and non-Western and ethnic artists with spirituality and
crafts drew criticism for its Eurocentric attitudes (McEvilley 1992: 154-155). At
contemporary art biennials, mixed-media artworks seek to escape essentializing
characterizations, postcolonial critique is increasingly integrated into curatorial practices,
and artists from global peripheries receive more inclusive treatment indicated by the
Chinese national pavilion in the Arsenale at the Venice Biennale (Tang 2007: 253).
Despite their efforts to signal inclusiveness, art biennials run the risk of
representing non-Western art divorced from its geographical context and complex
identities, while reducing its difference to postcolonial stereotypes (Tang 2007: 253-255).
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Sometimes supported by art museums, biennials can establish associations between their
hosting cities and art through site-specific artworks, their visual documentation, and
urban branding (Tang 2007: 256). Contemporary art, thus, is concerned with exploring
the boundaries between art and everyday life, exhibitions and urban space, and aesthetic
perception and blind spots that highlighted by public artworks draw attention to the
experience of places, sites, and spaces that cities are made of. As artworks address
collective memory, urban history, and public spaces they reflect on cities as subjects of
tourist-oriented representations that archives of biennial exhibitions reinforce with visitor
maps, permanent exhibitions, and site-specific artworks (Tang 2007: 256-257). As art
seeks to engage the public, participates in urban regeneration, and reflects on biennial
exhibitions, publications that accompany exhibitions critically probe into the institutional
effects of art history that artistic archives give a self-reflexive form to (Godfrey 2007).
While art history and theory become critically contested as constructs, cultural politics
attendant to interpreting artworks inform artistic experience and representation. As self-
reflexive phenomena, artworks take as their subjects documentary practices, historical
records, and public controversies (Tang 2007: 258).
Probing into the constitution of public knowledge, the articulations of subject
positions, and the construction of historical information, discursively sophisticated
artworks indicate that, despite the integration into the art market of art biennials, aesthetic
representation maintains the potential of social and cultural relevance. As large-scale,
recurring, and international exhibitions, art biennials raise larger theoretical questions
over the relationship between these series of events and the development of the field of
art (Tang 2011: 73). Even though the autonomy of art can become the subject of a
sociological critique (Bourdieu 1993), it is the connections between art and economy,
society, and culture that art biennials as a specific kind of events increasingly making part
of the culture industry articulate (Nadarajan 2006). Representing a globalized culture
through artistic, curatorial, and institutional practices of biennial exhibitions, the
worldwide proliferation of biennials reflects efforts that global peripheries make to attain
strategic positioning in the contemporary art world (Nadarajan 2006, Tang 2011: 88). Not
unrelated to the spread of neo-liberalism, international competition, and economic
globalization, creative industries, cultural districts, and art biennials have been the
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subjects of urban development strategies around the world since the 1990s, which has
brought art and culture into the orbit of cultural industries.
Concentrating on contemporary and postwar art, biennales stage spectacular
exhibitions with hundreds of artworks and artists, take place in Asia in over a third of
their cases globally, and enjoy public funding, corporate support, and institutional
independence (Tang 2007: 259, 2011: 74-75). Having mushroomed as celebrated
temporary cultural events since the 1990s, art biennials change leading curators, main
projects, and surrounding discourse with each of these events that curating figures having
global renown, such as Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Okwui Enwezor, assist in branding. Since
biennials confirm the value of artworks by exhibiting them, the recognition of artworks as
art leaves out of consideration their financial value. Works of art, thus, stand in
contradiction to their market valuation through claims to uniqueness, artistic aura, and
disinterestedness that they raise (Altshuler 2008, Bourdieu 1993: 40). Critics, curators,
museums, and galleries produce the value of artworks, among other means, through their
exhibitions that by their selectivity, curating, and reputation establish the credibility of
works and artists (Bourdieu 1993: 71, 81). From the 1960s and 1970s, independent
curators, such as Harald Szeeman, organizing experimental exhibitions started to be
indicators of the value of artworks through their discursive treatment and publicized
display before they enter museum or gallery collections (Tang 2011: 75, 88).
Sometimes jointly coordinated and promoted biennials and art fairs differ in that
the latter are venues for trade in art, even though fairs, such as ShContemporary in
Shanghai, increasingly commission performances, films, and installations by
contemporary artists. Hosting discussions on the art market, aesthetic representation, and
art theory, fairs are able to a growing extent to invite prominent academics, such as
Jacques Rancière, as keynote speakers in an indication of their intellectual relevance,
international importance, and institutional development (Bankowsky 2006). As opposed
to biennials that are curated exhibitions showing selected works, presenting visual
narratives, and seeking global representativeness, art fairs lacking an overarching
curatorial theme allow a wide variety of galleries to bring their artists to the art market
(Tang 2011: 76). As international events present in many metropolitan centers, biennales,
by contrast, are organized by independent curators that survey global art trends, draw on
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current intellectual developments, and put hosting cities on the map of global visibility.
While art fairs cater to the tastes of wealthy collectors attending them, rather than
expressing a single curatorial vision, their proliferation, however, puts the pressure on
galleries to commission an increasing amount of works for the art market regardless of
critical success, artistic quality, or curatorial interest (Saltz 2005, Tang 2011: 89).
Not infrequently represented as transnational and cosmopolitan phenomena,
biennials are claimed to affect the relations between global centers and peripheries.
Metropolitan centers, such as Shanghai, newly attaining prominence in the global art
world increase their visibility through international attention, ideas, and art these events
attract (Basualdo 2010, Weiss 1997). Biennials can also connect hosting locations to
global cultural capitals, trends, and figures in an effort to offset postcolonial imbalances
in terms in which non-Western art was represented at large-scale international exhibitions,
such as Magiciens de la terre at the Center Pompidou in 1989 (Griffin 2003, Tang 2007:
265-266, 2011: 79, Weiss 1997). Often biennials, such as the Singapore Biennale,
contribute to urban revitalization by inaugurating art spaces, rehabilitating historical
quarters, and stimulating cultural consumption, while positioning their hosting cities as
global tourist destinations through installations and site-specific art (Kwon 2004,
Stallabrass 2004: 26). As biennials become ubiquitous venues for exhibiting
contemporary art, these global events engage in cultural competition with one another,
since they more frequently have an urban or national focus, than possess a regional or an
independent identity, as does Manifesta (Griffin 2003, Tang 2011: 79, 90). Hosting
biennial exhibitions and maintaining presence at global cultural arenas, such as the
Venice Biennale, lend themselves to national image-making through international
recognition that critically acclaimed and publicly resonant artworks may bring (Martinez
2009, Moss 2009, Stallabrass 2004: 37).
Even though some biennials may forgo an international curatorial focus in order
to reinforce regional ties by their choice of artists, most biennales exhibit artists from as
many continents as possible, widely network with curators around the world, and reflect
the post-Cold War geography of global capitalism (Tang 2011: 80). As economic
globalization brought global centers and peripheries into closer proximity, biennials
express this networked condition through artworks exploring issues of identity,
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citizenship, and sovereignty as matters of national and international representation at art
exhibitions, where diversity and multiculturalism are reflected. In an indication of the
growing autonomy of the global art world, national identities become only loosely
associated with the international representation of nation-states at biennials (Belting
2009). The mobility of artists increasingly dissociates the geography of their national
origin from the cultural topography of their residence in global metropolises (Tang 2011:
81, Wu 2009). While Western artists cease to represent the absolute majority of artists at
art biennials, non-Western artists increasingly present at international exhibitions
predominantly reside in New York, London, Berlin, and Paris (Wu 2009: 110-111). Since
at biennials developing countries largely continue to be represented by artists residing in
global cities and identifying with global culture, the association of these artists with the
processes of globalization, transnationalization, and denationalization expresses their
international identities at art exhibitions (Sassen 1998a: xxiii-xxx, Tang 2011: 81).
Even though cultural differences between global centers and peripheries are
produced, reproduced, and augmented through their incorporation into the interpretation
of postcolonial, national, and global histories at art biennials, such as the Guangzhou
Triennial, international art exhibitions explore emerging global configurations of
economic, cultural, and social relations as their conditions. Biennials aim to reflect
critically on urban experience, space, and culture, while probing into practices that
constitute cosmopolitan identities within an increasingly differentiated field of global
mobility, inclusion, and exclusion, where global cities serve as nodes in deterritorialized,
non-governmental, and non-state networks of economic and cultural flows (Sassen 1998b:
82, 92, Tang 2011: 82). Reflecting the neo-liberal emphasis on flexibility, deregulation,
and global flows, contemporary art exhibitions constitute ephemeral zones of
autonomous aesthetic practices (Bey 2003). At art exhibitions, international artists and
curators act as cultural brokers between different places, regions, and networks (Bydler
2004, Stallabrass 2004: 6). While creativity, nonconformism, and risk-taking become
increasingly incorporated into models of economic development, artists are losing their
autonomy from the art market positioned by the global economy at the forefront of
cultural exports. As policies oriented at nurturing flexible labor and creative economy
modeled on the arts sector are being adopted in China, its biennial art exhibitions reflect
294
efforts to stimulate the growth of local creative industries considered to be central
components of global competitiveness in areas of knowledge economy, advanced
services, and innovative development (Tang 2011: 86).
Since creative industries policies are not interchangeable with the state support of
the arts, art biennials are not exclusive sites of the production and display of
contemporary art. Thus, biennales can represent global and local communities,
accommodate cultural and social differences, and substitute long-term education,
commission, and exchange frameworks to a limited extent only. Nevertheless, art
biennials have proved to be singularly flexible, inclusive, and popular institutions that
over the last two decades have brought global peripheries into Western cultural circuits
(Wu 2007: 379). While in the West, non-Western curators offer alternative and non-
Eurocentric perspectives, Western curators provide access to the international art world
that non-Western biennials seek to integrate into, rather than to connect with their
neighboring countries (Wu 2007: 379-380). Despite regional collaboration, such as
between biennials in Shanghai, Singapore, and Gwangju, Asian biennales prioritize
networking with Western artists and curators, rather than targeting local or regional
audiences. While Western participants in Asian biennials may represent their validation
in the art world, Asian countries are in competition to bring their contemporary art to
Western international exhibitions, such as the Venice Biennale. In Venice, separate
pavilions holding collateral and independent exhibitions were established by Taiwan in
1995, by Singapore and Hong Kong in 2001, by China in 2005, and by Macao in 2007
(Wu 2007: 380).
In this respect, international exhibitions have played an important role in
connecting China to the global art world, since Chinese contemporary artists took part for
the first time in the Venice Biennale in 1993 (Wang 2009: 54). Receiving additional
international attention at the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1994, Chinese contemporary art was
represented in a temporary pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1995. This was followed
with an expanded show co-organized by the widely recognized curator Harald Szeeman
at the 1999 Venice Biennial (Li 2006a, 2006b). At the same time, with the support of the
local government China’s first art fair was held in Guangzhou in 1995 and had included
international participants in 1996 (Wang 2009: 55). Furthermore, China’s first biennial
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art exhibition took place at the Shanghai Art Museum in 1996. 1997 saw the inauguration
of the Shanghai Art Fair and an official exhibition of Chinese contemporary art in Beijing.
Reflecting increased participation by Chinese galleries in the international art fairs, such
as the Basel Art Fair, the Shanghai Biennale was transformed into an international event
involving into its exhibitions global curators and foreign artists in 2000 (Wang 2009: 55-
56). Consequently, in the 2000s various international biennial exhibitions and art fairs,
such as Art Beijing, Shanghai Art Fair, and ShContemporary, proliferated across China’s
major cities, where shows and events dedicated to urban, regional, and global art scenes
started to be routinely held (Li 2006a).
While the Giardini park reflects the centrality of countries that have historically
been taking part in the exhibition, the arrival of Asian pavilions illustrates the shifting
relations between global centers with a colonial past, such as the United Kingdom, and
rising peripheries asserting their identity at the Venice Biennale (Wu 2007: 381). Even
though its pavilion is a late-comer to the Arsenale, the second exhibition complex of the
biennale, China arrived to Venice when Chinese contemporary art became one of the
most sought-after in the international art market. Since they represent national and
minority identities within the framework of international cooperation and cultural policies,
art biennials are highly publicized global events that reflect continuities and ruptures in
relationships between global centers and postcolonial peripheries with respect to art and
culture. For global peripheries having a presence at biennials is tantamount to the
recognition of their identities in spaces where imagined centrality and marginality is
presently reorganized to accommodate their entry into the international art world (Said
1993: 52). However, despite the worldwide popularity of art biennials, artistic careers
continue to be launched from global cities, such as New York, London, and Berlin, which
is especially the case for artists from global peripheries seeking international recognition
(Wu 2007: 385).
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Part 2: Asian Art Biennials between Globalization Processes and the Global Art
World
Even though contemporary art has been enjoying increasing levels of international
recognition, in the early 1990s art history remained focused on Europe and North
America to the exclusion of aesthetically or geographically marginal art (Figueiredo 1994:
105-116). The modernist artistic canon dominating art exhibitions also established an
opposition between high art and popular culture, such as that between European
modernism and Brazilian carnival (Vergne 2003: 18). However, the crisis that art history
and museum practices presently find themselves in echoes the historical ruptures, the
social transitions, and the epistemological breaks of the last thirty years that displaced the
West from its former centrality. Since the 1960s, independence, decolonization, and
liberation movements questioned Eurocentric discourses and their validity claims,
especially vis-à-vis the ensuing global restructuring (Vergne 2003: 18). The post-Soviet
transitions in Eastern Europe, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the end of apartheid in
South Africa have led to the world economy, the borderless communication, and the
rising peripheries of the twenty-first century (Sassen 1997: 737). As the world became
increasingly interdependent through rapid connections across vast distances that
communication networks and information technology enabled, international economic
exchanges relying on money markets, banking systems, and stock exchanges further
facilitated globalization (Mazrui 2001: 97, Vergne 2003: 18-19).
Being inextricably linked with the nation-state, globalization is also associated
with international consequences of continued economic development, such as accelerated
environmental degradation, growing economic inequalities, and spreading cultural
homogenization. However, rather than describing an opposition between the West and
the rest of the world, globalization comprises multiple processes whereby countries
globally jostle for extending their cultural and economic influence regionally and
internationally (Appadurai 1996). As economy, society, and culture become more global
around the world, cultural interrelationships are increasingly rearticulated around
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inclusive aesthetic epistemologies that international art exhibitions, such as the Venice
Biennale, the Shanghai Biennale, and the Gwangju Biennale, address from multiple
perspectives, rather than exclusively based on European or American artistic canons
(Burbach et al. 1997). While Western cultural dominance is increasingly questioned
globally, art biennials explore alternative art histories that postcolonial, postmodern, and
poststructural scholarship informs, as curators and artists address international
implications of the historical ruptures of the past decades beyond their Western
interpretations (Vergne 2003: 19). Since the late twentieth century, international biennials,
independent curators, and universities have critically examined exhibition practices, art
history, and cultural programming, in order to bring into art and cultural institutions
alternative, non-Eurocentric, and interdisciplinary ideas that describe aesthetic
developments on global margins.
As art institutions explore alternative historical narratives in an attempt to
accommodate multiple cultures and view-points at art exhibitions, art biennials adopt
exhibition practices and educational strategies oriented toward a broad range of audiences
not necessarily familiar with modern or contemporary art (Krauss 1983, Vergne 2003:
20). Art museums and biennials focus on education to expand their capability to engage
in a dialogue with plural concepts, cultures, and audiences. As non-hegemonic, rather
than authoritative, spaces, art institutions generate practices, scholarship, and
interpretations placing an emphasis on difference as their guiding principle (Freire 2000).
Furthermore, as part of their mission, art museums seek to integrate different
complementary views and traditions into their institutional practices. Museums make
efforts to respond continuously to global developments, to juxtapose disparate
phenomena at their exhibitions, and to reconcile archival preservation with aesthetic
change (Foucault 1986, Vergne 2003: 20). As modernity appears to be no longer
associated with the West, attempts at mapping international culture, historical
discontinuities, and global differences have led to calls for tracing transitions composing
globalization as a cultural phenomenon not restricted to a single definition (Bhabha 1994:
217), but allowing for multiple representations through global art exhibitions, where
modernity is reformulated in view of different art histories, artistic practices, and
aesthetic forms (Appadurai 2001: 15, Chevrier 1999-2001, Fanon 1967).
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The notion of modernity can be defined as a European phenomenon dating from
the early nineteenth century, as a universalist epistemological practice privileging reason
and knowledge or as an historical period with geographical boundaries and philosophical
affinities (Vergne 2003: 21). As opposed to the connection Western philosophy created
between knowledge, history, and analytical thought, contemporary theoretical discourse
no longer restricts modernity to Western culture, history, and geography (Foucault 1984:
38, Hall 2001). For Hall (2001: 19), modernity is a plural phenomenon whose artistic
expressions increasingly relativize its association with the West, while being constantly
transformed by multiple histories, representatives, and canons that translate modernism
into local contexts, practices, and forms. As international exhibitions authored by
independent curators started to appear in the late 1960s, such as Harald Szeemann’s
When Attitudes Become Form: Live in Your Head in 1969 in Bern, Switzerland,
contemporary art transformed artistic practice through the notions of conceptual art,
earthworks, abstraction, and process art deployed for site-specific and formally self-
reflexive works. While the language of art that was internationally formulated in the
1960s retains its contemporary relevance, the transformations of artistic practice that echo
global developments are no longer restricted to European or American exhibitions
(Vergne 2003: 21-22). Thus, perceiving modern history in terms of permanent change,
artistic practices originating in the late 1960s reformulate modernism in relation to
different cultures, rather than represent a new artistic tradition.
As global shifts in economic, cultural, and social relations continue to redefine
artistic practices in terms of aesthetic engagement with everyday life, urban space, and
site specificity (Oiticica 1991), contemporary artistic practices put into question the
institutional autonomy of museum and gallery exhibitions. Contemporary art critically
reflects on spatial relations, in-between locations, artistic performativity, museum
authority, and its subversive potential as concepts that can contribute to an
interdisciplinary exploration of cultural practices, emancipation movements, and
everyday life (Vergne 2003: 22, Wayne 2000). As artistic representations deconstruct
social systems, critique social stereotypes, and appropriate aesthetic devices,
contemporary art problematizes everyday life, explores economic relationships, and
reflects on cultural crises as part of reconciling social relevance with aesthetic forms.
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Likewise, deterritorialization, urbanization, and capitalism are treated by contemporary
art in the context of estrangement effects, viewer responsibility, and aesthetic
engagement that works using ethnographic artifacts and documentary materials can
suggest (Vergne 2003: 23). As a modernist aesthetics of abstraction is adopted in
contemporary works utilizing traditional materials, craft skills, and ethnic artifacts, a
critical stance toward art history, perception, and production can be achieved. Thus,
complex practices, aesthetic models, and distribution networks that artists located on
global peripheries deploy translate Western aesthetic discourse into hybrid works that are
positioned in between different cultures, histories, and narratives (Bhabha 1994: 38,
Vergne 2003: 23).
By focusing on urban spaces, architectural forms, and alternative communities,
contemporary art strives to generate new knowledge through practices incorporating
photo-documentation, moving images, and found footage deriving from popular culture,
computer games, music videos, and Hollywood cinema (Adelson 2001: 246). Realist
representation, documentary films, and site-specific installations record economic
transitions, such as Beijing or Shanghai’s development, trace urban dislocation, and
indicate civic responsibility, while allowing local practices, global culture, and
community involvement to redefine relations between art and cities (Vergne 2003: 24).
As a consequence of globalization, artists are increasingly highlighting their difference at
art biennials, such as the Gwangju Biennale and the Shanghai Biennale, where
independent organizations, artist groups, and alternative platforms that have been
affecting artistic production and distribution over the last two decades in Europe and Asia
are saliently present (Hou 2003). These exhibition, educational, and production platforms
negotiate the relation between the global and the local through community collaborations,
digital initiatives, and urban involvement (Hou 2003). At art biennials, exhibitions are
increasingly reoriented toward project presentation, immediate experience, and
interdisciplinary works, rather than museum displays, aesthetic contemplation, and clear-
cut artistic genres, such as cinema and performing arts. However, even though European
avant-garde movements, such as Dada, Bauhaus, and Surrealism, led to Fluxus, body art,
and happenings among other interdisciplinary art forms in the 1960s, video art and multi-
300
media works are not widely represented at permanent exhibitions in museums or art
historical shows at biennials (Vergne 2003: 25).
As everyday materials, popular culture, and scientific knowledge become parts of
contemporary artworks, local artistic practices from emerging global peripheries borrow
ideas from sociology, urban studies, anthropology, and humanities to transform
exhibition spaces into process- and audience-oriented environments (Mudimbe 2001: 17).
The redefinition of art institutions in terms of the relations between external communities
and artistic events places an emphasis on everyday life, minimalist aesthetics, and non-
monumental works, as opposed to the high production values of the mainstream
contemporary art (Balibar 1997). As it adopts critical practices to reinvent marginal
aesthetics based on traditional, everyday, and local elements, contemporary art presents
alternative subject positions through film narratives, documentary works, and
performance art (Vergne 2003: 26). Even though, in contrast to modernism and avant-
garde movements, contemporary art does not appear to produce aesthetically new works,
the globalization of art practices and institutions suggests that historical artistic models
are subject to change (Becker 1994). Under the influence of globalization, art exhibitions
became sites for constant experimentation, subversive culture, and marginal practices that
are selectively determined by alternative art histories, multiple disciplines and theories,
and local artistic genealogies (Vergne 2003: 27). Thus, contemporary art becomes
organized around events where artworks are presented, communicated about, and made
into spectacle for which art institutions provide necessary conditions as central and
definitive locations in the art world (Hou 2003: 36).
Since the relationships between local changes and globalization are widely
reflected in artistic and cultural discussions of their interdependence as mutually binding
and dynamic phenomena, art is implicated in global cultural transformations through the
contribution that art events, such as international biennials, make to generating local
identity by foregrounding cultural differences in the global context (Appadurai 1996).
While cultural differences add significance to locations on global peripheries as sites
where different modernities are generated, artists from around the world challenge
established definitions of art in response to interdisciplinary, multicultural, and
sociological premises of contemporary art (Hou 2003: 36). The global art world changes
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in response to the impact fluid networks, hybrid spaces, and contrasting cultures have on
artistic discourse that pursues an anti-hegemonic critique of art institutions, modernist
aesthetics, and universalist assumptions (Hardt and Negri 2000). As local cultural
institutions become part of urban revitalization initiatives, alternative art spaces on global
peripheries represent global shifts that transnational corporations, changing consumption
patterns, and non-governmental organizations bring to international relations as part of
which contemporary art promotes cultural diversity and hybridity (Bey 2003). Being an
increasingly dynamic, global, and vibrant region, Asia seeks to put its contemporary art
on the global map through supporting infrastructures, art events, and alternative spaces.
These events, such as the Shanghai Biennale, react to urban development by focusing on
community-involving projects, film, art, and video festivals, and experimental artistic
platforms (Hou 2003: 37-38).
Contemporary artists respond to social, economic, and cultural crises by exploring
established norms, proposing solutions to problems, and forming transregional networks
through meetings, conferences, and exhibitions, where international artistic collaboration
is established. Thus, non-Western artistic practices start transforming the global art world
through international events, such as the Shanghai Biennale, where experimental works
are created, exhibited, and discussed. As significant global events, art biennials reflect
cultural ambitions that stress both local cultural characteristics and openness to
international exchanges (Hou 2005: 57). The participation of international artists
contributes to the process of constructing a local identity of art events, such as the
Shanghai Biennale, the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial, and the Sydney Biennale, by
highlighting their singularity vis-à-vis other biennials nationally, regionally, and
internationally. Proliferating art biennials increasingly emphasize their urban, national, or
regional specificity, such as the Manifesta Biennial, while exploring innovative
possibilities to achieve significance in terms of global cultural exchanges, regional artistic
collaboration, and local responses to globalization (Appadurai 1996). Since global
cultural production reflects social, cultural, and economic divisions, local art scenes find
their expression in biennials, where cultural contradictions, conflicts, and flows connect
localities to their global counterparts in a self-reflexive, critical, and creative process of
crossing cultural boundaries (Appadurai 1996: 198, Hou 2005: 57-58).
302
As cities around the world increasingly compete for global visibility, cross-border
migration, technological dissemination, and global communication promote the global
culture of electronic media, mainstream entertainment, and vehicular languages.
Concomitantly, economies, societies, and individuals become transformed by the
reorganization of regional and international relations around virtual communities, hybrid
cultures, and invented lifestyles (Appadurai 1996: 198). In this context, art biennials are
events that both promote their hosting cities on the global map and produce local
identities. International cultural exchanges, artistic discourses, and artists reinforce these
local identities in response to globalization generating open, hybrid, and innovative
localities (Bhabha 1994). Rather than being closely related to nation-states, cultural
identities are continuously transformed, as global distinctions between Eastern and
Western cultures are attenuated through hybridization (Hou 2005: 59). As economic
globalization, consumer society, and electronic communication become everyday
phenomena around the world, global popular culture associated with pluralism, hybridity,
and interactivity increasingly affects everyday life, while deepening economic disparities
call forth a continuous critique of global capitalism. Given that consumer society became
a global cultural phenomenon, the commodification of urban spaces, such as heritage
districts, contributing to the economic revitalization of cities is met with critical
commentary that contemporary art reappropriating media images of everyday life makes
(Hou 2005: 60).
Global and local changes become the focus of contemporary art drawing on
global flows of information, communication, and migration, in order to explore
immaterial, unstable, and ephemeral phenomena (Hou 2005: 61-62). Thus, artistic
reactions to globalization represent alternative insights, non-mainstream positions, and
fragmented experiences that are open to global, historical, and subjective interpretations
that relate to their urban contexts through art biennials (Appadurai 1996). However, while
they became associated with spectacular event culture, global capitalism, and tourist-
oriented entertainment, such as amusement parks, art biennials, sometimes perceived as
globalized festivals, can also be considered to be unpropitious to producing serious art
(Schjeldahl 1999). Nevertheless, also being alternative sites of artistic experimentation
that flexibly respond to developments in contemporary art that museums fail to reflect,
303
biennials are sites where utopian visions, identity politics, ethical questions, and
postcolonial histories are uniquely represented (Filipovic et al. 2010: 13). While also
being exhibition sites and spectacular events, biennials are interpreted as discursive
environments where theoretical, speculative, and interdisciplinary arguments on
contemporary society, culture, and everyday life are staged (Hlavajova 2010, Hoskote
2010). Between the 1895 Venice Biennale and the proliferation of close to two hundred
biennial exhibitions currently, the founding of the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1951, the
defunct Paris Biennial in 1959, and the Sydney Biennial in 1973 established biennales as
art institutions in their contemporary form as largely bi-yearly international events.
The later proliferation of biennials reflected the transformation of the art world,
where art fairs grew in importance, art journals rapidly increased in number, curating
courses became institutionalized, and contemporary art started to attract general public
(Filipovic et al. 2010: 13-14). Biennials launched in global peripheries, such as the
Havana Biennale founded in 1984, started to increase rapidly their presence in the art
world in the 1990s and 2000s, when Shanghai, Moscow, Liverpool, Bucharest, Taipei,
Lyon, Johannesburg, and Berlin among other cities added biennial contemporary art
exhibitions to their cultural profiles. Being large-scale, international, and periodical
exhibitions, biennials can be distributed across several urban locations, have site-
specificity through commissioned artworks, and involve conferences, scholarly
publications, and accompanying journals (Filipovic et al. 2010: 14). Recurrently showing
overviews of contemporary art and utilizing varying exhibition formats, biennials are
contested events whose emergence as institutional, conceptual, and aesthetic phenomena
is at the center of debates over their general relevance and critical currency. As platforms
that have been giving rise to public debates and provocative artworks, such as Haake’s
Germania produced for the 1993 Venice Biennale, biennials prompt critical reflection on
historical, cultural, and social issues (Filipovic et al. 2010: 15). As definitive events
reflecting social and cultural change, these exhibitions also create relationships between
artworks they present and viewers experiencing their relation to space, architecture,
culture, and history within which these events take place (McEvilley 1993).
While it was museum and gallery exhibitions that have historically mediated
access to and knowledge of classical and modern art (Greenberg et al. 1996: 2), biennial
304
exhibitions appear to be the primary means of access to contemporary art. Over the last
several decades, biennials have become highly visible sites for generating public
discourse around contemporary art with implications for its reception, history, and
conceptualization. These implications put an analytical emphasis on the spatial context
where artworks gain visibility, rather than on individual works (Clark 2010a, Ferguson
and Hoegsberg 2010). Even though the history of contemporary art revolves around
biennial exhibitions, these large-scale, recurring events that inspire conferences, lectures,
and debates are only gradually becoming legitimate subjects of scholarly discourse on art
history in the context of globalization (Basualdo 2010, Bydler 2004, Filipovic et al. 2010:
16). As globally prominent cultural phenomena, biennials are central to the understanding
of contemporary art whose context is inseparably implicated in its interpretation through
exhibitions, rather than through autonomous works of art only (Clark 2010a, Derrida
1967: 227-228, 1976: 158). The awareness of exhibitions as actively and self-reflexively
constructing the meaning of artworks grows in response to global power shifts that the
increasing number of biennials and the prominence of independent curators indicate.
Consequently, the theoretical importance of these biennial exhibitions as major
contemporary phenomena has gradually developed in relation to the more visible
biennials, such as the Venice Biennale and Documenta (Alloway 1968, Brenson 1998,
Buren 2010, Filipovic et al. 2010: 17).
305
Part 3: The Shanghai Biennale, the World Expositions, and the Commodification of
Art
While biennials both at global peripheries, such as the Shanghai Biennale, and elsewhere
have subjected the Eurocentric bias of art history to critique (Basualdo 2010), the
historical origins of biennial exhibitions are not unrelated to the European universal
expositions and world fairs (Mosquera 1992, Pastor Roces 2010, Preziosi 2003). Arising
in this historical context, the Venice Biennale has served as a model for the display of
cultural patrimony that takes place at global biennials marked by considerable cultural
differences reflecting their particular local circumstances (Filipovic et al. 2010: 18, Jones
2010, Niemojewski 2010). Historically founded in response to local development needs,
marginal cultural positioning, and urban regeneration projects, biennials have evolved to
represent the global art world, rather than Western cultures only (Enwezor 2003). As
ephemeral institutions lacking the permanence of museums, biennials are unstable,
discontinuous, and fluid events that do not allow generalizations from their particular
editions escaping strict definitions (Basualdo 2010, Hlavajova 2010). Even though
comparable to art fairs and other institutions in the art world, biennials differ from
museums in the distance they take from the Enlightenment premises, institutional
authority, and historical canons of the latter. At the same time, biennials serve as sites of
contingent experimentation, probing inquiry, and artistic relevance (Verwoert 2010).
Biennials have reflected the transformation of contemporary art brought about by
the continued influence of artistic experimentation in the 1960s, the social, economic, and
cultural impact of globalization, and the demise of artistic genius, aura, and autonomy as
points of conceptual reference (Filipovic et al. 2010: 20). As art production and biennials
appear to be increasingly interdependent, biennial exhibitions became important
institutions exerting reciprocal influence on art museums with which they share
theoretical discourses, display formats, and cultural functions (Ferguson and Hoegsberg
2010, Hlavajova 2010, Verwoert 2010). Furthermore, the emergence of independent
curators in the 1960s is inseparably connected to the proliferation of biennials as critical
306
public spheres where the shift from artistic practices to curatorial discourses as focal
points of these events has occurred (Clark 2010a, Martini and Martini 2010, O'Neill 2007,
Raqs Media Collective 2010, Sheikh 2009). As global phenomena, art biennials prompted
the writing of alternative, self-reflexive, and non-Western art histories that described how
biennial exhibitions taking place in societies in transition differ from their Western
counterparts, such as the Venice Biennale (Hoskote 2010, Konaté 2010, Marchart 2010,
Marschall 1999, Mosquera 2010, Spricigo 2010). Promulgating counter-narratives,
experimentation, and global art, biennials are intimately and controversially linked to
cultural globalization through their inclusion of non-Western artistic practices,
distribution of Western exhibition models, and consolidation of mainstream culture
(Baker 2010, Enwezor 2003, Filipovic et al. 2010: 23-24). Thus, due to their importance
for local and global histories of contemporary art, biennials draw attention to the dynamic
interdependence between artworks, contexts, and exhibitions that reflect contemporary
culture, the international art world, and local cultural policies.
Culturally connecting and synchronizing global centers and peripheries, art events
probe the universality assumptions of art history, as local artists explore the implications
contemporary art has for their identity in the global art world (Bydler 2011: 464, Wu
2008: 11). However, artworks circulating locally and internationally do not equally
belong to contemporary art as a global aggregate of current artistic concepts, practices,
and traditions that distinguish between local artistic experimentation and the international
art market closely linked to North America and Europe (Bydler 2011: 465, Wu 2008: 12).
The relations between contemporary art and globalization have institutional, sociological,
and economic aspects whose relationship to works, practices, and discourses is mediated
by art history, auction houses, museums and galleries (Belting 1987, 2003, Belting et al.
2009, Boullata 2008, Busca 2000, Bydler 2004, Clark 2010b, Reilly and Nochlin 2007,
Smith et al. 2003, Smith 2009, Zijlmans and Damme 2008). As contemporary art has
become increasingly global, traditional art history became a subject of critical
interrogations since the 1960s and 1970s, since postcolonial movements, cultural
transformations, and identity politics found growing reflection at art exhibitions, museum
collections, art theory, and conference panels (Bydler 2004, 2011: 465, Fisher 1994,
307
Harris 2001: 15-16, 27, 261-290, Hassan and Finley 2008, Mercer 2005a, 2006, 2008,
Mosquera 1996).
Though remaining connected to European and Western art history, theory, and
institutions, such as museums, markets, and periodicals, contemporary art as a
cosmopolitan phenomenon is increasingly generated at international exhibitions (Beck
2006, Breckenridge 2002, Mercer 2005a). Marked not only by international exchanges
and openness to the public, but also by opaque selectivity, global orientation, and
challenging concepts, art biennials are platforms for theoretical discourse, curator
statements, and accompanying essays that rely on professional networks for staging these
art events (Bydler 2011: 466-467). Despite the efforts by art institutions, such as
museums, auction houses, and galleries, to increase audience participation, art biennials
remain sites of global collaboration taking place through social networks connecting art
dealers, collectors, and professionals. As a more cosmopolitan Chinese city, Shanghai is
part of the image the Shanghai Biennale projects as an international event that regularly
invites foreign curators, museum directors, and art professors to co-organize its
exhibitions, such as its 2006 HyperDesign edition (Bydler 2011: 468-469). While its
exhibitions cross interdisciplinary boundaries with artists, architects, and designers
challenging definitions of contemporary art, the temporality of the global art world, and
linear Eurocentric narratives of art history, this biennial explores relationships between
postmodernism, avant-garde, and modernity and their local appropriations (Fang and Xu
2006). As it contrasts concepts of modernism and postmodernism with global art, the
Shanghai Biennale seeks to be a counter-hegemonic contributor to contemporary art that
reacting to social, economic, and cultural shifts redefines its meaning in the context of
locality, hybridity, and marginality (Bydler 2011: 469, Fang and Xu 2006).
The Shanghai Biennale relates artistic practices to everyday life, historical
narratives, and futuristic visions that highlight local cultural differences from Western
and European constructions of contemporary art. Since the global art world composed of
art museums, criticism, historiography, education, production, the market, and audiences
originated in Europe (Bourdieu 1992, 1996: 122, 124, Danto 1964, 1997, Dickie 1984,
Luhmann 1995, 2000), contemporary art is considered to be a Western phenomenon
(Karlholm 2004: 65, 171, 253). Representing Western influence on global peripheries,
308
local fields of contemporary art are frequently restricted to art centers, museums, and
galleries that give access to the international art market through highly selective
exhibitions (Bydler 2011: 470-471). Given that important contemporary art exhibitions
often exert considerable local influence through the market exposure they grant,
contemporary artists seeking global attention take recourse to art fairs participation, art
gallery exhibitions, and state-funded projects, such as art biennials. Familiarity with
recognized artworks, taking part in artistic discussions, and inclusion into art exhibitions
that constitute contemporary artistic practices are closely related to art museums,
academies, and criticism. Thus, global margins, where art museums and education
significantly differ from their Western counterparts, give rise to contemporary art initially
disconnected from modern art history (Hallam 2007, Möntmann 2006). Emerging in
nineteenth-century Europe, modern museums, expositions, festivals, and other
spectacular events operate as heterotopic spaces, where artifacts, visitors, and narratives
intermingle in contexts creating relationships between displayed works and exhibiting
institutions (Bennett 1995: 1, Bydler 2011: 472, Foucault 1986).
With art institutions becoming implicated in the production of artworks,
international exhibitions, art biennials, and arts festivals differ from museums in their
global orientation in terms of inclusive art history, non-linear narratives, and parallel
historical developments (Elkins 2002, 2007). While economic globalization, cultural
cooperation, and global mobility make art museums into popular event spaces reviewed
by magazines, visited by collectors, and debated by critics, international art exhibitions
are constitutive sites for global art history (Bydler 2011: 473, Chakrabarty 2000). Rather
than defined in relation to modernism, postmodernism, or museums, contemporary art,
thus, is not unlike avant-garde movements whose critical practices seeking to abolish the
distinction between art and life continue to be adopted despite the commodification of
their artworks on the art market (Barlow 1997, Buchloh 1990, Bürger 1980, 1984,
Gaonkar 2001, Smith 2009). As opposed to the rarefied, self-reflexive, and autonomous
concerns of historical avant-garde art, contemporary art professes communitarian,
cosmopolitan, and heteronomous attitudes (Bydler 2011: 474). However, contemporary
artists operate through stressing their individual, local, and personal voices that represent
the present situation from their particular geographic, social, and cultural positioning
309
being inevitably fragmentary, contingent, and ephemeral (Benjamin 1988: 254, Hu 2008:
4, 58-59, 95-99). As art history is being recognized as a hegemonic construct operating
by selective inclusion, previously marginal artists are increasingly recuperated as relevant
for a globally informed understanding of contemporary art redefining its relation to
diverse artistic traditions (Benjamin 1988: 247-248, Bydler 2011: 474-475, Nochlin
1973).
Among the effects of China’s economic development on its culture is the
integration of Chinese contemporary art and cinema into circuits of cultural globalization
that the Shanghai Biennale exemplifies (Berger 2000). Being followed by the Guangzhou
Triennial launched in 2002 and the Beijing Biennale in 2003, the Shanghai Biennale
represents for local critics and curators a postmodern transition toward the acceptance of
contemporary and avant-garde art in China (Lin 2010: 206). Over time, the Shanghai
Biennale has become a global cultural event involving curators from Asia, Europe, and
North America, important contemporary artists from around the world, and wide
audience attention, such as its 2006 edition establishing its regional reputation and
influence. Furthermore, China’s permanent pavilion opened at the Venice Biennale in
2005 indicates not only the growing global visibility of Chinese contemporary art, but
also the changing policies with regard to art and culture in China (Lin 2010: 208).
Organizing this biennial, the Shanghai Art Museum aims to become a regionally and
globally recognized site of academic, artistic, and cultural exchanges via international
exhibitions featuring contemporary art. Mediating between the state support for
contemporary art, cultural policies of the city of Shanghai, and local artistic communities,
the Shanghai Biennale also reflects the increasing commercialization of Chinese
contemporary art vis-à-vis its success at the global art market (Wu and Wang 2010: 396).
In the 2000s, the Shanghai Biennial gave the impetus for the emergence of
biennials in other Chinese cities, where the Chengdu Biennale, the Shenzhen Biennale,
and the Guangzhou Triennial started to be held. These biennials have been receiving
municipal, provincial, and private funding for contemporary art exhibitions reflecting
Western artistic styles and global theoretical discourses. In the 2000s, Chinese
contemporary artists have become widely represented via exhibitions at Western
museums and biennials, such as the Venice Biennale, in response to China’s internal
310
changes and its growing globalization (Wu and Wang 2010: 397). Both domestic
biennials and overseas exhibitions reflect fundamental cultural changes in China, where
contemporary artistic and curatorial practices have become increasingly adopted at public
museums, such as the Shanghai Art Museum, incorporating artistic experimentation,
educational programs, and research projects into their activity. Since the 1990s, Shanghai
and Beijing’s private art museums and exhibition spaces, such as the Ullens Center for
Contemporary Art, spurred in their development by the rapidly growing art market have
been promoting contemporary art in China with their spacious premises, curatorial
expertise, and ambitious programming (Wu and Wang 2010: 398). However, the
proliferation of private art spaces, public museums, and commercial galleries has
transformed Chinese contemporary art from being unofficial and alternative to becoming
pervasively commercial in the 2000s.
Deriving from the historical Venice Biennale as a universal exhibition and
reflecting the rapid growth of the Asian art market, biennials are becoming a global
phenomenon with a direct impact on urban culture. Moreover, contemporary art biennials
seek to attract local and international visitors with spectacular artworks, popular shows,
and competitive programming. These biennial exhibitions correspond to urban branding
strategies of hosting metropolises as creative cities (Gielen 2009). Mediating between art
exhibitions and global cities, biennials have become marketing tools that bring diverse
audiences to art events, art fairs, and parallel programs usually coinciding with other
global events in their hosting cities, such as the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai (Fairley
2009: 11). Internationally curated exhibitions provide added marketing value as part of
accountability to funding governments, municipalities, and sponsors that bankroll over 60
international art biennials and triennials of which over a third are situated in Asia (Asian
Art Archive 2009). Having seven biennials, numerous art districts, and over 300 galleries,
China experiences an explosive expansion of the art market backed by a rapid growth of
auction houses, cultural districts, and collectors specializing in contemporary art (Fairley
2009: 11). With the number of art fairs skyrocketing globally to 50 in 2008, over a third
of these events take place in Asia. At the same time, galleries from the Asia-Pacific
region are heavily underrepresented at international art fairs, as opposed to a significantly
greater presence of Asian artists at these events.
311
While art fairs, such as ShContemporary in Shanghai, showcasing curated
exhibitions, commissioned works, and global artists become similar to biennales,
biennials and triennials increasingly commission work for collecting institutions that
dominate the contemporary art market (Fairley 2009: 12). Even through shifting their
focus from local art scenes to global trends surveys, biennials in Shanghai, Taipei,
Guangzhou, Busan, Jakarta, and Gwangju have consistently expanded the scale of
participation by both local and international artists and curators (Lee 2009). Since Asian
biennials seek both to participate in the global art world and to engage local audiences,
international curators address urban and regional specificity of these events, bridge
cultural gaps between global centers and peripheries, and represent alternative voices in
the international art market (Seijdel 2009). Translating urban culture into site-specific
artworks, artists make global connections between local social tensions, historical
memories, and utopian visions that international curators frame within biennial
exhibitions representing contemporary art highlights from around the world (Fairley 2009:
13). As part of growing cultural consumption in Asia, art biennials are spectacular events
whose attendance is associated with fashion and luxury that contemporary art enjoys both
cultural and spatial proximity with, such as the Shanghai Gallery of Art in the trendy
Bund area, as an expression of cultural capital (Berghuis 2008: 30).
As spectacular, large-scale, and multi-media artworks that hold audience attention
have become widely present at Asian biennials, they may be indicative of social, cultural,
and economic transformations in the region, where mobile communication, mainstream
entertainment, and personal computers are part of everyday life (Fairley 2009: 13-14).
The overwhelming popularity of the Shanghai Biennale and the ShContemporary art fair
demonstrates that global and local audiences put art events into a critical relationship
with universal expositions and theme parks, since the former are being redefined by
changing everyday life and cultural consumption in Asian cities (Lee 2006). As biennale-
specific artworks attempt to address local audiences within the environments of cultural
consumption that are proximate to Western-style shopping malls, contemporary art
becomes open to critical reflection and social commentary especially in view of the
commodification of art rapidly transforming Asian biennials into spectacular celebrations
of the global art market (Fairley 2009: 14, Holmes 2009). Similarly, the Venice Biennale
312
reviews art production in terms of the present moment, the non-linearity of history, and
globalization, rather than artistic novelty. While contemporary art increasingly pays heed
to the site-specificity of exhibitions and artworks, biennials explore theoretical ideas,
such as phenomenological aesthetics, artistic documentation, and cultural displacement
focusing on minimalist details of everyday objects (Tan 2009: 15-16).
Even though global biennials and triennials proliferating across cities as different
as Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Gwangju, and Istanbul are considered innovative art institutions,
the Venice Biennale remains a representative exhibition for the art world ever since its
beginning in 1895 (Davidson 2010: 719). Closely related to the nineteenth-century
universal expositions that most European and American metropolises have held, this
biennale echoes world’s fairs that also included exhibition spaces for the fine arts
(Benjamin 1999: 907). Thus, the Venice Biennale continues to reflect in its configuration
the global economic preeminence of Europe and North America in the nineteenth century,
since its primary exhibition grounds in the Giardini di Castello are largely reserved for
the pavilions of Western countries, such as Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, and
the United States (Davidson 2010: 719-720, Hobsbawm 1987: 60). At the 2005 edition of
the biennale approximately seventy-five countries and city-states had exhibitions at one
hundred sites. These exhibition sites were separated into the limited-access Giardini area,
the secondary Arsenale spaces, where among others Chinese and Indian pavilions are
situated, and additional galleries along the Grand Canal for other participants, such as
Thailand, Morocco and Indonesia. Reflecting economic globalization (Hardt and Negri
2000), the Venice Biennale continues to represent cultural competition between nation-
states that art exhibitions have historically served as stages for.
The Venice Biennale represents the inclusive contemporary art world in a manner
similar to the utopian visions that circulated at the universal exhibitions of the nineteenth
century as future-oriented dream-worlds (Benjamin 1999: 285). Divorced in their
exhibition from ethnographic objects encouraging cross-cultural comparisons, fine arts
objects from Europe and North America were housed in palatial pavilions, such as the
Palais des Beaux-Arts at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition, set apart from popular
entertainment sites (Davidson 2010: 725-726, Greenhalgh 1988). The emergence of the
Venice Biennale partly reflects the essentialist Eurocentric approach to the fine arts that
313
widely popular world’s fairs applied to judging aesthetic achievements according to the
national origin of artists (Davidson 2010: 730-731). As the colonial expositions became
widely spread and highly visible in the 1930s, they have become controversial due to
their bias against non-Western cultures, as their Surrealist detractors, such as André
Breton, highlighted (Buck-Morss 1989: 323-324, Davidson 2010: 732). As institutions
integrally related to the cultural history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
the world expositions are not unlike contemporary art biennials and triennials in that they
were held annually in metropolitan centers, such as Paris, Chicago, and Glasgow, to
stimulate consumption, create jobs, and promote their countries (Buck-Morss 1989: 323).
Representing global changes, international art biennials also stand in the shadow of
historical continuities with the world’s fairs and the panoramas whose dazzling displays
distracted from the commodity function of these dreamscapes (Benjamin 1999: 3-13).
314
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