Rehearsal - Shanghai Biennale

The eighth Shanghai Biennale was a strange mix of innovative and subtly provocative art, with prosaic, prescribed and uninspiring concoctions. Titled ‘Rehearsal’, the works in the Shanghai Art Museum were Act III in a four-act, one-and-a-half year long project which explores the processes of art creation, production, presentation and dissemination. Within the theme, the suggestion also is that exhibition spaces are not necessarily the final destination for many artworks, but are merely springboards from which artists embark on additional journeys of creativity. While it is an ambitious concept, the result (so far?) can be considered as taking the idea a little too literally, with the inclusion of many works which should never have left the private sanctity of the artist’s studio.

At the core of the ‘Rehearsal’ biennale is the Ho Chi Minh Trail, brought to us by the organisers of the Long March Project, which will sustain the show, along with other separate projects, throughout its four acts. Works from this project are dotted throughout the levels of the Art Museum, but, due to questionable curatorial organisation, were either dwarfed by other works or simply mixed in with unrelated pieces which made them hard to identify, and hence appreciate, as being from the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Particularly on the first floor, where an amalgam of paintings, photographic prints and videos were meshed in with other disparate works, the effect was nothing more than a curatorial mess. This was definitely the part where the ‘rehearsal’ needed a whole lot more tweaking before the final production.

Individually, there were works of impeccable quality and solid concepts. Chinese artist Liu Xiadong’s pair of large-scale paintings depicting the at once hopeless and hopeful aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake are such works. ‘Getting out of Beichuan’ portrays a group of teenage boys in a small boat, seemingly floating directionless, yet peacefully, amidst a flock of white cranes in mid-take off. Adjacent to this is ‘Entering Lake Tai.’ Equally grand in scale, this painting presents a group of young girls poised stoically in the place where their lake once was, against the backdrop of a mountain village in rubbles. Accompanying these pieces are documentary photographs and videos of the artist in the arduous process of painting. This is one example of where the ‘Rehearsal’ theme was perfectly executed.

Of course, not all were as polished or conceptually sound. One ‘installation’ (if you can call hanging up some pieces of paper on a three-walled room an installation, which the organisers of the show did) which prompted a loud “WTF!” and quite a bit of disappointment and resentment from yours truly was Austrian artist Josef Trattner’s wine paintings. Yeah, that’s right, wine. And it was called ‘Blind Taste’. Something was definitely blind in not only the creation, but selection of this work for the biennale. This installation was found in what I came to realise was the Nepotism Corner; a section of the top floor predominated by works which did not appear to fit the theme or any concept of good art, and were probably there through some personal connection with the curators (on the gossip side of the art world, the Shanghai Biennale is apparently notorious for sneaking in friends of those in high places). Trattner’s wine paintings has to be one of them, otherwise the only other explanation for its inclusion in the show is that someone was really drunk (and blind) when the decision was made. While wine can work as a meaningful symbol of civilisation, this was no way to metaphorise it. The works, quite literally a mass of A2 sized paper covered in splotches of either red or white wine and sprinkled with glitter, are supposed to, according to the guidebook, “bring back your deepest memory, arouse the most passionate emotions, and remind you of the mightiness of history.” WTF?!?! By this time, I had major biennale fatigue, having already been through two biennales in five days and I had no patience for such rhetorical fluff and bad art.

Another phenomenon I discovered here was wall text composed in what I can only describe as the strange literary style of socialist rhetoric. This is not necessarily a good or bad thing, just an anomaly amongst all other captions I have read. Whether it be a language/translation barrier, or a real indoctrination of socialist expression that has made its way into the biennale world, the texts seemed to speak directly to the reader, and offer strong suggestions on what we should think and feel about the works. The above quote is one example amongst many that caught me off guard and left me feeling like I had just been told how to think, but in the nicest of ways.

So that is the spectrum of the quality of works in this very convoluted show. After over a week of reflection, I’m still not sure of what I think of it. While a biennale should not be judged purely for the way in which it interprets and implements its own theme (as many of these are arbitrary and deliberately broad, chosen in order to include almost anything in the show), I feel as though Shanghai, in particular, did not execute its theme adequately at all. That said, many of the works were beautiful, stunning, thought-provoking, moving and just plain good in their own right, and perhaps that’s what I should take from the experience of the Shanghai Biennale. Simply that it was a show with a real mixture of good and bad art. [Image from http://www.supernice.eu/]