twocities White Papers

Subject: The Effect of the 2000 Shanghai Biennale on the

Chinese Contemporary Art Market

Author: Amelia Johnson

Date: July 17, 2007

1. Foreword

2. Significance

3. Analysis

4. Conclusion

I. Foreword

Chinese contemporary art is becoming more prominent among international exhibitions and contemporary art auctions. This paper argues that the 2000 Shanghai Biennale was the turning point for contemporary art within China and explores how this was instrumental in causing Chinese contemporary art to gain an international platform. The paper analyzes the relationship between the Shanghai Biennale and the Chinese contemporary art market outside of China by examining how the 2000 Biennale was influential in the development of the Chinese contemporary art market both inside and outside China.

In addressing this question, the paper is divided into three sections: the Shanghai Biennale before 2000, the changes that took place at the 2000 Biennale and how it impacted the Chinese contemporary art market.

II. Significance

Shanghai Biennale before 2000

The first Shanghai Biennale was held in 1996, but the use of ‘biennale’ in this case is a farce. The 1996 and 1998 biennales consisted of nothing more than Chinese traditional ink paintings. The exhibitions hosted no foreign artists and no media other than painting.¹ Beginning only a year after the first biennale in Asia², the Shanghai Biennale fell far short of the international art world’s expectations.

Changing Influences

By the late 90s Shanghai’s economy was rising at double digit rates. Major building projects were taking place all over the city including the new Pudong Airport, designed by the French architect Paul Andreu (designer of the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris), the Oriental Pearl TV Tower (now the cityscape’s distinguishing feature), and the Universal Financial Center (which upon completion, at 101 stories, will be one of the tallest buildings in the world). As the city developed economically, the government sought to further its international influence by hosting various cultural activities, and even won the bid to host the 2010 World Expo.³ This economic progress and the city’s evolution towards a powerful global force in the East, caused the city government and the Shanghai Biennale committee to realize the event’s potential to portray Shanghai as an artistically open and progressive city; ideas that were absent during the first two biennales.

In addition to these civic developments, an exhibition in 1999 called Art For Sale helped further the artistic development of the international biennale. Organized by a group of young artists, held in a public space and sponsored by non-government agencies⁴, the exhibition displayed works by artists too radical for the museums and galleries in Shanghai. (Napack, 37) Nonetheless Art For Sale gained prominence in the media and other shows of similar content continued to push the boundaries of art set by local authorities. (Higgins, 27)

2000 Shanghai Biennale

Influenced by these exhibitions, the 2000 Shanghai biennale, titled Shanghai Spirit⁵, sought to portray itself as representative of a city embracing modernity. The biennale was expected to be a landmark in the history of contemporary Chinese art as a celebration of the city’s unique ability to blend East and West. (Wu, 2001, p 44)

The biennale committee made several significant changes in an attempt to make the event more avant-garde and to achieve the international status for which it strove. First, the biennale venue, the Shanghai Art Museum (which used to be a jockey house in the British settlement of the 1930s), underwent major refurbishment. The renovation project was made with foreigners in mind; a high-ranking official reportedly interrupted the renovation of the museum to order the use of white marble and chrome so “foreigners can see this is a truly modern museum.” (Napack, 36)

Second, Biennale organizers allowed the first foreign artists to participate. Thirty-four Chinese artists and thirty-three foreign artists from fifteen different countries were organized by four curators: Paris based Hou Hanru, Japanese independent curator Toshio Shimizu and Chinese curators Li Xu and Zhang Qing. Hou and Shimizu handled the foreign participants, including Tatsuo Miyajima, Mariko Mori, Lee Bul, Matthew Barney, Anish Kapoor, On Kawara and Huang Yongping, while curators Li and Zhang organized the Chinese artists. The biennale was meant to serve a nationalistic cause by undermining the dominance of foreign curators in setting the standards of Chinese contemporary art. Paradoxically, the biennale invited two foreign curators instead of the many independent curators in China who had been campaigning for years to organize exhibitions within the country. (Wu, 2001, 47)

A third significant change was that the biennale displayed works other than painting. In fact, installation pieces made up at least half of the event. This was particularly significant because at the time installation art was viewed by government authorities as “alien and potentially disruptive.” (Vine, 31) Ancient forms of calligraphy and ink painting were the dominant mediums shown in the 1996 and 1998 biennales as these art forms are taught by traditionalists in art academies throughout China. Despite the fact that 2000 was more open than previous biennales, this long-held traditionalist attitude was hard to overcome and in January of 2000 reports emerged in the Western press that entries by at least three Chinese artists had been rejected by the biennale selection committee as overly anti-Maoist or “pornographic”. (Vine, 31)

The Chinese artists chosen for the biennale were artists that had been overlooked for international exhibitions like the 1999 Venice Biennale and therefore little known in the West.⁶ The artists’ work lacked loud political messages and extravagant or exotic images. (Nagoya, 113) But that is the precise reason why the artists were chosen. Trying to balance between two extremes of being an open and international biennale that embraces modernity but also having the constraints of a closely monitored communist government sponsored event, these artists were a safe choice.

An unofficial but vitally important addition to the 2000 biennale was the ‘satellite’ exhibitions that sprung up across the city coinciding with the event. Unlike the artists at the official biennale venue, artists of the satellite exhibitions provided a livelier and more confrontational view of Chinese contemporary art. Critics argued that the ‘satellite’ exhibitions were where the real cutting-edge work was.⁷ The works consisted of installation, video and performance, mediums of which the Chinese government was still wary.

The best known satellite exhibition, curated by Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi, was entitled Fuck Off.⁸ The exhibition, located at Eastlink Gallery on Moganshan Lu, featured 50 artists from all over China. Several of the works were controversial including Zhu Yu’s photographic document of a performance of the artist eating a fetus.⁹ Wang Chuyu fasted 100 hours in the attic above the exhibition premises, where he was observed by a camera transmitted to a TV screen in the gallery. Another artist, Yang Zhichao, had his shoulder blade surgically cut open and fresh grass planted into the wound. Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi explained the project like this:

“’Fuck Off’ is an event initiated by a group of curators and artists who share a common identity as ‘alternative’. In today’s art, the ‘alternative’ position entails challenging and criticizing the power discourse and popular conventions. In an uncooperative and uncompromising way, it self-consciously resists the threat of assimilation and vulgarization.”¹⁰ The exhibition was closed by authorities immediately after it opened but has proved to be influential in the contemporary art scene of China in that the exhibition forcefully pushed the limits of art set by government authorities. (Park, 40)

The 2000 Shanghai Biennale was influential both inside and outside the confines of the actual event. The official biennale pushed the limits of the previous biennales and created an international dialog centering on Chinese contemporary art, while the unofficial events pushed the public and private views of art, transcending the controls placed on the 2000 biennale itself. The combination of these two forces brought Chinese art to international attention.

III. Analysis

A large number of artists from the 2000 Shanghai Biennale and satellite exhibitions have risen to international attention and have become influential in the growth of the Chinese contemporary art market.

In 2004, Sotheby’s and Christie’s sold only $22 million worth of Asian contemporary art. In 2006, however, a series of record breaking auctions in Hong Kong, London and New York; in 2004 the auction houses brought in $190 million for Asian contemporary art (mostly Chinese).¹¹ In March last year Sotheby’s New York held their first ‘Contemporary Art Asia’ auction. The 240 lot sale totaled $13,228,960, far exceeding the presale estimate of $8 million.¹² The artists from the biennale and satellite exhibitions have been key players in this growth of the Chinese contemporary art market.

The 2000 Shanghai Biennale and unofficial satellite exhibitions have an extensive list of artists who have sold numerous works at auctions (often times exceeding the upper estimate) and have participated in international exhibitions.

The 2000 Shanghai Biennale was a major event in the artists’ careers, being agents of change for Chinese contemporary art while exposing them to an international audience in which to build rapport. From among the artists who participated, Cai Guoqiang and Liu Xiaodong are particularly significant figures in Chinese contemporary art.

Cai Guoqiang has been commissioned by several leading art institutions to create work, which usually consists of a series of explosions that leave imprints on paper. In the early 90s Cai had one or two exhibitions and performances per year in the East (Japan and Asia Pacific); toward the end of the decade his work was shown in Italy, and New York. Post 2000 Shanghai Biennale however, his projects have become far more numerous and widely shown, with exhibitions across Europe and the United States. One of Cai’s most well known projects was his 2002 rainbow of fireworks joining Manhattan and Queens over the East River in New York, marking MoMA’s temporary move to Long Island City. In 2005, Cai Guogiang was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennial. Starting in 2002 his work was sold at auction and always exceeded the upper estimate, often by hundreds of pounds. Cai Guoqiang’s work is now in such demand that the waiting list is several years long.¹³

Liu Xiaodong, little noticed before 2000, has become a major figure in Chinese contemporary art. After participating in the 2000 Shanghai Biennale and several international exhibitions post biennale, his work began selling at Sotheby’s in 2005. At a Beijing Poly Auction last November, Liu Xiaodong’s Newly Displaced Population¹⁴ sold for $2.7 million, the highest price ever paid for a contemporary Chinese artist, putting Liu in the category (with Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons) of living artists whose work has sold for more than $2 million at auction.¹⁵

The artists that participated in the satellite exhibitions have also become important figures in Chinese contemporary cutting-edge art. Ai Weiwei, Gu Dexin, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong and Yang Zhenzhong are some of artists who have been in international exhibitions across Europe and the United States.

Yang Fudong, a Shanghainese video artist, participated in both the Art For Sale exhibition in 1999 and the Fuck Off satellite exhibition in 2000. In 1999 he became represented by ShanghART Gallery, the oldest contemporary art gallery in Shanghai and one of the leading galleries in China. Pre-biennale, Yang Fudong’s work was shown only in a few venues in China, but after the 2000 biennale, his work appeared in more and more exhibitions: Documenta 11 (2002), the Chinese Pavilion at the 50^th Venice Biennial (2003), the Liverpool Biennale and Between Past and Future: new Photography and Video from China, which traveled to the V&A in London and New York’s ICP in 2004 and, most recently China: Power Stations I organized by the Serpentine Gallery and Red Mansion Foundation at London’s Battersea Power Station. Yang Fudong’s impressive biography of exhibitions around the western world is largely due to exposure created by the 2000 Shanghai Biennale.

IV. Conclusion

The 2000 Shanghai Biennale marked a turning point for the Chinese art world.  Not only did the biennale help launch artists into the international art world, but the biennale artists also challenged China to move into the modern era and take notice of contemporary art. The biennale was a motivating force behind the new wave of Chinese art not only by changing official and private views of art, but also by spawning satellite exhibitions, inviting foreigners to participate and showcasing modernization. The 2000 Shanghai Biennale is essential because it opened up a dialog for contemporary art in China that previously did not exist and created a platform in which to launch Chinese contemporary art abroad.