Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker On Not Being Killed By Some Unfortunate Juxtaposition The 2013

Left to right: Hilma af Kint, The Dove, No. 13, 1915, oil on canvas, 158 x 131 cm; The Dove, No. 12, 1915, oil on canvas, 158 x 131 cm. Courtesy of The Hilma af Klint Foundation and the Venice Biennale.

n 1909, American woman of letters Anna Seaton-Schmidt1 described the 8th Venice International Biennale as an “ensemble never before attained in a modern salon,”2 one that catapulted it into preeminence I 3 as an international exposition. The insertion of individual exhibitions within and throughout the Palazzo delle Esposizioni had transformed it, and the Biennale, into an exemplary art gallery.

Paintings and statues were . . . grouped psychologically. Those influenced by the same traditions, climate, culture, were placed together in surroundings which enhanced their esthetic value. Architecture, decoration, exhibits, thus blended in one harmonious whole, an immense advantage not only to the visitor but to the artist, who, instead of finding his picture or statue killed by the unfortunate juxtaposition of some fellow artist’s work violently opposed to his own discovered, to his exceeding joy, the value of his creation enhanced by its surroundings.4

More than a century later, at the , the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, or Central Pavilion as it is known in English, has again been transformed into an art gallery whose architecture, “psychologically” grouped objects, and rooms dedicated to individual artists shimmer in a harmonious whole. No objects are “killed” by unfortunate juxtapositions; on the contrary, the 2013 international exhibition is a carefully crafted foray into

6 Vol. 12 No. 5 Left to right: Augustin Lesage, Symbolic Composition on the Spiritual World, 1925, oil on canvas, 205 x 145 cm; Symbolic Composition on the Spiritual World, 1923, oil on canvas, 158 x 117 cm. Courtesy of Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne and the Venice Biennale.

Rudolph Steiner, Blackboard Drawing, April 14, 1923, chalk on black paper, approximately 90 x 140 cm. Courtesy of the Rudolph Steiner Archive, Dornach, Switzerland, and the Venice Biennale.

Aleister Crowley and Frieda the present and into a past rich in utopian Harris, Atu XII—The Hanged Man, 1938–40, watercolour on dreams of non-objective and spiritual paper, 61 x 45 cm. Courtesy of Ordo Templi Orientis and the worlds. Here, for example, occult paintings Venice Biennale. by Swedish artist Hilma af Klint from 1915, the Tarot cards of Aleister Crowley and Frieda Harris, the healing divinations of Emma Kunz, the fantastic architecture of Augustin Lesage, the pan-language cards of Xul Solar, and the trance drawings of Anna Zemánková hold company with a stunning array of contemporary art from around the world. Adjacent to the Emma Kunz, installation view at Palazzo delle Esposizioni. large-scale, cosmological, blackboard Courtesy of the Emma 5 Kunz Centre and the Venice drawings of Rudolf Steiner from 1923, Biennale. for example, are densely rendered, large- scale “cosmographies” by Chinese artist Guo Fengyi in ink, pen, and pencil on long paper scrolls dating from 1989 to shortly before her death in 2010. “I draw in order to know,” Guo Fengyi once said.6

Vol. 12 No. 5 7 The Italian-born, New York-based artistic Marino Auriti, Encyclopedic Palace of the World, c. 1950s, director of the 2013 Venice Biennale, wood, plastic, glass, metal, haircombs, model kit parts, Massimiliano Gioni, has named his ensemble in 335 x 213 x 213 cm. Courtesy of the American Folk Art the Palazzo delle Esposizioni and the Arsenale Museum, Gift of Collette Auriti Firmani in memory of Marino The Encyclopedic Palace in honour of the self- Auriti and the Venice Biennale. taught Italian-American artist Marino Auriti, Left: Guo Fengyi, Huangdi Mausoleum, 1996, coloured who filed a design for an imaginary museum ink on rice paper, 259 x 71 cm. Courtesy of Long March with the U.S. Patent Office in the 1950s. Auriti’s Space, Beijing. museum “was meant to house all worldly knowledge, bringing together the greatest discoveries of the human race, from the wheel to the satellite.”7 His model, The Encyclopedic Palace of the World, is a 335-centimetre-high spectacle of wood, plastic, glass, metal, hair combs, and model kit parts. Gioni has assigned it place of honour at the entrance to the Arsenale, while pride of place in the Palazzo is awarded to a manuscript rich in paintings and calligraphy that was illuminated by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung between 1914 and 1930. Commonly known as The Red Book, the manuscript was only made public by Jung’s heirs in 2001.

In his review of the 2013 Venice Biennale, Swiss critic Samuel Herzog describes The Red Book as both the beginning and the centre of Gioni’s encyclopedic ensemble. Devoid of transcription or explanation, it becomes,

8 Vol. 12 No. 5 however, “a mere symbol for Jung’s intellectual world. . . . A narrative tent in whose shadow connections between the objects on display [in The Encyclopedic Palace] and their associated discourses could become visible” is absent.8 Is it not so, Herzog asks, that, “whoever creates an encyclopedia automatically stakes a claim for a certain sovereignty over interpretation— that probably applies even to very personal encyclopedias?”9 Holland Cotter also expresses reservations about Gioni’s encyclopedic strategy in his review for the New York Times:

Mr. Gioni refers to the model of the “wunderkammer,” or cabinet of curiosities, collections of uncategorizable, often exotic objects first assembled in Renaissance Europe. This concept is not original, and it gets tricky when, as here, some curiosities are works by “outsider artists,” which can simply mean self-taught, but often implies having some form of physical, social or psychiatric disability.

The outsider art concept is tired by now, even ethically suspect, the equivalent of “primitive art” from decades ago. Mr. Gioni finesses the problem without really addressing it by integrating outsider-ish-looking inside art (there’s more and more of this around) so the two designations get blurred.10

Nevertheless, Cotter and Herzog remain united in their praise of Gioni’s curatorial brilliance and the sheer pleasure of moving through his “single itinerary”11 among one hundred and fifty artists from thirty- seven countries: “the show’s curatorial line is so firm, its choice of artists so strong, and its pacing so expert that you are carried along, and ultimately rewarded.”12

In his foreword to the catalogue to the 2013 Biennale, Gioni describes The Encyclopedic Palace as being “about knowledge—and more specifically about the desire to see and know everything.” Presentation of objects in the exhibition is not linear, he writes; instead it reveals “a web of associations through contrasts and affinities, anachronisms and collisions.” At the heart of the exhibition is a meditation on the ways in which images are used to organize knowledge and shape experience. Inspired by Hans Belting’s notion of an anthropology of images, and bringing together works and artifacts from different contexts, Gioni seeks to ignite new sparks from “the coerced coexistence of heterogeneous objects and the friction between art and other forms of figuration:”13 In an interview that took place shortly after the opening of the Biennale, he noted: “We live in the twenty-first century and therefore I wanted to create an exhibition in Venice that is simultaneously historical and contemporary. For we live in an age of synchronicity.”14

An ambitious collateral exhibition at the 2013 Venice Biennale, Voice of the Unseen/Chinese Independent Art 1979–Today, also seeks to create an encyclopedic ensemble of art both historical and contemporary. Curated by

Vol. 12 No. 5 9 Wang Lin, Professor at the Sichuan Fine Art Institute; Luo Yiping, Director of the Guangdong Museum of Art; and Gloria Vallese, Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, the exhibition was organized by the highly regarded Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou. Situated at the head of the Arsenale,15 separated by a narrow canal from Gioni’s Encyclopedic Palace and the official pavilion of the People’s Republic of China, Voice of the Unseen opened to the press and international art community on May 30 with an academic forum.16 The following day, the English language China Daily reported on the exhibition and noted that nearly twenty Chinese curators, critics, and art historians at the forum had addressed subjects such as the State system, historic veneration, and the quest for value. Wang Lin was quoted as saying that “the fragmented presence [of Chinese contemporary art in the West] cannot reflect the real look [complexity and variety] of Chinese contemporary art. Many excellent Chinese artists and their works deserve a chance to be seen.” It was noted in the article that the exhibition contained a temporary library of more than one thousand Chinese artists’ portfolios and that all the artworks had been recommended by an academic committee composed of twelve renowned art critics.17

Voice of the Unseen, like The Voice of the Unseen, installation view at Venice Encyclopedic Palace, is an exhibition Biennale, 2013. about knowledge. If Massimiliano Gioni addresses the desire to see and know everything, the curators of Voice of the Unseen are swayed by a desire to tell everything. Although they seek to structure their “vast encyclopedia of contemporary Chinese life and culture” by dividing it into nine sections (Family, Village, Ruins, Poverty, Body, Landscape, Memory, History, Magic),18 the exhibition remains an overwhelming array of heterogeneous objects by one hundred and eighty-eight artists and artist groups coerced into coexistence and, at times, into unfortunate juxtapositions. Devoid of transcription, explanation, or a “narrative tent” that goes beyond the briefest of surtitles, the objects on display remained mere symbols of vital, diverse, and highly complex intellectual, cultural, political, and artistic discourses in China today, discourses that weigh heavily upon the visitor to Voice of the Unseen in their absence and indiscernibility. An attempt, however, is made to reach out to the exhibition’s international audience with a large sign in English at the entrance to the exhibition that notes: “Art shows the world that China is not a global threat. Please come and listen to the true voice in Chinese artists’ hearts.” Accepting this invitation to listen, however, proves impossible. As H. G. Masters notes on the ArtAsiaPacific blog, the “supersized Voice of the Unseen . . . seemed intended for Chinese audiences, as there was scant information about the works on view and their Web site is in Chinese.”19

It would be performances associated with the opening of Voice of the Unseen that would attract most attention, both at home and abroad. In their unmitigated directness the performances became a “real, original, spontaneous voice to be heard”20—professional “crying actors” (people

10 Vol. 12 No. 5 Top: Yuan Gong, Airstrikes who, wearing long white robes, cry loudly at funerals) wept at a statue of Around the World—Shanghai, 2013, performance. Courtesy Confucius, and a young woman was reputedly engaged in a controversial of the artist. sexual act21—in a manner that the curators had hoped their ensemble

Bottom: Yuan Gong, Airstrikes of objects would become. Artist Zhang Jianhua, dressed in the protective Around the World—Venice, 2013, performance. Courtesy clothing of mineworkers with a safety helmet, gloves, and boots, of the artist. asked visitors on the opening day of Voice of the Unseen to have their photographs taken with him. During the academic forum, and at the opening of the official pavilion of the People’s Republic of China, he lay on the ground as if injured or dead, bringing to the attention of Biennale visitors and the public realm the plight of miners in China.22 Yuan Gong’s performance on May 30, Air Strikes Around the World (2013), in which remote-control units simultaneously flew around the Oriental Pearl Tower

Vol. 12 No. 5 11 in Shanghai and above Venice and its canals, generated the desired sense of danger and anxiety in Italy and resulted in a confrontation with Italian police while in China the performance elicited no response from the authorities.23 For Yuan Gong, the presence of so many Chinese artists at the 2013 Venice Biennale did not build the dialogue that is so passionately desired: “Today there are so many Chinese exhibitions at Venice. This displays a Chinese anxiety, a desire to have dialogue with the world. But they have no opportunity to output values, to contribute to the academic and art worlds.”24

This desire for dialogue with the world, and for an “output” of values distinct to social life and artistic practice in China, was evident in another collateral exhibition that took place in the vicinity of Voice of the Unseen. Curated by Yu Gao, Professor at the Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology, and independent curator Zhang Wei, Mente-Pulsante (translated as Mind- Beating, although “pulsating mind” would be preferable) presented the work of fourteen practitioners, among them artists, a writer and literary critic, a filmmaker, a musician, an architectural critic, a sculptor, an architect, a photographer, a professor and research advisor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, a sociologist, and a Daoist forecaster who casts oracles.25 Although Mind–Beating presented far fewer projects than Voice of the Unseen, its ambitions were no less significant, and its selection of subjects and participating artists was close in spirit to Massimiliano Gioni’s Encyclopedic Palace, as was its “single itinerary,” firm curatorial line, and inclusion of artists from disparate disciplines. The intent of the organizers of Mind–Beating was to present “the true condition of China. It was a simultaneous presentation method in the present tense [in which] almost all the participants have undergone a shift in identity.”26

Zhao Shuhong, 520KM/H, 2013, installation, 2200 x 360 x 300 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Left: Yu Jianrong, Seeking, 2013, video installation. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Zhang Xinjun, Family Chronicle, 2013, video installation. Courtesy of the artist.

12 Vol. 12 No. 5 The objects in the exhibition included Zhao Shuhong’s spectacular full- scale, 220-metre-long model of a carriage of the controversial high-speed Chinese train that was involved in a deadly crash in July 2011. Titled 520KM/H (2013), the carriage is a metaphor for rapid transformation, accelerated growth, and the ecstasy and nightmare of speed.27 The artist notes that it reflects “A competitive mindset that drives people to surpass others and themselves. . . . Questions of speed, safety, GDP, government accountability, technology export, or the world economy cannot stop our high speed pursuit of the “Chinese Dream.”28 With monitors along the interior of both sides of the carriage, 520KM/H also served as an interior exhibition space, delivering live feeds from the streets of Beijing and Nanjing, video art, and soap-opera style broadcasts on missing children by Yu Jianrong, as well as a report on an art village near Caochangdi in Beijing that had been razed. The driver’s cabin of the train was home to a video installation set in old furniture that represented the three-room house common in China in the 1980s, when the artist Zhang Xinjun was born. “In Family Chronicle,” he says,” I used cameras to record my mother and I as we lived in our old home.”29

Shiau Jon-Jen, Gone With the Wind, 2013, stainless steel and aluminum, 463 x 235 x 682 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Vol. 12 No. 5 13 Yu Gao, co-curator of Mind– Li Tianbing, Drying Clothes, 2013, 300 items of clothing. Beating, observes that the physical Courtesy of the artist. location of these visual and Left: Wang Guofeng, Voice from North Korea, 2013, 13 domestic narratives, inside a high- suitcases, audio. Courtesy of the artist. speed train carriage, reflected the intense conditions under which they are occurring, shapes the way we look at them, feeds their logic, and intensifies a feeling of excitement when they are encountered.30 Another artwork adjacent to 520KM/H was a 6.8 metre high aluminum and stainless steel fan titled Gone With the Wind (2013) by sculptor and architect Shiau Jon-Jen. These dramatic, large-scale works were countered by poetic, gestural interventions including Drying Clothes (2013), an installation by Li Tianbing of three hundred pieces of clothing strung above the train carriage, at the highest point in the exhibition, in a tribute to migrant workers across China from whose homes the clothing was collected by the artist. Voice from North Korea (2013) consisted of sound recordings by Wang Guofeng of celebratory parades in North Korea that emanated from thirteen suitcases. Wang Guofeng noted that “the control exerted on the human spirit by politics and power can lead people to lose their conscious awareness, leading them to grow accustomed to living within illusions.”31

If an onslaught of moving images of everyday life in China lined the interior of the high-speed “train” that is depicted in 520KM/H, the interior of the pavilion is lined by A Scene (2013), a still “landscape” of eight painted windows, each with six individual portraits, that gave the appearance of stained glass. This work by one of China’s leading artists, Yu Hong, depicts young women, dressed and naked, among vibrant landscapes as well as portraits of men and children. Many of the forty-eight figures recall earlier paintings by the artist such as Natural Selection, Sky Curtain, Questions for Heaven, and Atrium from 2010, while other figures are drawn from the Internet.32 The unusual perspectives that Yu Hong employs, and that give her paintings their distinctive and arresting quality, are drawn from sources

14 Vol. 12 No. 5 Yu Hong, A Scene, 2013, glass, transparent film, 48 images, each 30 x 35 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

as diverse as figures in graphic works by Goya, frescos from the Kizil and Mogao Thousand Buddha caves, and the Ladder of Divine Ascent, a twelfth- century icon in St. Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai. Yu Hong’s windows in Mind–Beating framed the entire exhibition, which also included Blink of an Eye (2013), video segments on painting excursions of artist Liu Xiaodong; digital cinema by Ma Jun from mathgroup; and a video by Tan Ping titled One Cup (2013), a meditation on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s theory that no two leaves in the world are the same.

Zhu Xiaodi, Block Writing, The exhibition ensemble extended 2013, polyethylene foam, 600 x 600 x 350 cm. Courtesy of into the garden surrounding the the artist. pavilion. Here Fang Zhenning laid out a fifty-metre-long installation of mirrors, The Central Axis (2013), that “extracts” the central axis of the ancient city of Beijing. Fang Zhenning believes that the six-hundred-year old core of the city, its psychological and cultural axis, is threatened today by the “expansion of capital and desire in China.”33 An installation of reconstituted Chinese characters in foam, Block Writing (2013), by Zhu Xiaodi was nearby. In a mound or “pile of beautiful collapse,” as curator Yu Gao describes it, the characters remind us that “we have forgotten how to use language.”34 During the opening, Ma Jiqi of mathgroup was seated in the garden, where he forecast the future based on eight divinatory trigrams of the I-Ching, or Book of Change: qiangua (male), kungua (female), kangua (water), ligua (fire), zhengua (thunder), gengua (mountain), xungua (wind) and duigua (marsh).

Vol. 12 No. 5 15 As the catalogue to the exhibition notes, the I-Ching reflects ancient Chinese Opposite page: Historical document display at Passage perceptions of the universe but remains into the present day a tool for to History, Venice, 2013. Courtesy of Lü Peng. understanding the world.35

In a moment of perfect symmetry, Installation view of Passage to History, Venice, 2013. Courtesy Yu Hong was participating in of Lü Peng. Mind–Beating on the twentieth anniversary of the first participation of Chinese artists at the Venice Biennale. In 1993, the Italian curator of the , Achille Bonito Oliva, invited her to present her work36 in a section titled Passaggio a Oriente (Passage to the Orient). Fourteen artists from China were awarded this honour: Ding Yi, Fang Lijun, Feng Mengbo, Geng Jianyi, Li Shan, Liu Wei, Song Haidong, Sun Liang, Wang Guangyi, Wang Ziwei, Xu Bing, Yu Youhan, Zhang Peili, and Yu Hong.37 Looking back, Yu Hong observed that “there were just a few Chinese artists participating in the Venice Biennale twenty years ago. Now, there are so many that Chinese artists have become the face of the biennial, like a landscape of Venice.” 38 For the 2013 Biennale, one of China’s most committed art historians, Lü Peng, invited Achille Bonito Oliva to co-curate an exhibition titled Passage to History to mark the anniversary of Passage to the Orient as well as twenty years of economic, cultural, and artistic exchange between China and the West.39 One would have expected Lü Peng to have embarked on an ambitious, large-scale exhibition such as Reshaping History: Chinart from 2000 to 2009, which he co-curated in Beijing in 2010.40 Instead, Passage to History was quiet, restrained, and modest, its promised research, perspectives, and discourse on the “historic route”41 of the past twenty years more likely to be found in the forthcoming catalogue than in the exhibition itself. Focused on only a handful of Chinese artists, the exhibition looked at a fundamental question: “How Chinese contemporary artists, each in their own way, have been engaged in the process of negotiating an international identity through cultural exchange with the West.”42 At a time when artists and critics in China, including the artists and curators of Voice of the Unseen and Mind–Beating, are examining the construction of a distinctive national identity in a globalized world, this approach by Lü Peng was almost startling. In the press release to Passage to History, Lü Peng speaks of a “precious period of Chinese contemporary art history” seen through the work of twenty artists including Fang Lijun, Liu Wei, Wang Guangyi, Xu Bing, Zhang Peili (Venice 1993), Zhang Xiaogang (Venice 1995), Liu Xiaodong (Venice 1997), and Zhan Wang (Venice 2002).43

Lü Peng’s description of the past twenty years of contemporary Chinese art history as “precious” is reminiscent of an interview he gave in March 2010 as part of the Materials of the Future project organized by the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong.44 In the interview Lü Peng described his determination to leave a rural factory where he had been sent during the Cultural Revolution

16 Vol. 12 No. 5 Vol. 12 No. 5 17 and his desire to learn whether Chinese or Western art history existed. He found one volume, History of Western Aesthetics (1979), by Zhu Guangqian (1897–1986), in a school library and Concise History of Western Art, by Qian Juntao (1906–98), from 1949,45 in the provincial library. Because they were the only copies available, Lü Peng transcribed each by hand, the latter over a period of months. It was not until 1982 or 1983 that books on the history of Western art became readily available in China. And it was not until the June 4th movement of 1989, and the concern of many that the reforms of 1977 to 1989 could be rescinded, that Lü Peng decided to write about contemporary art of that period. “What was the point of living through the past ten years? Thinking back on these ten years I began to realize how precious they were.”46 Only four years later, in 1993, in a period of extraordinarily rapid social, political, and cultural transformation, contemporary Chinese artists stepped onto the international stage. Lü Peng acknowledges that their participation in the Venice Biennale was not as smooth as imagined and was full of hardships:

I read an essay in [1993] entitled “Artists Return from Venice Disappointed.” The essay gave a basic introduction on the situation of the thirteen [ fourteen] Chinese artists who took part in the Venice Biennale for the first time, and as the title suggests, these artists were perhaps less than pleased with their experience there: the installation time was too short, the exhibition space was very subpar, the accommodations were lousy, most of the artists had to pay for their own travel, Chinese representative Li Xianting had no opportunity to introduce Chinese art to the world, et cetera. At first, “Obtaining passports was easy, and there wasn’t any trouble applying for Italian visas, and so these not-so-famous artists withdrew most or all of their savings from bank and set off on a pilgrimage to this world art mecca with excitement in their hearts.” Their experience in Italy, however, did not live up to their rosy expectations.47

The highly competitive Venice Biennale, where intellectuals, art critics, and artists from around the globe jostle for attention during an astonishingly short period of four “professional” days, remains as contentious and disappointing, and as thrilling, for participants from China in 2013 as it did in 1993. But they are not alone in this regard. The complexities of overcoming the fragmented presence of a nation’s contemporary art on the world stage, and the desire to provide as many excellent artists and their works as possible a chance to be seen, are shared by curators and artists of all nations who venture into this magnificent city in search of an appropriate venue, and a form of exhibition ensemble, that will not be missed or ignored. For all the frustrations it thrusts upon participants and viewers alike, the Venice Biennale remains for all nations the venue in which to showcase—however imperfectly—individual, regional, and national artistic discourses in all their complexity.48 In an interview on his participation in the Venice Biennale in 1993, artist Wang Guangyi noted

18 Vol. 12 No. 5 Left to right: Curator Lü Peng that Achille Bonito Oliva’s and artist Wang Guangyi, Venice, May 27, 2013. Courtesy Passage to the Orient of Lü Peng. had “brought Chinese contemporary art to a worldwide audience.” Of particular significance, Wang Guangyi observed, is that “once it is on the global stage the issues discussed are not only examined locally but also globally.”49

The burden to be “successful” in this brutal competition can be especially heavy, especially for the curator of a national pavilion. In 2013, Wang Chunchen, Head of the Department of Curatorial Research of the Central Art Academy of Fine Arts Museum, and Adjunct Curator at The Broad Art Museum of Michigan State University, was charged with the task to “curate China.”50 Increasingly, national curators at the Venice Biennale have rejected the path of broad inclusion adopted in group exhibitions such as Voice of the Unseen. Instead, they prefer to showcase the work of an exceptional individual whose artistic practice speaks to a moment in the life of the people of a nation that may be unique but more likely is shared by all humanity. This transformation of the personal, the discursive, and a wide array of perspectives into “a parliament of global contemporary narratives,” has enriched international biennials, including Venice, as was noted in the last issue of this journal.51 One such narrative at the 2013 Venice Biennale was to be found in the pavilion of Lebanon, where Akram Zaatari’s Letter to a Refusing Pilot (2013) illuminates the refusal of an Israeli fighter pilot, Major (res.) Hagai Tamir,52 to bomb a school in southern Lebanon in 1982. The school, which had been founded by Zaatari’s father, was later bombed by another pilot. Zaatari’s Letter to a Refusing Pilot is constructed around his own childhood experiences in Lebanon, an act of conscientious objection by an enemy pilot, and the darkest days of the Second World War in its citation of both Albert Camus’ Letter to a German Friend and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novella, The Little Prince. The relevance of Zaatari’s Letter to our day was demonstrated during the opening of the Venice Biennale when Lebanon became a stage for terrorist and military deployment as the Syrian conflict crossed its borders.53

Akram Zaatari, Letter to a Refusing Pilot, film and video installation, 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg/ Beirut.

Vol. 12 No. 5 19 Among the fortunate juxtapositions I experienced at the 2013 Venice Left: Kamikaze Loggia, Georgian Pavilion seen from Biennale was viewing Zaatari’s installation in its entirety at the same time Canale di Porta Nova. Photo: Gio Sumbadze. it was being watched by the Iranian American artist Shirin Neshat. It was Middle: Kamikaze Loggia, a reminder of the importance of the Biennale as an opportunity for artists Georgian Pavilion, interior view. Photo: Gio Sumbadze. not only to present their own work but also to reflect on the practice of Bottom: Kamikaze Loggia, Georgian Pavilion, Bouillon fellow artists from around the globe. Leaving the Lebanon Pavilion, on Group relaxing on the balcony. my way to the China Pavilion, I paused at the Kamikaze Loggia, designed Photo: Gio Sumbadze. by Gio Sumbadze, of the sovereign state of Georgia, which abutted, and hovered over, the pavilion of the People’s Republic of China. The curator and commissioner of the Georgian Pavilion, Joanna Warsza and Marine Mizandari, respectively, described their pavilion as a “parasitic extension” to an old building in the Arsenale, one in the spirit of vernacular architecture in Georgia that provides lawless, romantic, and “suicidal” living spaces, terraces, open refrigerators, and even artist studios constructed on top of, and on the sides of, existing buildings. These extensions, prone to collapse, are described by Warsza and Mizandari as constituting self-initiated environments that open discourse on the last twenty years in Georgia, a country that is sometimes described as “Italy gone Marxist.”54 After viewing the work of the Bouillon Group—Thea Djordjadze, Nikoloz Lutidze, Gela Patashuri, Ei Arakawa, and Sergei Tcherepnin—inside the Loggia, I walked cautiously down its steep steps and entered the China Pavilion and a world in a state of transfiguration.

Perhaps if I had not paused at Letter to a Refusing Pilot and the Kamikaze Loggia immediately prior to entering the China Pavilion—I might have regarded Transfiguration as a group exhibition. I might have examined its itinerary, pacing, curatorial line, and choice of artists and ruminated on its meta-themes: transfiguration in English and bianwei or change of position in Mandarin. Instead, I was immediately taken by the work of two of the artists in the exhibition—He Yunchang and Wang Qingsong—whose practices, obsessions, and perspectives, like those of Akram Zaatari, clearly belong in a parliament of contemporary global narratives. Both had long attracted international attention, Wang Qingsong with his Another Battle Series (2001), soldiers on the battlefield under a McDonald’s logo-banner, and He Yunchang with his performances Casting (2004), in which he sealed himself inside a concrete block for twenty-four hours, and One Rib (2008), when one of his ribs was surgically removed. In the 2013 China Pavilion, He

20 Vol. 12 No. 5 Yunchang is represented by The Rock Tours Round Great Britain (2006), which documents his circumambulation of Great Britain from September 24, 2006, to June 14, 2007, carrying a rock from the town of Boulmer that he then returned to its original location after walking 3,500 kilometres. In a new project for Venice, in the garden behind the China Pavilion, He Yunchang installed 2,013 numbered and signed bottles filled with seawater. Here visitors to the Biennale were invited to sign their own water bottle, fill it with seawater, and exchange it for one of He Yunchang’s signed bottles. I was filled with a longing to see a solo exhibition in the China Pavilion that would celebrate the work of an artist like He Yunchang, whose travails and determination and use of the simplest of means are powerful metaphors for human struggle across all national boundaries. As Nataline Colonnello observes:

He Yunchang, The Rock Tours Round Great Britain, 2006–07, documentation of performance, 112 photographs, 35 x 45.5 cm each. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Lucerne/ Beijing.

He Yunchang points to the endurance of those innumerable people, who, like the artist himself, keep living, despite all the difficulties that may affect their existence: “The sharp blade of reality can only pierce their limbs; it cannot wound their wills. The persistence and tenacious spirits of these disadvantaged groups inspire me.” 55

Vol. 12 No. 5 21 Similarly, the large-scale, staged photographs of Wang Qingsong, such as Top: Wang Qingsong, Temporary Ward, 2008, Temporary Ward (2008) and ICU (2013), are powerful indictments of global photograph, 180 x 320 cm. Courtesy of the artist. societal conditions. They resonate across borders and confront us with the Bottom: Wang Qingsong, ICU, ethical consequences of our distractions. 2013, photograph, 180 x 300 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Despite its apparent illogic, engagement with the work of exceptional Chinese artists in one-person exhibitions on an international stage is perhaps more likely to bring a deeper understanding of artistic practices and discourses in China than large group exhibitions where engagement is often more symbolic than real. It should be acknowledged that one person exhibitions by leading Chinese artists were present at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Fang Lijun, who celebrated the twentieth anniversary of his first participation in Venice, was celebrated in an impressive solo exhibition titled A Cautionary Vision, a collateral event curated by Danilo Eccher, Director of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (GAM, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea) in Turin. The exhibition was

22 Vol. 12 No. 5 one of three organized by The Global Art Center Foundation (GACF) from the Netherlands and the Asia Art Center from Beijing and Taipei.56 In an interview with Karen Smith published in the exhibition catalogue, Fang Lijun was asked if the visitor to the exhibition sees his world view or something more personal in the paintings on display. “Specifically, it is the feeling of personal survival,” he answered.

I am concerned with how to deal with our civilization. We were taught as children how mankind evolved from savages to become civilized, from apes to men. Seldom did we discuss the negative aspects of becoming civilized. . . . Basically, painting is all about “revealing,” but we have to use methods of “concealing” in order to present the truth that we want to expose.57

Ai Weiwei, Straight, 2008–12, steel reinforcing bars, 6 x 12 m. Installation view at Zuecca Project Space, Venice. Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery, London.

For Ai Weiwei there is always little separation between his personal life and artistic production; in his exhibitions at the 2013 Venice Biennale any distinction there may have between the two has been conflated. Three exhibitions showcased his work in Venice: two were individual projects titled Straight and S.A.C.R.E.D., curated by Maurizio Bortolotti,58 and in the —temporarily situated in the —Ai Weiwei “represented” Germany together with three other artists. Straight restaged a work presented at in Ai Weiwei’s retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., in 2012. Bent reinforcement bars from the wreckage of schools that collapsed in the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province were brought to Beijing where they were straightened. In the Sala Zuecca at Le Zitelle in Venice they were installed one on top of the other in a minimalist landscape occupying an entire room. Even the most jaded of Ai Weiwei’s observers will find S.A.C.R.E.D. both moving and disturbing. Six metal containers about 1.5 metres high were placed in the nave of the church of Sant’Antonin. Inside the containers are individual dioramas that depict episodes in Ai Weiwei’s eighty-one-day-long imprisonment in 2011. Each container is assigned a subtitle: Supper (eating); Accusers (interrogation); Cleansing (shower); Ritual (walking), Entropy (sleep), and Doubt (toilet). Each of the containers has viewing holes through which visitors can gain a partial view of the scene, thereby themselves becoming both voyeur and an agent of surveillance.

Ai Weiwei’s participation in the German Pavilion has been seen as political commentary directed at China by the Pavilion’s curator, Susanne Gaensheimer. In fact, her invitation to four artists of whom three are

Vol. 12 No. 5 23 Ai Weiwei, S.A.C.R.E.D., 2011–13, six-part work composed of (i) Supper, (ii) Accusers, (iii) Cleansing, (iv) Ritual, (v) Entropy, (vi) Doubt, six dioramas in fiberglass and iron, each 377 x 198 x 153 cm. Installation view at Chiesa di Sant'Antonin, Venice. Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery, London.

24 Vol. 12 No. 5 not German nationals to “represent” Germany, is a continuation of her curatorial practice with the late German filmmaker , who represented Germany at the 2011 Venice Biennale posthumously. Gaensheimer notes in her catalogue foreword that:

What Christoph Schlingensief wanted to realize at the German Pavilion [in 2011] was a “Gesamtkunstwerk” that would have defied traditional boundaries in more than one sense. . . . [T]he logical conclusion seemed to me to pursue this transnational approach further and retain Schlingensief’s focus on the question of the significance of national representation today. . . . In doing so, we wanted to articulate on the level of art and with its distinctive means that we, as curators and artists, feel committed to the idea of a shared European culture within the more encompassing referential framework of a global cultural community, and that is the daily basis of our work.59

Ai Weiwei, installation view For the German Pavilion, Ai Weiwei assembled at German Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2013. Photo: Zheng 886 three-legged wooden stools. Today antique, Shengtian. Courtesy of the artist and Venice Biennale. the stools were for centuries in common use in homes throughout China. “The single stool as part of an encompassing sculptural structure may be read as a metaphor for the individual and its relation to an overarching and excessive system in a postmodern world developing at lightning speed. [It provides a perspective] on how biographical, cultural, or political identity is related to larger, transnational conditions and circumstances.”60 Indeed, unstable forms of national identity were to be found throughout the entire Venice Biennale, most overtly in This is not a Taiwan Pavilion addressed elsewhere in this volume. Similarly unstable but rich in infinite possibilities is the role of the artist in an age of synchronicity, as Massimiliano Gioni observed. In such a period the grand gesture appears increasingly hollow. Instead, it can be the ruminations of an artist like Lee Kit from Hong Kong, living modestly among those he serves, that is of enduring value. “Do the pictures keep you warm?” he asks. His objects, handpicked from the everyday, are morality plays for living.

More than a century ago, in 1909, Anna Seaton-Schmidt lamented that “we moderns have been too long occupied with the production of individual pictures and statues, which we have huddled together in our annual Exhibitions, to their own undoing and the infinite wearying of all who visited them.”61 At the 2013 Venice Biennale huddles of singular pictures have been replaced by a cacophonous, lawless, romantic, and at times kamikaze assemblage of narratives for living that threaten to collapse under the weight of their own desires. None are more fascinating and contentious than those spun and purled by artists from China whose presence in Venice has unleashed virulent debates at home. Curator and critic Du Xiyun recorded some comments for posterity in an essay titled “Outputting State if

Vol. 12 No. 5 25 Failing to Output Value —— Yuan Gong’s Air Strikes Around the World.” 62 One described Yuan Gong’s performance as troublemaking sensationalism; another saw it as a challenge to the power system. Critic Tong Yujie is quoted as dismissing Yuan Gong’s action (“the political imagination of contemporary art is not merely [a] simple and coarse political gimmick”), while Li Zhenhua, artist, curator, and founder-director of the Beijing Art Lab, reputedly suggested that:

Air Strikes around the World is the most direct challenge and response to Eurocentrism in the global art map. Compared to the exhibition and artistic works officially approved by the Venice Biennale, Yuan Gong’s air strikes completely changed a state of being passive to an active aggression, which is an independent artistic work beyond the Western value evaluation system.63

For Du Xiyun himself, Air Strikes Around the World may not be a profound work of art, but it does symbolically and accurately “coincide with China’s current state: rapid rising but superficial, overwhelming and ferocious in appearance but feeble in essence, seemingly powerful but weak, deliberately mystifying and even deficient.”64 Du Xiyun notes that Yuan Gong regards himself as “a disordered academic-combination person who is ruined in Post-Marxism.”65These ruins provide safe harbour for an absence of sovereignty over interpretation (a sovereignty that Swiss critic Samuel Herzog believed he identified in Gioni’s Encyclopedic Palace).66 It is the persistent and tenacious refusal of such sovereignty in the face of “the sharp blade of reality”67 that makes the presence of Chinese artists in Venice, and their narratives for living, so compelling.

Notes 1 Anna Seaton-Schmidt of Cincinnati “was a successful writer and lecturer on art and wrote . . . for international art periodicals and for her newspapers in Cincinnati, Boston, and Washington, D.C. She frequently visited the Nourse sisters [painter Elizabeth and her sister Louise] in Paris and joined them on painting trips to Picardy, Brittany, Italy, and Switzerland,” Mary Alice Heekin Burke, “Elizabeth Nourse: Cincinnati’s Most Famous Woman Artist,” library.cincymuseum.org/journals/art/files/eli-065. pdf. 2 Anna Seaton-Schmidt, “Venice: An Example: The Development of the Art Gallery as Manifested in the International Biennial Exhibition,” Art and Progress 1, no. 1 (November 1909), 12–13. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), Frieda Harris (1877–1962), Emma Kunz (1892–1963), Augustin Lesage (1876–1954), Xul Solar (1887–1963), Anna Zemánková (1908–1986), and Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925). 6 Chris Wiley, “Guo Fengzi,” in Massimiliano Gioni, “Is Everything in My Mind?,” Il Palazzo Enciclopedico: The Encyclopedic Palace (Venice: Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia, 2013), 394. 7 Massimiliano Gioni, “Is Everything in My Mind?” in Il Palazzo Enciclopedico: The Encyclopedic Palace, 23. 8 "Ohne jede Transkription und ohne Erklärungen allerdings ist das «Red Book» hier lediglich ein Symbol für Jungs Gedankenwelt. . . . Gioni [verzichtet] darauf, irgendein narratives Zelt über seine Ausstellung zu spannen, in dessen Schatten eine Zusammengehörigkeit der Dinge und Diskurse sichtbar werden könnte,” Samuel Herzog, “Biennale von Venedig: Weltumarmung auf die alte Art,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, June 1, 2013, http://www.nzz.ch/aktuell/feuilleton/kunst_architektur/ weltumarmung-auf-die-alte-art-1.18090839/. 9 "Ja ist es nicht auch so, dass im Grunde keine Enzyklopädie ohne ein bestimmtes Mass an autoritärer Gestik auskommt? Wer eine Enzyklopädie schafft, der beansprucht damit automatisch auch eine gewisse Interpretationshoheit—das gilt wahrscheinlich sogar für ganz individuelle Enzyklopädien"; Samuel Herzog, “Biennale von Venedig: Weltumarmung auf die alte Art.”

26 Vol. 12 No. 5 10 Holland Cotter, “Beyond the ‘Palace,’ an International Tour in One City,“ New York Times, June 5, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/06/arts/design/venice-biennale-in-its-55th-edition. html?ref=venicebiennale/. 11 “The Encyclopedic Palace is laid out in the Central Pavilion (Giardini) and in the Arsenale forming a single itinerary, with works spanning over the past century alongside several new commissions, including over 150 artists from 37 countries,” Web site of the 2013 Venice Biennale, http://www. labiennale.org/en/art/. 12 Cotter, “Beyond the ‘Palace'.” 13 Gioni, “Is Everything in My Mind?” 23. 14 Georg Diez, “Wikipedia Kunst,” Der Spiegel, no. 26 (June 2013), 126: "Wir leben im 21. Jahrhundert," sagt er schließlich, "und deshalb wollte ich in Venedig eine Ausstellung entwerfen, die gleichzeitig historisch ist und gegenwärtig. Denn wir leben im Zeitalter der Synchronizität." 15 The exhibition took place at Tesa 91 and Tese di San Cristoforo n. 92–93–94, Arsenale. 16 The academic forum was titled The Interpretation of Chinese Contemporary Art: Global Context, Chinese System, Historical Scheme and Value. 17 Zhang Zixuan, “No longer unseen voices at Venice Biennale,” China Daily, May 31, 2013, http://www. chinadaily.com.cn/life/2013-05/31/content_16550014.htm/. 18 Press release, Voice of the Unseen/Chinese Independent Art 1970–Today, May 2013. 19 H. G. Masters, “Field Trip: Venice, Beyond the Biennale,” ArtAsiaPacific, June 7, 2013, http://www. artasiapacific.com/Blog/FieldTripVeniceBeyondTheBiennale/. 20 Press release, Voice of the Unseen/Chinese Independent Art 1970–Today, May 2013. 21 Liao Danlin, “Things that make you go ‘hmm?’” Global Times, June 17, 2013, http://www.globaltimes. cn/content/789394.shtml/. 22 Ian Volner, “The Neutralization of Chinese Art. The ‘accepted rebels’ at the Venice Biennale,” New Republic, June 24, 2013, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113583/chinese-art-neutralized-venice- biennale#/. 23 “Yuan Gong and his assistants implemented Yuan Gong’s art project Air Strikes Around the World across time and space, at the same time, both in Venice [Piazza San Marco] and Shanghai. While implementing the art project in Venice, it received quite big attention from the local police, so his assistants got arrested and they were brought to the local police office for the investigation. On the contrary, when the project was carried out in Shanghai, the local police and the residents didn’t pay any attention at all. Yuan Gong himself was in Shanghai” Correspondence between the artist’s assistant and the author, July 17, 2013. 24 Yuan Gong Web site, http://www.yuangong-art.com/news/air-strikes-around-the-world-in-venice/. The complete artist’s statement, provided by his assistant to the author, is dated May 25, 2013: “In Venice and Shanghai, the implementation of the project Air Strikes Around the World may lead to many questions, but I want to say that it represents my true feelings about China and the world. On the one hand, I think that people may consider themselves as the creators of human civilization. But on the other hand humans cannot eradicate the barbarian side to their existence, such as the threat to the world of rogue states such as North Korea, the territorial disputes in East Asia, and terrorism in the Middle East. The world is violent and turbulent! In China economic and social growth presents a false prosperity for society. There is a lot of corruption. Law exists in name only, not real law, just the presence of law. Powerful interests are controlled by the interpersonal relations of a few people. This is on China’s conscience! Today there are so many Chinese exhibitions at Venice. This displays a Chinese anxiety, a desire to have dialogue with the world. But they have no opportunity to output values, to contribute to the academic and art worlds. The art project Air Strikes Around the World is a new experimental work that exists across time and space and is combined in a network.” 25 The exhibition, which took place at Spazio Thetis, Castello 925, included the artists Chen Danqing, Fang Zhenning, Li Tianbing, Liu Xiaodong, Mar Jiqqi and Ma Jun (mathgroup), Shiau Jon-Jen, Tan Ping, Wang Guofeng, Yu Hong, Yu Jianrong, Zhang Xinjun, Zhao Shuhong, and Zhu Xiaodi. 26 Mind-Beating, video, https://www.facebook.com/Mind.Beating/. 27 “The central focus of the exhibition is the high-speed train which is a metaphor for many aspects of Chinese reality. Although there have been train derailments elsewhere, such as the recent one in Spain, speed in China still represents a most terrible power. As is the case with many other disasters in China, it is speed which sacrifices the well-being of the Chinese people. High speed is both ecstasy and nightmare,” correspondence between Yu Gao and the author, July 26, 2013. 28 Fang Zhenning, ed., Mente-Pulsante/Mind-Beating (Beijing: Authentic Vision [HK] Ltd., 2013), 163. 29 Ibid., 151. 30 Conversation with the author, May 30, 2013. 31 Fang Zhenning, ed., Mente-Pulsante/Mind-Beating, 115. 32 Conversation with the author, May 30, 2013. 33 Ibid., 31. 34 Conversation with the author, May 30, 2013. 35 Ibid., 67. 36 The title of Yu Hong’s work in 1993 was also Landscape. 37 See Meiqin Wang, Confrontation and Complicity: Rethinking Official Art in Contemporary China, Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Binghamton, 2007, 124, http://books.google.com/ books?id=r1SEtvf7st8C/. In 1997, both Liu Xiaodong and Yu Hong were included in the , this time at the invitation of the Chinese Commisioner (and participating artist), Sun Weimin who was then Vice President of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Other artists were Chao Ge, Hong Ling, Hu Jiancheng, Liu Gang, Shen Ling, Wan Jiyuan, Wang Yuping, Xie Dongming, and Yuan Yunsheng, Chen Yifei was also awarded a solo exhibition: Meiqin Wang, Confrontation and Complicity, 129. 38 Correspondence with the author, July 19, 2013.

Vol. 12 No. 5 27 39 “Through this time period there is a recorded change in accepted attitudes toward Chinese culture and its international identity in the Western world, as well as toward China’s contribution to contemporary art, particularly in painting. The theme of exhibition, passage to history, derives from these,” press release, Passage to History: 20 Years of La Biennale di Venezia and Chinese Contemporary Art, http://www.artecommunications.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=arti cle&id=2519%3Apassage-to-history-20-years-of-la-biennale-di-venezia-and-chinese-contemporary- art-biennale-arte&catid=132%3Aesposizioni-e-mostre-2013&lang=en/. 40 Lü Peng (), Zhu Zhu (), and Kao Chienhui (), Reshaping History: Chinart from 2000 to 2009 (Beijing: China National Convention Center Beijing, May 2010). 41 Press release, Passage to History: 20 Years of La Biennale di Venezia and Chinese Contemporary Art, http://www.artecommunications.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2519% 3Apassage-to-history-20-years-of-la-biennale-di-venezia-and-chinese-contemporary-art-biennale- arte&catid=132%3Aesposizioni-e-mostre-2013&lang=en/. 42 Ibid. 43 The twenty artists in Passage to History are Chen Xi, Cui Xiuwen, Fang Lijun, Li Qing, Liu Wei, Liu Xiaodong, Mao Xuhui, Sui Jianguo, Wang Guangyi, Wang Jianwei, Xu Bing, Yan Peiming, Ye Yongqing, Yin Zhaoyang, Yue Minjun, Zeng Fanzhi, Zhan Wang, Zhang Peili, Zhang Xiaogang, and Zhou Chunya. 44 Videotaped interview with Lü Peng at his home in Chengdu on March 1, 2010, Materials of the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art from 1980 to 1990, Asia Art Archive, http://www.china1980s. org/en/interview_detail.aspx?interview_id=75/. 45 This volume was possibly a later edition of A History of Western Art, by Japanese artist Kimura Sohachi (1893–1958), which was translated by Qian Juntao and originally published in 1932. 46 Videotaped interview with Lü Peng at his home in Chengdu on March 1, 2010, http://www.china1980s. org/en/interview_detail.aspx?interview_id=75/. 47 Lü Peng, Foreword, Passage to History: 20 Years of La Biennale di Venezia and Chinese Contemporary Art (September 2013), http://www.chengdumoca.org/en/exhibition/ column/3214/01/393/. 48 As Rene Block observed, the external financing of the Venice Biennale through autonomous national and regional pavilions (as well as its Collateral events) “is simply ingenious”; Rene Block, “We Hop On, We Hop Off: The Ever-faster Spinning Carousel of Biennials,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 12, no. 3 (May–June 2013), 32. This has opened the Venice Biennale to an exceptional range of cultural discourses that are not accessible elsewhere. 49 Venice: Wang Guangyi on Chinese Contemporary Artists, videotaped interview, http://www. blouinartinfo.com/news/story/923297/venice-report-video-wang-guangyi-on-chinese-contemporary/. 50 Wang Chunchen, Transfiguration: The Presence of Chinese Artistic Methods in Venice (San Marino: Maretti Editore, 2013), 7. 51 Nikos Papastergiadis, “The Cosmos in Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 12, no. 3 (May/June 2013), 11–12. 52 Avihai Becker, “Why We Refuse,” 2003, http://www.seruv.org.il/english/article.asp?msgid=60/. 53 See Nina Siegal, “Lebanese Artist Explores ‘Human Face’ of Conflict: ‘Letter to a Refusing Pilot’ by Akram Zaatari,” New York Times, June 19, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/movies/letters- to-a-refusing-pilot-by-akram-zaatari.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0/. 54 Kamikaze Loggia (Tbilisi: Ministry of Culture and Monument Protection of Georgia, 2013), 2. 55 Nataline Colonnello, On He Yunchang’s project “One Rib,” Galerie Urs Meile, http://www. galerieursmeile.com/fileadmin/images/Artists/HE_YUNCHANG/HE_YUNCHANG_TEXTS/ He-Yunchang_On-He-Yunchangs-Project-One-Rib_Nataline-Colonnello_2009_E.pdf/. 56 Two other group exhibitions were presented at the Palazzo Mora: Rediscover, curated by Karlyn De Jongh from the Netherlands, and Ingrandimento, curated by Huang Du and Yang Shinyi. The series of exhibitions were titled Culture Mind Becoming. Another solo exhibition, of the work of Qui Zhijie, titled The Unicorn and the Dragon, was presented at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice and the Aurora Museum in Shanghai. 57 Fang Lijun, A Cautionary Vision (Beijing: Art of Two Centuries, 2013), unpaginated. 58 Maurizio Bortolotti, Foreword, Disposition: Ai Weiwei, Straight S.A.C.R.E.D. (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2013), unpaginated. 59 Susanne Gaensheimer, Foreword, Ai Weiwei, Romuald Karmakar, Santu Mofokeng, Dayanita Singh (Berlin: Gestalten, 2013), 52–53. 60 Ibid., 53. 61 Anna Seaton-Schmidt, "Venice: An example: The Development of the Art Gallery as Manifested in the International Biennial Exhibition, Art and Progress 1, no. 1 (November 1909), 12–13. 62 Du Xiyun, Give a Little Time for the Ideal, IV (Beijing: New Star Press, 2013. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 Samuel Herzog, “Biennale von Venedig: Weltumarmung auf die alte Art,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, June 1, 2013, http://www.nzz.ch/aktuell/feuilleton/kunst_architektur/weltumarmung-auf-die-alte- art-1.18090839/. 67 Nataline Colonnello, On He Yunchang’s project “One Rib.”

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