Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker

Making Worlds: The 53rd

Guangzhou @ Ireland @ Venice One of the most memorable events at the was a seminar that took place in a sweltering, over-crowded hall in the Irish Pavilion.1 As Homi K. Bhabha sardonically noted at the beginning of his presentation, the narrow, interlocked chairs into which both panel and audience were uncomfortably squeezed created

. . . an association of ideas and bodies at the same time, very much like many art practices where affect and sweat and all kinds of bodily fluids mix and blend, sexualities are questioned, nationalities become blurred, boundaries immediately become tangible. . . . An orgiastic experience is being provided in this wonderful city [of great sexuality]. . . . This is not going to be a sober seminar!

In fact, despite the wanton grandiloquence and dazzling intellectual displays of its participants, this seminar was a deadly earnest exercise in power. Some of the Western art world’s most respected luminaries had been invited by Sarat Maharaj, co-curator of the Third Guangzhou Triennial (GZT 2008), to participate in a conversation that would “query” the Guangzhou Triennial and its call for, as the triennial’s title suggested, a farewell to postcolonialism.2 The occasion was not only the opening of the Venice Biennale, but also the launch of a special issue of the Irish journal Printed Project,3 which was intended, according to its guest curator/editor Maharaj, to add to the reflections, debates, and analysis surrounding the GZT 2008 and, above all, to address the “ongoing methodological instigations, to use Ezra Pound’s word, . . . that are urging and nudging us, even perhaps twisting our arms, asking us to think about these questions.”4

Bhabha, a leading theorist in the field of postcolonialism, accepted the challenge to participate, as did Daniel Birnbaum, artistic director of the 53rd Venice Biennale; Chris Dercon, director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich; and Charles Esche, director of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Also present was Gao Shiming, deputy director of the Advanced School of Art and Humanities, China Academy of Art. It was Gao who had argued passionately, as a co-curator of the GZT 2008, that contemporary discourse and artistic production should be liberated from Western models such as postcolonialism, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, hybridity, and alternative modernities.5 They had become, Gao had proposed, propaganda strategies to manage difference in “a new policy of domination” and as “tools of a new ideology of global capital” that have

 evolved into little more than high-sounding but increasingly hollow slogans of political propaganda.6

Bhahba launched a dismissive counter-attack on any suggestion that postcolonialism could be described as a model:

If, like me, you had some modest responsibility for floating the concept, we were trying to get away desperately from the fiat of models. . . . The post-colonial model does not exist. That is not my problem. It has never existed in my own work.”7 Bhabha’s version of globalization, he argued forcefully, is “that the incomplete project of decolonization—which has not had its chance—is recognized today in the profound inequalities of globalization.” In an eloquent and persuasive monologue on these inequalities, Bhabha noted that “what is important about identification, or identity, or the politics of recognition, is how much authority you have, or you don’t have, through the mediation of that concept.” Authority, he continued, is about access, or “where you can put the object, or where you are not allowed to put the object, or who writes the label, or who in fact proceeds to write the essay on the label, and what resources institutionally are there—and who has the right to narrate.8

The next person with the right to narrate was Daniel Birnbaum, artistic director of the 53rd Venice Biennale. Having arrived late due to prior obligations, Birnbaum deftly moved the topic from postcolonialism to his own conversation with Maharaj, which had been published in the catalogue to the 53rd Venice Biennale under the title Philosophical Geographies.9 In the course of this conversation Maharaj had referred to a “spiritual geography” of Europe10 reputedly proposed by the Jewish philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) in a lecture in Vienna in 1935 titled Die Philosophy in der Krisis der europäischen Menschheit (Philosophy in the Crisis of European Mankind). Maharaj further suggested that Husserl had made claims for “Europe’s singular achievement” of having “broken through to a more theoretical, transcendental plane” while “the cultures of India or China remained bogged down at the mythic level.”11 At the Irish Pavilion, seventy-four years and countless interpretations of Husserl’s 1935 lecture later, Birnbaum continued his ongoing conversation with Maharaj by describing Husserl’s spiritual gestalt of Europe as a “brutal map” based on the principle of exclusion.12

The next speaker, Chris Dercon from Munich, quickly shifted the conversation from Husserl to the principle of (postcolonial) inclusion and the plethora of pavilions that, in 2009, constituted the Venice Biennale. “It seems,” he contended, “as if we have another form of mapping! . . . I am quite struck to find suddenly a pavilion of Catalunya. I am very struck to find all these regions popping up trying to establish not quite an identity— no, but a kind of management of culture, a kind of mismanagement of different cultures, maybe a kind of mismanagement of performing the difference.”13 Biennials, he conceded, had “created a kind of guarantee for participation,” but, he wondered, in two years’ time, would cities such as Lyon or Berlin have their own pavilions? Dercon’s key concern was,

 however, neither exclusion nor inclusion but rather what he termed the “dictatorship of the present.” One of the major crises of the visual arts, he argued, was not the dictatorship “of the management of multiculturalism, or the management of performing the so-called difference, but the management of amnesia. . . . ‘farewell to postcolonialism’ should mean ‘farewell to amnesia’!” Dercon concluded his presentation by suggesting that we should perhaps not say farewell to postcolonialism. “There are other, more urgent farewells.”

This challenge was taken up by Charles Esche of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. “Postcolonialism was a convenient excuse for what we might call the West, or what we might call Western Europe, not to deal with its history and not to have to face its memories, but actually to displace the issue. . . . There is a crisis. It is not a crisis of identity but a crisis of memory. It is also a crisis of reflection.”14 Esche referred to writings by Maharaj that described the move in Europe in 1989 “from a world of juxtaposition [as exemplified by the Berlin Wall] towards a world of entanglement.” Saying farewell to postcolonialism, Esche argued, would perhaps allow for a new understanding of the fact “that we are all immediately entangled even before we encounter any notion of the Other. We are entangled through the economy, we are entangled through politics, we are entangled through our digital exchange.” Nevertheless our notions of the nation state and the bureaucratic structures on which we are dependent do not “reflect on entanglement, or fully on themselves.”15

It was time for Gao Shiming to speak. The conversation could finally move away from a familial, internal discourse among curators and theoreticians based in the West. Now a curator and theoretician from China—indeed the very person who had called for a “farewell to postcolonialism”—had the right to narrate. Perhaps he would challenge the progenitor of postcolonialism himself, endorse or reject notions of entanglement, or defend his Liberationist calls to abandon Western theoretical models and English as the international language of intellectual exchange. Perhaps once again, as he had done at the Guangzhou Triennial in 2008, Gao would rebel against the dictatorship of the past (and not the present).16

The room was still as Gao began to speak. First he apologized for his difficulty with English before complimenting Bhabha on his narrative of “the re-emergent past and the coming future.” Then, in the grand tradition of Western academic jousting, he dealt an elegant blow to the (metaphysical) body. Referring to Bhabha’s opening query (“farewell to post-colonialism but say hello to what?”), Gao asked him, “Is this question itself on the basis of a linear history?” Bhabha’s reaction was swift and unequivocal: “No! None of the work I have done could have been done if I had thought in linear terms.” Bhabha then embarked on a lengthy reply, which concluded with the statement that modernity was “the most messianic project ever with its notion of the now, and the now, and the new, and the now, and the now.” The gauntlet had been thrown down and the debate could begin. To my astonishment, before Gao could reply or make the kind of substantial contribution to the discussion that other panel participants had been allowed, the conversation was declared over. Audience and participants alike rushed to the next event. As Gao Shiming passed me we greeted one another. “How eloquent Homi Bhabha is as a speaker,” he remarked, smiling.

 National Participations and Collateral Events in a World of Entanglement The pre-eminence of the Venice Biennale as an international platform for contemporary visual art remains undisputed despite the rapid growth of biennials and triennials around the world. This is due, in part, to the Venice Biennale’s distinct combination of national pavilions, major surveys curated by the Biennale’s artistic director in official venues such as the Arsenale and the Palazzo delle Esposizione,17 and the burgeoning off-site exhibitions and pavilions categorized as eventi collaterali or Collateral Events.18 These off- site events, situated in spectacular historical palazzi or modest, vernacular houses and shops, have spread like a virus across the city, turning Venice itself into an anarchistic, multi-venue “exhibition.” Far more exciting than most of the “official” national pavilions situated in the Giardini, the Venice Biennale’s Collateral Events have increasingly provided fear-defying forays into contemporary cultural and political waters. They have certainly provided a safe haven for those countries whose nationhood is placed in question by others, such as Taiwan and Palestine, or for those nations who insist on their right to narrate, especially after the Wende or “change” in Europe in 1989, when the shift “from a world of juxtaposition towards a world of entanglement” resulted in a flurry of newly created or newly aligned nations seeking an international platform to express their hard won, independent cultural and political identities.

Chris Dercon’s description of this process as another form of mapping is correct. His consternation, however, at the rapid expansion of “regional” pavilions such as that of Catalunya, and his characterization of them as possibly “a kind of mismanagement of performing the difference,” does not take into account either the complexities of Catalunya’s political formation as a “historical nationality” within the Spanish state19 or the history of the Venice Biennale itself. From its very beginnings, the Venice Biennale has experimented with shifting definitions of the national and the regional. In 1893 the Venetian City Council passed a resolution to organize a biennale artistica nazionale, a biennale of national art. The 1 Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città die Venezia (the first Venice Biennale), inaugurated on April 1, 1895, became instead an international exhibition with one section of Italian artists participating by invitation only, and another with Italian artists selected by jury.20 By the time of the 8th Venice Biennale, in 1909, with its more than 450,000 visitors, the first “national” pavilions had been constructed in the Giardini. Among them was the Padiglione Bavarese, initiated by artists belonging to one of Europe’s most influential artists’ associations, the Munich Secession, from the state or “region” of Bavaria.21 It was not until 1912 that the Bavarian Pavilion would become the . The history of the German Pavilion and its physical transformation during the period of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany were addressed in the 53rd Venice Biennale by the German commissioner, Nicolaus Schafhausen, who caused a sensation by choosing the British artist , rather than a German national, to “represent” Germany.22

Indeed, the 2009 Venice Biennale provided fertile ground for a number of daring reinterpretations of national identities and for adventurous experiments in “representing” a country, or a city-state, or an occupied territory, or a Special Administrative Region. It also opened its doors to

 Arabic and Muslim culture in an unprecedented fashion. Among the Collateral Events in the 53rd Venice Biennale were Palestine c/o Venice; East-West Divan: Contemporary Art from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran; and ADACH Platform for Venice, curated by Catherine David for Abu Dhabi/United Arab Emirates. Among the national participations were Morocco, the Syrian Arab Republic, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates (with surely the best-funded pavilion of the entire Biennale).

The interest and excitement generated by the participation of these countries and territories was reminiscent of the exhilaration in 1999 when Chinese artists first made their presence felt in Harald Szeemann’s legendary . The Süddeutsche Zeitung reported at the time that Szeemann had set new accents: “The favourites of the art market today are apparently the Chinese.”23 Carol Vogel of the New York Times asked Szeemann about this new presence. “I felt it was important to get a freer look at another history,” he answered, “to see how Chinese history has changed the appearance of our own culture.’’24 The change in the appearance of Western culture at the turn of the twenty-first century was nowhere more evident than in the . Constructed in 1912, the year of the founding of the Republic of China, the French Pavilion had originally been designed as a representative display of French cultural power and national pride. In 1999 the expatriate Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping “perforated”25 the neoclassical pavilion and its ionic columns with nine wooden pillars dominated by legendary creatures from the two- thousand-year-old book Shan Hai Jing, or The Classic of Mountains and Seas.26 The curators of the pavilion, Hou Hanru and Denys Zacharopoulos, described Huang’s One Man, Nine Animals as provoking “the powerful experience of navigating intellectual, cultural, and political uncertainties.”27 Did Huang Yong Ping’s installation in the French Pavilion in 1999 reflect the uncertainties of the expatriate Other? Or did it claim the territory for itself? Was it “bogged down at the mythic level” or was it operating at a “more theoretical, transcendental plane”28 of the Philosophical Man who, according to Edmund Husserl in 1935, maintained a “critical attitude toward anything and everything pregiven in the tradition?”29

Francesca Dal Lago, who curated the Chinese section of an exhibition titled Passage to the East in the 1993 Venice Biennale, suggested in a review of the 48th Venice Biennale, in 1999, that the work of expatriate Chinese artists such as Huang Yong Ping, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Chen Zhen, although labelled “Chinese,” was produced “in a Western cultural sphere [and] often employs ‘Chinese’-indexed symbolism to discuss cultural hybridity and the dilemma of living between two worlds.”30 The work of both Chen Zhen and Cai Guo-Qiang in the 1999 Venice Biennale capitalized, according to Dal Lago, “on the widespread Western ignorance of Asian cultural manners, mixed with a spiritual awe and respect for the esoteric ‘East’. They thus create a discourse which ultimately does not acquire any specific ‘meaning’, neither in China nor in the ‘West’.”31 The International Jury in 1999 obviously did not agree. They awarded Cai Guo-Qiang the Golden Lion, La Biennale di Venezia International Prize, for his large-scale environment, Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard, in the Arsenale.32 The 108 decaying,

10 life-sized figures created out of sixty tons of clay33 were a reconstruction of a sculpture, completed in 1965, that toured in China and was copied and given as gifts to Albania, North Korea, and North Vietnam.34 Cai’s installation was almost certainly, Britta Erickson suggested at the time, “one of the final sculptures in the Socialist Realist manner” and a metaphor “for the failed promise of socialism in China.”35 The “irony of a work created by an anonymous collective being recast for the glory of an individual artist” would not be lost on some viewers, Erickson concluded.36 For Dal Lago, Cai’s environment was a “trademark spectacle.” The work produced by artists living in China, on the other hand, she argued, was “rarely nice.” Instead it was “rough, violent, unsophisticated, vulgar, and kitsch” art that consciously mimicked “the daily experience of urban reality in China: well packaged and often glittering on the outside, irrational and morbid within.”37

A decade later, the promise of a glorious era for “Chinese” art in the West and at the Venice Biennale seems to have faded. The years of extravagant, spectacular works (and astronomical prices for all art Chinese) are probably over. This is not only due to the current economic crisis and a new-born distaste for excess and hyperbole. The short attention span of the West has been exhausted, and even some leading collectors in China have shifted their interest to artists from other cultures.38 Unfortunately, the myriad opportunities the West had been offered over the past twenty years to engage with the art and culture of China in a differentiated and thoughtful manner were often gambled away in repetitive group shows of “Chinese” art from European collections in the “Orientalist format of ‘national grouping’,” as Dal Lago wrote in 1999, which falsely created the “feeling of an homogeneous ‘Chinese’ style, eliminating single creativities.”39

The conditions for exchange between East and West are dramatically different from what they were a decade ago. Among China’s intellectual community, there is a strong desire to escape the “introspective post- colonial self-imagination,” as Gao Shiming writes in this volume.40 Above all, Chinese artists and intellectuals are no longer content to play the role of the Other in an entangled, post-West41 world. Gao observes that:

. . . despite the huge success of “Chinese contemporary art” in the international arena and the capitalist market over the past twenty years, it appears that Chinese contemporary art was merely successful as an alternative modernity, as a local version of contemporary art. Its success was due to identity politics and the playing of the “China card.” Today, we are above celebrating the success of this cultural-political strategy. We are no longer satisfied with fighting for space and rank in the globalized edifice in the name of the Other, and in the name of fairness. Now, we are considering building a new home, a different system, a historic site for cultural creation and for subject renewal. It is the site of contemporary Chinese art.42

The 53rd Venice Biennale, in 2009, like the Third Guangzhou Triennial, in 2008, was a site for subject renewal and for “contemporary Chinese art.”

11 The China Pavilion What Is to Come (Jian Wei Zhi Zhu) Fang Lijun, He Jinwei, He Sen, Liu Ding, Qiu Zhijie, Zeng Fanzhi, and Zeng Hao Curators: Lu Hao and Zhao Li

Exactly one hundred years ago, Isaac Taylor Headland, a professor at Peking University, published a report titled Court Life in China: The Capital, Its Officials and People. He described the return of Prince Chun (Zaifeng) from Europe43 and his subsequent purchase of a brougham, a European- style carriage. “As straws show the direction of the wind,” he wrote, “these incidents ought to indicate that Prince Chun will not be a conservative to the detriment of his government, or to the hindrance of China’s progress.”44 Reading “straws” and “directions” would become a fine art among Western observers seeking to comprehend, interpret, anticipate, and manage China in the following century. At the 2009 Venice Biennale, the curatorial strategy of the China Pavilion was also, in the words of its curator, a “straw and direction” approach. The intent was to describe to the world “where the wind blows”45 in the context of “the confrontation between globalization and domestic interests” in China. The Zen-like character of this strategy was intentional and designed to evoke a world that is in motion as “we pick up the traces of the fragments left over in the social reform.” Finally, the China Pavilion was to offer a roadmap to a future based on a “new value system.”46 It would also be endowed “with more Chinese characteristics,” and would focus attention on emerging artists from the region.47

Lu Hao, one of the curators of the 2009 China Pavilion, is a renowned Chinese artist who was invited to participate in the 1999 Venice Biennale. Then he had hoped to place live birds, fish, and insects in exquisite, miniature, plexiglass architectural models of what Li Xianting called “the most ideological buildings in China.”48 Instead, Lu had to satisfy himself with synthetic fauna. A decade later, as co-curator of the China Pavilion, a former industrial site in the Arsenale dominated by gigantic, disused oil containers, Lu situated artworks like miniature, synthetic fables that metaphorically revealed “what is to come” (jian wei zhi zhu). “We are to see the world,” Lu Hao wrote in his curatorial statement, “in a grain of sand.”49

This was nowhere clearer than in the installation of the work of Fang Lijun, another renowned Chinese artist who participated in the 199350 and 1999 Venice Biennales. In 2009, Fang created forty gilded, miniature, truncated figures between twenty and forty centimeters high and wedged them underneath the China Pavilion’s oil cans in a “spatial visual shock” that was said to reflect on the scale of “the many social problems the human race faces [including] energy, the environment, and war.”51 Lu Hao described Fang’s work, and that of artist He Sen, as belonging to the category of

Fang Lijun, 2009.3.23, 2009, mixed media installation. Courtesy of the artist.

12 Top: Fang Lijun, 2009.3.23, “Dragging self back into reality.”52 2009, mixed media installation. Courtesy of the artist. Sen’s installation, Taiji World, Middle: He Sen, Taiji World, consisted of fifty small framed 2009, installation with oil on canvas, frames, and wood paintings that were installed, crates. Courtesy of the artist. salon-style, on shipping crates Bottom: Zeng Fanzhi, Transformation Plan— at the far end of the pavilion. Transforming the “Oil Depot” into “the Stacks,” 2009, wood, From a distance the brightly paper, and steel, 149 x 316 x 39 coloured paintings appeared to cm. Courtesy of the artist. be monochrome. Only in close proximity could one recognize that the paintings consisted of a thick layer of compressed pigment that had been “engraved” by traditional Chinese brushes (which were made of wolf hair53) into depictions of traditional Chinese landscapes, flowers, and birds. The third artist in this category, Zeng Fanzhi, created an installation titled Transformation Plan—Transforming the “Oil Depot” into “the Stacks.”54 Zeng took East-West publications and disassembled them into fragments. He then illustrated the books and made comments in them before re-binding them in the classical Chinese manner.55 The books were finally placed on a shelf-structure across a passageway in the pavilion, their Chinese titles incomprehensible to the Biennale’s Western audience. In an interview between Lu Hao and Zeng on the occasion of the Venice Biennale, Zeng explained that his artistic process is one of destruction: “I have never wanted the audience to see the truth.” His art works depict “the inner spiritual world.”56

Concern for the bewilderment and trauma of those who have not yet benefited from the extremely rapid transformation of Chinese society in the past twenty years is a key element of the work of He Jinwei.57 His large- scale, two-part, red velvet hanging served as the entrance to the China Pavilion and was titled Is the World Before your Eyes Real? Over seventy individual paintings were stitched onto each hanging in a “world map” in which persons, social incidents, symbols, and emblems were magnified or microscopically examined. When asked by Lu why his artworks did not assume one particular style, He answered that “only commodities need replications, and only the market requires constant production.”58

Left: He Jinwei, Is the World Before Us True (detail), 2008, velvet, oil on canvas, each painting 18 x 14 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Right: He Jinwei, Is the World Before Us True, 2008, velvet, oil on canvas, each painting 18 x 14 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

13 After thirty years of painting on canvas, Zeng Hao abandoned the familiar world of two-dimensionality and created a “macro-narration” in three- dimensional space in the form of a 4.5-metre square perspex box containing over two hundred objects of daily life suspended by wire. This work, titled 2009-6-7 (the date the Venice Biennale opened to the general public), was installed not in the darkened industrial ruins of the China Pavilion but in the adjacent Giardino delle Vergini, or Garden of the Virgin. Replicas of newspapers, airplanes, toilet paper, highrises, and sofas floated seamlessly in Zeng’s synthetic world of equivalence and disorder. Also situated in the garden was Qiu Zhijie’s site-specificDomino: The small knocking down the big, which consisted of wooden dominoes of various sizes arranged on the lawn in the shape of a tree. For Zeng, it is important to hold to the “game- mindedness of art and to bear the social responsibilities. Part of the idea stems from Plato’s reactionary thought in driving poets out of Utopia and the other part from traditional Chinese literati’s recognition of the structure of the spirit.” 59

Left: Qiu Zhijie, Domino: The small knocking down the big, 2009, installation of wood dominoes of various sizes. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Zeng Hao, 2009–6–7, 2009, Perspex, found objects, 4.5 m square. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Zheng Shengtian.

One of the key aspirations of the 2009 China Pavilion, according to Lu Hao, was to cleanse “self-identity represented by other than self.”60 This was especially evident in the provocations of Liu Ding, whose six “theme” stores, vitrines filled with myriad personal, aesthetic, and everyday objects, lined the main passageway of the China Pavilion. Liu Ding’s Store—The Utopian Future of Art, Our Reality consisted of the installation at the Biennale (the storefront) and a Web site (www.liudingstore.com) at which paintings signed by the artist could be purchased for 1,500 RMB. Container of Experience, “a vitrine filled with some plaques, some framed photographs, a carved wood pedestal, a tree branch, a lot of glass laboratory flasks, and a rock, also signed by Liu Ding,” was being offered on the Web site for 741,093 RMB.61 In addition, Liu Ding’s Store was offering a “tailor-made utopia of art” for visitors, who were invited to provide their “interests, ideas, special items, or dimensions.” The fee for this service would cover not only production materials and payments to other artists whose work is included in the vitrine, but also a “proprietor’s thinking fee.”62 In addition to Container of Experience, five other theme stores were available: The Perfect Sphere, Gold, A Momentary Lapse of Willpower, The Weight of a History Book, and Changing Sensibilities. According to the artist, the project was “based on the artistic ideal of unifying things of different values within a new order to create a model for a free artistic society.”63

The response to China’s national pavilion in the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 in the Western international press was largely indifferent, while Art Radar Asia noted dryly that it was less successful than in the past and “unable to generate much buzz for China during the festival’s opening days.”64 But the key question is what the measure of “success” should be.

14 Top: Liu Ding, installation The 2009 China view of Liu Ding’s Store—The Utopian Future of Art, Our Pavilion was an Reality, 2009. Courtesy of the artist. experiment that Liu Ding, Liu Ding’s Store— refused to offer The Utopian Future of Art, Our Reality, 2009, vitrine with “Chinese” art or objects, 210 x 100 x 80 cm. Courtesy of the artist. spectacle. Instead it Liu Ding, Liu Ding’s Store— pitted highly personal The Utopian Future of Art, Our Reality, 2009, vitrine with artworks against objects, 210 x 100 x 80 cm. the dark stage of an Courtesy of the artist. industrial ruin. During the opening days of the Biennale the British newspaper the Independent reported that the chairman of the Biennale had announced that the Chinese Pavilion would move to a new location in the future, among the “conventional venues” in the Giardini65 Thus the China Pavilion was possibly situated for the last time in 2009 in the few remaining untamed spaces of the Arsenale, where both “Chinese” art and contemporary Chinese art had repeatedly dazzled Western audiences.

In 2003, a panel discussion organized by Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art brought together leading curators and academics from Asia for a discussion titled “Looking Forward from Venice: The Prospects of Contemporary Chinese Art.” Johnson Chang Tsong-zung, who would co- curate the 2008 Guangzhou Triennial five years later, asked, “How do we measure the indicator of international success for contemporary Chinese art? Our ultimate expectation is that it should lead and influence artistic creation in other parts of the world in theories and ideas. This is also the foremost goal of contemporary Chinese art internationally.”66 This was certainly to be true of the 2008 Guangzhou Triennial. Perhaps the spectacle- resistant experiment of the China Pavilion 2009 will also be recognized as a turning point. As Lu Hao wrote in his curatorial statement, the works that were presented are part of a new “lingual system“ and “are no longer the political symbols known to and accepted by the West, nor are they dazzling, commercialized and superficial popular imagery.”67

15 The Hong Kong Pavilion Pak Sheung Chuen, The Horizon Placed at Home Making (Perfect) World: Harbour, Hong Kong, (N22°17’400” Version), Hong Alienated Cities, and Dreams Kong, 05/04/2009, 45 plastic bottles filled with sea water Pak Sheung Chuen collected from Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong. Commissioner: Tobias Berger Courtesy of the artist and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. The Hong Kong Pavilion is neither large nor grand, but it does have a Pak Sheung Chuen, Half fortuitous location for an off-site Collateral Event. Situated directly opposite Soul, Half Body, Venice, 21/05/2009, 63.4 kilograms the entrance to the Arsenale, one of the key venues of the Venice Biennale, worth of stones. Courtesy of the artist and the Hong Kong and next door to the only café in the area, it is ideal for dropping in or for Arts Development Council. meeting people. It is also, by virtue of its (physical) association with the Pak Sheung Chuen, From the Queen to a Flower: 1, Hong Arsenale, a location that signifies the avant-garde (or the now, and the now, Kong, 06/2009. Courtesy of the artist and the Hong Kong and the new, as Bhabha would say). The complex issues and contradictions Arts Development Council. surrounding the participation of Hong Kong in a “nationally” structured Pak Sheung Chuen, NYPLP1: page 22/Half Folded Library, international exhibition such as the Venice Biennale have been obscured 58th Street Branch Public in that it has been subsumed into the category of Collateral Event. The Library, 127 East 58th Street, New York. Courtesy of the potential of this event to become a platform of exchange that will open artist and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. doors, showcase, promote, reaffirm, and elevate, and to enable Hong Kong Pak Sheung Chuen, Travel art to bask in the limelight was noted by Ma Fung-kwok, Chairman of Without Visual Experience, Malaysia, 07–11/10/08, the Hong Kong Arts Development Council and the Commissioner of the photographs, various sizes. Courtesy of the artist Pavilion, in his foreword to the catalogue of this year’s exhibition, Making and the Hong Kong Arts (Perfect) World: Harbour, Hong Kong, Alienated Cities, and Dreams.68 Development Council. Pak Sheung Chuen, Breathing in a House, Korea The curator of the Hong Kong Pavilion in 2007, Norman Ford, had (Busan), 01–10/09/2006 (10 Days), plastic bags. nevertheless questioned the designation of Hong Kong’s participation as Courtesy of the artist and the Hong Kong Arts a Collateral Event when he asked, “meaning, like collateral damage, we Development Council. happened unintentionally?”69 In the newly aligned world of 2009, however, a certain indifference to the “naming” of the participation of Asian city states, regions, and nations seems to have set in. Instead, one senses here too a new confidence as to one’s role in the world, a heartfelt conviction as to the right to participate in such international events, and the sheer pleasure of having written one’s own labels and having the right to narrate. External reassurance is no longer needed or sought; new curatorial strategies are the order of the day. In the case of the Hong Kong Pavilion this has meant a shift from the format of a group exhibition to a solo presentation by one of Hong Kong’s younger and most respected artists, Pak Sheung Chuen.

Cleverly playing on the title of the 53rd Venice Biennale, Making Worlds,70 Pak’s (perfect) universe—the pavilion, its courtyard, and a typical Venetian canal visible through its rear gate—were exquisitely choreographed by the artist according to four categories: Harbour, Hong Kong, Alienated Cities, and Dreams. In Harbour it is Pak’s intention to create artworks out of everyday objects; in Hong Kong to gather together things and objects “that are scattered across the city, waiting and longing to be elucidated.” Artworks created in New York, Tokyo, Korea, and Venice, as Pak “isolates” himself from Hong Kong—“a city with which I am too familiar”—are to be found in Alienated Cities, while Dreams consists of those artworks that “will perhaps act as an initiation for realizing future happy memories,” and are, in fact, instructions to the viewer on how to combine “past memories and future imaginations.”71

Some of Pak’s best-known works have been included in the 2009 Hong Kong Pavilion. NYPLP1: page 22 / Half Folded Library: 06-24/06/2008 documents a site-specific installation in New York’s 58th StreetBranch

16 Library where Pak secretly folded the upper corner of every other page 22 of all books in the library, 15,500 volumes in total. Breathing in a House: Korea (Busan), 01–10/09/2006: 10 days consists of transparent plastic bags containing Pak’s breath, which he collected over a period of ten days until the bags had filled the apartment.Making (Perfect) World should, however, not be regarded as a retrospective exhibition in the classic sense of the word. It is instead, the artist says, a “cohesive vision” consisting of newly commissioned works together with “re-edited” older works “to coincide with the site and context of Venice.”72 One of the most powerful of these works is A Travel Without Visual Experience: Malaysia, 07–11/10/2008: 5 days/4 nights tour group. In 2008 Pak joined a tour group travelling to Malaysia. In order to simulate blindness he either closed or bound his eyes for the entire journey. “During the trip, I was still doing all the sightseeing and took many photos, but instead of seeing, I only used my body to sense and experience my surroundings.”73 Each photograph was labelled, with a date and time stamp on the photographs. In the caption to m081009.1133, Pak wrote: “In my imagined world, all mosques are blue.”74

The Venice audience of A Travel Without Visual Experience: Malaysia was asked to have cameras ready, flash on, before they entered the darkened room in which photographs that Pak had taken in Malaysia during his simulated blindness were exhibited. Only when the viewer took a flash photograph of the room could she or he see Pak’s photography for the blind. “You can’t change the world, so you try to change the way you see it,” Pak explained in an interview. “This is basically how I work and live. I am creating a world, a perfect world.”75

The Macau Pavilion Divergence Lee Yee Kee, Bonnie Leong Mou Cheng and Kitty Leung Mou Kit, João Ó Bruno Soares Curator: Kent, Ieong Chi Kin

Pak’s perfect world was less evident in the work presented in the Macau Pavilion. Here, an exhibition titled Divergence meandered through a former scoletta, or little school, in Venice’s Campo Bandiera e Moro: up narrow stairs, into dark rooms and hidden corners. Divergence, the press release for the pavilion tells us, should not be understood as ambiguity but as “a deviation from a perceived direction which can induce wrong variations out of rationality.”76 The distinguished jurors who selected the participating artists were equally metaphorical in describing their understanding of the theme of the pavilion, especially

17 Bonnie Leong and Kitty Leung, Space in Flux: Man-Made Landscape, 2009, sequins and beads on linen, 1.8 x 4.6 m. Photo: Kitty Leung. Courtesy of the artists.

Ung Vai Meng, the former director of the organizing institution, the Macau Museum of Art: “Since a certain date, the sky of Macau has become bizarre. Clouds overhead are leashed by a round of turbid and suffocating light, while underneath those brand-new, gold-glittering luxury hotels are packed with throngs. . . . In the struggle between the city’s alienated expression and concealed fatigue, the artists throw us a stream of hypotheses without answering.”77 For the eminent Chinese critic Feng Boyi, also a juror, the exhibiting artists’ works “chime with the very many issues arising in the regional culture of the Macau SAR [Special Administrative Region of China].”78

The disjunctive, metaphoric subtexts of the colonial, regional, and national waters that Macau and its artists must navigate in the twenty-first century is the true subject of its participation in the 2009 Venice Biennale, exactly ten years after Macau was transferred to China after more than four hundred years of Portuguese rule. Four artists and three projects were selected by the jury. Lee Yee Kee’s installation in a blackened room, Timeless Tunnel, is disorientating and anxiety-provoking in its endlessly repeating cycles and mirrored reflections of the filmed interior of a tunnel. In a recent interview, Lee observed that this work is “about not going forward or backward, which is kind of like what’s happening in Macau today. . . . [It] gives a very strong impression of this sense of contradiction and being lost. I want people to see themselves as actually being inside the tunnel with the mirror, to feel what I felt. . . . There’s the sense that it’s a never-ending trap.”79 Lee is referring to her experiences as a child when she would play in the tunnel of an air raid shelter on Guia Hill, the highest point of Macau.

During his presentation at the Irish Pavilion, Charles Esche had observed how entangled we are through the global economy, and through our digital exchanges. Two of the artists in the Macau Pavilion, Bonnie Leong Mou Cheng and Kitty Leung Mou Kit, addressed this “connectivity” in their work Space in Flux: Network Cube. Over a thousand glass tiles, each measuring half a square inch, were assembled on the gallery floor in a map-like installation nearly two metres wide and four metres long that recorded the density and frequency of Internet connections in Europe and Asia. Another large-scale work by the same artists, Space in Flux: Man-Made Nature, hung on the wall. A multitude of small beads in various shades of black and pearl white had been embroidered to create a gestural landscape of mountain ranges rising above the traces of fields and riverbeds. According to the artists, the work explored the “paradoxical state of closeness and distance.

18 Bonnie Leong and Kitty Leung, Space in Flux: Man-Made Landscape, 2009, sequins and beads on linen, 1.8 x 4.6 m. Photo: Kitty Leung. Courtesy of the artists.

“Physical boundaries,” they noted in the exhibition label for the work,“are no easy ways to separate cultures, economies, regions, and even nations.”

João Ó Bruno Soares simulated light-box advertisement for a one-way air ticket from Venice to Macau for the astonishing price of only €19.99 glowed in the evenings at the entrance to the Macau Pavilion and attracted potential travelers during the day who didn’t realize that they had stumbled onto life imitating fiction. For those astute enough to question this extraordinary “deal,” it soon became clear that it was counterfeit, a subterfuge to recall an event that had slipped into history leaving even its supporters stranded on the beach. 1999 referred to the year when Macau was transferred to China and the ten-day-long advance booking period to the tenth anniversary of this event in 2009. The dates of the travel period (June 10 to December 22) recalled respectively the national day of Portugal and the date of Macau’s transfer to China. And the fictitious, low-cost airline, EurAsia Airways Limited? “It is Eurasian,” the artist explained in an interview, “so, a little like myself, between Europe and Asia.”80

João Ó Bruno Soares, EurAsia Airways Limited, 2009, installation. Photo: the artist. Courtesy of the artist and the Macau Art Museum.

19 The Taiwan Pavilion Cheng-Ta Yu, Ventriloquists: Introduction, 2008, HDV, video Foreign Affairs: Artists from Taiwan installation, colour/sound. Hsieh Ying-Chun, Chen Chieh-Jen, Chien-Chi Chang, Cheng-Ta Yu Courtesy of the artist. Commissioner: Fang-Wei Chang

Foreign Affairs, the title of Taiwan’s eighth exhibition at the Venice Biennale, hinted at the illicit as well as at the august and conjured up its ongoing dilemma on the international stage. Once again the Taiwan Pavilion was situated at the edge of Venice’s magnificent San Marco Square. Locals and tourists alighting from the numerous vaporetti that jostle for moorage at its door could not avoid seeing the large banner, reading Foreign Affairs: Artists from Taiwan, hanging from the Palazzo delle Prigioni (prisons’ palace) on the promenade Riva degli Schiavoni. A complement to the prisons of the Ducal Palace and a former seat of the Magistratura responsible for prosecuting common criminals, the Palazzo accords cultural events that take place in its historic halls—including the Taiwan Pavilion—vestiges of the unlicensed if not the unlawful.

If, in the past, the Taiwan Pavilion was renowned for its vibrant, high-tech, installation-based exhibitions, in 2009 it was noticeably more restrained. This year’s commissioner and curator, Fang-Wei Chang, observed that past exhibitions had been “very much about desire.”81 Chang decided instead to place her emphasis on “cross-regional art” within the present global political, economic, and social context. These concerns, Chang explained, are closer to those of many artists working in Taiwan today: “They are looking out rather than facing inwards. And this is what we are trying to do with the Taiwan Pavilion in 2009.”82

20 “Cross-regional” practice in Taiwan in 2009 has a quality of entanglement that Sarat Maharaj would love, especially in the hands of the youngest artist participating in the Biennale, Cheng-Ta Yu, who is still a university student. Both video works by Yu included in Foreign Affairs turned their attention to foreign residents in Taiwan. In Ventriloquists: Introduction, Yu stands behind his subjects, who attempt (unsuccessfully) to repeat his phrases in Mandarin. In Ventriloquists: Liang Mei-Lan and Emily Su two women from the Philippines who married into Taiwanese families sing popular songs and try to communicate with the artist in Mandarin, Taiwanese, and English. As Yu explains,“It was a conversation within the cracks of language and, unable to always convey what we meant, situations of miscommunication and dissonance occasionally arose.”83 For the resultant digital work on display, the artist translated their conversations in Mandarin or Taiwanese into English subtitles using English words but the grammar of the original language. “In previous Biennales in Venice the exhibitions in the Taiwan Pavilion were always asking, ‘Who am I’? This question confuses us. This time,” Cheng-Ta Yu explains, “we are saying ‘I am’!” Artists of his generation, Yu added, are “not concerned with what kind of Taiwanese artist we might be. We don’t think about that. My main concern is: how can I communicate with other people? And in what way? My work is not an end in itself, it is just an interface.”84

Cheng-Ta Yu, Ventriloquists: Liang Mei-Lan and Emily Su, 2009, HDV, video installation, colour/sound. Courtesy of the artist.

The older generation of artists from Taiwan participating in the 2009 Venice Biennale do not share Cheng’s indifference to categories of identity. “Interfacing” on the global stage is part of their everyday life as well. Nevertheless, they remain intensely aware of the barriers Taiwanese citizens often face when they travel or even apply for a visa to go abroad, a process that can be humiliating and bitter. One of Taiwan’s most distinguished artists, Chen Chieh-Jen, went to the American Institute in Taiwan in September 2008 to secure a visa so that he could participate in the New Orleans Biennial. He was refused on the basis that the officer suspected that he was intending to emigrate illegally to the United States. Chen established a blog (The Illegal Immigrant) as a public forum for Taiwanese who had encountered similar problems. Within days it had registered several hundred responses. The tales of those who replied were re-enacted and recorded on high-quality, 35 mm film and converted to DVD format. The result is the powerful and polemic work Empire’s Borders I (2008–09), shown at this year’s Venice Biennale. While Chen Chieh-Jen was careful to stress that his experience was similar to that encountered by foreign spouses and immigrant workers in Taiwan,85 the focus of Empire’s Borders I remained Taiwan’s complex relationship with the United States and its political and economic dependence upon these ties. America, he wrote, “has always been

21 Top: Chen Chieh-Jen, Empire’s Borders I, 2008–09, 35mm transferred to DVD, single- channel, colour/sound, 27 mins. Photo: © Chen You-Wei. Courtesy of the artist. Bottom: Chen Chieh-Jen, Empire’s Borders I, 2008–09, 35mm transferred to DVD, single-channel, colour/sound, 27 mins. Photo: © Chen You- Wei. Courtesy of the artist.

a dreamland of freedom, democracy, and progress, the standard by which everything has been judged. Ultimately the United States is portrayed [in Taiwan’s mainstream media] as the world’s suzerain where all desires can be satisfied.”86

Left: Chen-Chi Chang, Chen X. Family, New York City, 1998. Right: Chen-Chi Chang, Chen X. Family, Fuzhou, China, 2007. © Chien-Chi Chang/Magnum Photos.

But the life of those who do succeed in emigrating illegally to the States is harsh and lonely. Desires remain unfulfilled; families are separated for decades; only low-paid, menial jobs are available. It is in this netherworld of illegality that the artist Chien-Chi Chang began photographing Chinese immigrants living in New York, as well as their families in Fuzhou, over a period of seventeen years. Eventually he would become a “courier,” bringing photographs of the divided families to one another. His photographs of Fuzhou documented the physical transformation of the place, which came to be known as “widow village” (where everyone waits),87 while black-and- white images recorded the life of those who live in the “cracks” of American society in the hope of providing a better life for their families.

Also operating internationally in territories of extreme need and poverty is the architect/activist Hsieh Ying-Chun, who has been working on reconstruction projects since Taiwan’s devastating earthquake in 1999. Currently engaged in similar efforts in China following the Sichuan earthquake in May 2008, Hsieh presented photographic and video documentation of his projects at the 2009 Taiwan Pavilion under the title

22 Left: Hsieh Ying-Chun, houses with woven bamboo roofs built by the Thao tribe. Photo: © 921 Minbou. Right: Hsieh Ying-Chun, villagers adding recycled bricks and window casements to the main structure, Caopo Township, Sichuan. Photo: © Rural Architectural Studio.

Mutual Subject: What To Be Done. The distinguishing features of Hsieh’s practice are its commitment to using indigenous materials and building styles and an ability to adhere to extreme budget limitations. Solutions are home-grown, not imported. In commenting on the nature of the Mutual Subject, Hsieh Ying-Chun writes: “when I let go of control and allow my work to transcend its own boundaries, the results are spellbinding.”88

Venice Biennale Special The Singapore Pavilion Mention Award. Left to right: Homi Bhabha, Sarat Maharaj, Ming Wong: Life of Imitation Jack Bankowsky, Tang Fu Kuen, Ming Wong. Photo: Tara Ming Wong Tan. Courtesy of the National Commissioner: Lim Chwee Seng Arts Council, Singapore. Curator: Tang Fu Kuen

Special Mention—Expanding Worlds A special mention goes to Ming Wong (Singapore Pavilion) for examining the history of Singapore’s multiethnic cultural identities via the demise of the country’s once flourishing film industry. Ming Wong’s video-works use innovative forms and techniques to reflect on the sense of shame and exclusion that accompanies the imposition of racial and sexual stereotypes. 89

International Jury, 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009 (Jack Bankowsky, Homi K. Bhabha, Sarat Maharaj, Angela Vettese, Julia Voss)

On June 6, 2009, the International Jury of the 53rd Venice Biennale announced a number of awards of Special Mention: Remaking Worlds (Lygia Pape), Curating Worlds (Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset), Translating Worlds (Roberto Cuoghi), and Expanding Worlds (Ming Wong, Singapore Pavilion). The Singapore Pavilion was certainly deserving of this recognition. However, the jury’s description of the installations of Ming Wong as reflections on “shame and exclusion” seemed curiously at odds with the work itself. Perhaps a postcolonial (re)framing that the artist himself would resist? Life of Imitation, as one of Ming Wong’s works was titled, was in fact a celebration of Singapore’s golden age of cinema in the 1950s and 60s when “multiple worlds” proudly co-existed and “language, gender, appearance and traditions were continually [and successfully] negotiated.”90 Wong’s sophisticated re-reading of Singapore’s national cinema through re-enactments avoided pathos and nostalgia by means of “sly and comic” mimicry91 and provided a rich palimpsest of constantly shifting worlds. To (mis)appropriate Homi K. Bhabha’s remarks at the Irish Pavilion the day before the awards were announced, Ming Wong’s Life of Imitation

23 Top: Ming Wong, Life of Imitation, 2009, 2-channel DVD, 13 mins. Courtesy of the National Arts Council, Singapore. Bottom: Ming Wong, poster for Life of Imitation, 2009. Courtesy of the National Arts Council, Singapore.

questioned sexualities and blurred nationalities. Instead of making boundaries immediately tangible, however, Wong dissolved them.

The fourteenth-century Palazzo Michiel del Brusa on Venice’s Canal Grande, in which the Singapore Pavilion was located, provided the perfect mélange of theatricality and historical detritus, grand rooms and intimate niches, that Life of Imitation demanded and deserved. No (historical or contemporary) excess was too extravagant. Visitors were greeted in a grand entrance hall by large- scale canvases by Singapore’s last surviving billboard painter, Neo Chon Teck. Rare historical artifacts and ephemera from the collection of Wong Han Min followed, presented in plastic covers along with period posters and handbills. Ming Wong’s Four Malay Stories from 2005 in Sala 3 showed Wong attempting to learn (in Malay) lines by sixteen stock characters from films in the 1950s and 60s. Two new works from 2009, Life of Imitation (based on Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life, 1959) and In Love for the Mood (based on Wong Kar Wai’s melodrama In the Mood for Love, 2000), were brilliantly installed by Wong and curator Tang Fu Kuen in separate rooms, Sala 1 and Sala 2, which were separated from the main hall by heavy, red velvet curtains. In Life of Imitation three actors, each from a different ethnic group, portrayed a “black” mother and her “white” daughter who vehemently denied her racial roots: “I’m white. White!” By placing the projectors so that the reflection of one actor’s portrayal could be seen simultaneously beside another’s in the Sala’s elaborate historical mirrors, Tang and Wong “exposed slippages in acting guises and stances,” as was noted in the exhibition catalogue.92 Similarly, In Love for the Mood was presented on three screens placed diagonally across a darkened room in a manner that allowed for a meditative but disjunctive atmosphere of what Tang describes as “performative veneers of language and identity” that exerted a hypnotic fascination.

Asked whether he was the Asian Tarantino who saw thousands of films while jobbing in a video shop, Ming Wong replied: “I watch these films through other people’s memories. Many of these old foreign language films have no subtitles, so I have to watch it through a friend’s interpretation. It’s like watching someone else watching a film.”93

24 Ming Wong, In Love for the Beyond a Restrictive Dichotomy Mood, 2009, 3-channel DVD, 4 mins. Courtesy of the National I am reminded of an Italo Calvino quote from Invisible Cities Arts Council, Singapore. where Kublai asks Marco [Polo], “When you return to the West, will you repeat to your people the same tales you tell me?” Fiona Tan94

In her exhibition, Disorient, in the of the 53rd Venice Biennale Fiona Tan presented a rich, audiovisual tale in which voice- overs recounted excerpts from The Travels of Marco Polo. Her associative montages evoked “a fantasy of the West’s Orient” that is “so hung with paintings and overgrown with ornament, so covered in textured wallpaper, tapestries and richly coloured carpets that the eye is in danger of losing its bearing in space.”95 Tan noted: “I am straining to see and imagine the future beyond the restrictive dichotomy of East and West (one which always implies East versus West).”96

The fables of Marco Polo have been a source of inspiration for numerous artists at the Venice Biennale, most notably Nam June Paik who represented Germany in 1993, and Cai Guo-Qiang in 1995. In the garden of the German Pavilion Nam June Paik installed a work titled Marco Polo (in progress) that consisted of a VW Beetle, a refrigerator and television monitors.97 Cai Guo- Qiang created a performance and installation titled Bringing to Venice What Marco Polo Forgot and delivered traditional Chinese medicines to Venice on a Chinese fishing boat.98 In 2005, anothermountainman (Stanley Wong Ping- pui) metaphorically chastized Marco Polo for his failure to mention tea in his tales of China by recreating a tea house at the Hong Kong Pavilion.99 And at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, an exhibition titled A Gift to Marco Polo celebrated the legendary journeys of the Venetian merchant with the work of Fang Lijun, He Douling, Wang Guangyi, Wu Shanzhuan, Ye Fang, Yue Minjun, Zhang Peili, Zhang Xiaogang, and Zhou Chunya.100 The “gift” of Yue Minjun, who had also participated in the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, was a series of circular oil paintings that appropriated the work of the early Chinese Modernists Qi Baishi, Xu Beihong and Zhang Daqian.101 Yue placed vignettes of their work within the (visual) confines of “a perplexing labyrinth which is similar to the oriental labyrinth taken back by Marco Polo to the Venetians” seven hundred years ago.102

The fascination that Marco Polo has exerted on the imagination of curators and artists at the Venice Biennale until the present day is an indication of the abiding power of exotic and orientalist views of the “East.” Nevertheless, a number of exhibitions and events at the 53rd Venice Biennale revealed an important shift. The gestural and highly personal exhibitions at the pavilions of China, Hong Kong, and Macao; the sophisticated exploration of a world beyond restrictive dichotomies at the Singapore Pavilion; and the models of responsible action in an entangled, global world in the pavilion of Taiwan represent a distinct, and overdue, farewell from the oriental and occidental labyrinths of the past.

25 Notes 1 Sarat Maharaj: A conversation relating to the publication of Printed Project, no. 11: “’Farewell to Post-colonialism’—Querying the Guangzhou Triennial 2008,” Irish Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale, Friday, June 5, 2009. The Irish Pavilion was the exhibition venue for both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. 2 The Third Guangzhou Triennial, which took place from September 6 to November 16, 2008, in Guangzhou, China, was co-curated by Johnson Chang Tsong-zung, Gao Shiming, and Sarat Maharaj. See Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 8, no. 1 (January/February 2009), 6–29. 3 Sarat Maharaj, ed., “Farewell to Post-colonialism: Querying the Guangzhou Triennial 2008,”Printed Project, no. 11 (May 2009). 4 Sarat Maharaj, Conversation at the Irish Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale, Friday, June 5, 2009. See Ezra Pound, Instigations of Ezra Pound, Together with an Essay on the Chinese Written Character by Ernest Fenollosa (New York, Boni and Liveright: 1920). 5 Gao Shiming, “The Self Imagining of Guangzhou Triennial 2008: An Exercise in Negation,” in Maharaj, ed., Farewell to Post-colonialism, 13. 6 Gao Shiming, “A Be-Coming Future: Unweaving and Rebuilding of the Local,” Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 8, no. 5 (September/October 2009), 30. 7 Conversation at the Irish Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale, Friday, June 5, 2009. 8 Ibid. 9 Sarat Maharaj, “Philosophical Geographies,” in Making Worlds: Exhibition, ed. Rossella Martignoni (Venice: Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia and Marsilio, 2009), 277–83. 10 Edmund Husserl’s phrase “geistige Gestalt Europas” was translated by David Carr in 1970 as “the spiritual shape of Europe.” Today it would be more commonly translated as “spiritual gestalt.” The term “spiritual geographies” is not to be found in the original lecture by Husserl but rather in interpretative texts by later writers: see Marc Redfield, “Derrida, Europe, Today,”South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 2 (2007), 378. 11 Maharaj, “Philosophical Geographies,” 282. Without denying that much of Husserl’s 1935 lecture contained problematic references to other cultures and to what nowadays would be called the Other, it is important to recall the context in which he was speaking. No longer allowed to speak in public under the Nazi dictatorship in Germany or to teach, Husserl offered in Vienna a passionate defense of the then gravely threatened European “philosophical man” and described what today would be called his core cultural characteristics. One of these characteristics is the “peculiar universality of his critical stance, his resolve not to accept unquestioningly any pregiven opinion or tradition so that he can enquire, in respect to the whole traditionally pregiven universe, after what is true in itself.” This “universal critical attitude toward anything and everything pregiven in the tradition,” Husserl insisted, “is not inhibited in its spread by any national boundaries.” Translations by David Carr in Edmund Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, June 1970), 286 and 288. 12 Conversation at the Irish Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale, Friday, June 5, 2009. In 1935 Husserl declared that the spiritual gestalt of Europe should not be “understood geographically as on a map.” Translation by Carr in Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 273. 13 Conversation at the Irish Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale, Friday, June 5, 2009. 14 Ibid. 15 In this regard Charles Esche also suggested that museums, especially those with global aspirations, reflect on their own locations, their colonialist aspirations, and the displacement of objects from one place to another in the building of their collections. 16 “After post-colonialism, history is in the future. As long as we eradicate metaphysical pathos, we will no longer care about who we used to be, only who we will be. . . . We cannot and need not return.” Gao Shiming,” Observations and Presentiments after Post-colonialism,” in Farewell to Post- Colonialism: The Third Guangzhou Triennial (Guangdong: Guangdong Museum of Art, , 2008), 37. 17 Formerly known as the Italian Pavilion. 18 A record number of seventy-seven participating countries and forty-four Collateral Events were included in the 2009 Venice Biennale; see http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/, accessed July 2009. 19 “The Spanish Constitution of 1978 declares that Spain is an indissoluble nation that recognizes and guarantees the right to self-government of the nationalities and regions that constitute it. Catalonia, alongside Basque Country and Galicia, was set apart from the rest of Spain as a Historical nationality and given the ability to accede to autonomy automatically, which resulted in the 1979 Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia.” See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalonia, accessed July 2009. 20 See http://www.labiennale.org/en/biennale/history/, accessed July 2009. 21 Geschichte des Deutschen Pavillons (history of the German Pavilion), http://www.deutscher-pavillon. org/history.htm, accessed July 2009. The Munich Secession was founded in 1892, followed by the Vienna Secession in 1897 and the Berlin Secession in 1898. The highly influential 1. International Exhibition of the Munich Secession took place for the first time in 1893. 22 See http://www.deutscher-pavillon.org/english/home.htm, accessed July 2009. 23 Dorothee Müller, “Kinderschänder im Kunstverein—Frauen und Chinesen: Harald Szeemann hat bei der Biennale in Venedig neue Akzente gesetzt,” Süddeutsche Zeitung no. 132 (June 12/13, 1999), 17. 24 Carol Vogel, “At the Venice Biennale, Art Is Turning Into an Interactive Sport,” New York Times, June 14, 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/14/arts/at-the-venice-biennale-art-is-turning-into-an- interactive-sport.html?scp=1&sq=june 1999 venice biennale&st=cse&pagewanted=2, accessed July 2009. 25 Francesca Dal Lago, “Of Site and Space: The Virtual Reality of Chinese Contemporary Art,” Chinese Art 2, no. 4 (August/September 1999), http://www.chinese-art.com/Contemporary/volume2issue4/ Feature/feature.htm, accessed July 2009. 26 See Vera V. Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, “Conception of Terrestrial Organization in the Shan Hai Jing,” Bulletin de l’Ecole francaise d’Extrême-Orient, 82, no. 82, (1995), 57–110. 27 Denys Zacharopoulos, Hou Hanru, “France: Jean Pierre Bertrand/Huang Yong Ping,” 48a Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte: dAPERTutto (Venice: La Biennale di Venezia and Marsilio, 1999), 46.

26 28 Maharaj, “Philosophical Geographies,” 282. 29 Translation by Carr in Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 286 and 288. 30 Dal Lago, “Of Site and Space.” 31 Ibid. 32 http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/history/premi.html?back=true, accessed July 2009. 33 The installation commissioned by the 48th Venice Biennale consisted of “108 life-sized sculptures created on site by Long Xu Li and nine guest artisan sculptors, 60 tons of clay, wire and wood armature, and other props and tools for sculpture, four spinning night lamps, facsimiles photocopies of documents and photographs related to Rent Collection Courtyard (dated 1965)”; see Cai Guo- Qiang, “Project No. 33: Installation,”http://www.caiguoqiang.com/project_detail.php?id=33&iid=0, accessed July 2009. 34 See Britta Erickson, “Cai Guo-Qiang takes ‘The Rent Collection Courtyard’ from Cultural Revolution Model Sculpture to Winner of the 48th Venice Biennale International Award,” Chinese Art 2, no. 4 (August/September 1999), http://www.chinese-art.com/Contemporary/volume2issue4/Other/other2. htm, accessed July 2009. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Dal Lago, “Of Site and Space.” 38 See “On Being a Conscientious Collector: Zhang Rui in Conversation with Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker” and “Gaining Happiness Through Collecting: Yang Bin in Conversation with Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 7, no. 8 (November 2008), 38–49. 39 Dal Lago, “Of Site and Space.” 40 Gao Shiming, “A Be-Coming Future,” 32. 41 See Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, “Post-West: Guangzhou Triennial, Taipei Biennale, and Singapore Biennale,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 8, no. 1 (January/February 2009), 16–29. 42 Gao Shiming, “A Be-Coming Future,”36. 43 In July 1901 Prince Chun travelled to Germany to extend the regrets of the emperor of China for the murder of the German ambassador Baron von Ketteler during the Boxer Uprising. See http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaifeng, July 2009. 44 Isaac Taylor Headland, Court Life in China: The Capital, Its Officials and People (New York: F. H. Revell, 1909), 109, http://www.romanization.com/books/courtlifeinchina/chap11.html, accessed July 2009. 45 Lu Hao, “See a World in a Grain of Sand,” Theme of Chinese Pavilion EN, May 2009, press kit, China Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009. 46 Ibid. 47 Press release, Chinese Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennial, What Is To Come (Jian Wei Zhi Zhu 见微 知著), June 5, 2009. 48 Monica Dematté, “Chinese art . . . It’s dAPERTutto!,” Chinese Art 2, no. 4 (August/September 1999), http://www.chinese-art.com/Contemporary/volume2issue4/Post89/post89.htm, accessed July 2009. 49 Lu Hao, “See a World in a Grain of Sand.” 50 “In one section of the exhibition, called Passage to the East, in the grounds of the Giardini, the works of the Gutai Group, the Lettrist Group, and were displayed alongside those of Shigeko Kubuta and a selection of new Chinese artists (mostly painters) that included Xu Bing, Fang Lijun, Liu Wei, Yu Hong, Feng Mengbo, Wang Guangyi, Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi, Yu Youhan, Ding Yi, Wang Ziwei, Li Shan, Sun Liang, and Sung Haidong.” Peter Hill, True Lies and Superfictions, report no.7, School of Creative Arts Research Seminar Series 2004, University of Melbourne, Australia; see http://www.sca.unimelb.edu.au/research/seminar_papers/, accessed July 2009. See also Marcia E. Vetrocq, “Identity crisis: 1993 Venice Biennale art exhibition, Italy,” Art in America, September 1993, 5; see http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_n9_v81/ai_14406755/pg_5/, accessed July 2009. 51 What Is to Come, exhibition handout. 52 Lu Hao, “How I Choose Artists,” press kit, China Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009. 53 What Is to Come, exhibition handout. 54 Ibid. In the press materials for the pavilion, Zeng Fanzhi’s work is also titled Alteration Plan: Transforming the Oil Depot into a Book Shelf. 55 The English translation of Lu Hao’s text provided in the press kit reads: “Zeng Fanzhi first tries to find books on Western-Eastern cultural classes in the social, economic and cultural arenas before breaking them down into fragments.” 56 Lu Hao and Zeng Fanzhi Q & A, press kit, China Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009. 57 Lu Hao placed He Jinwei’s work in the category Resuscitation of Humanitarian Concern. 58 Lu Hao and He Jinwei Q & A. 59 Ibid. 60 Lu Hao, “How I Choose Artists.” 61 Winnie Wong, What People Are Saying, http://www.liudingstore.com/, June 1, 2009. 62 See www.liudingstore.com. 63 Ibid. 64 Katherine Don, “China Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale,” RedBox Review, June 9, 2009 (http:// review.redboxstudio.cn/2009/06/china-pavilion-at-the-53rd-venice-biennale/, accessed July 2009. 65 “Art attack: Inside the weird and wonderful world of the Venice Biennale,” Independent, Friday, June 5, 2009, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/art-attack-inside-the-weird- and-wonderful-world-of-the-venice-biennale-1696893.html, accessed July 2009. 66 Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 2, no. 3 (September 2003), 51. 67 Lu Hao, “How I Choose Artists.”

27 68 Ma Fung-kwok, “Message from the Commissioner,” Artist from Hong Kong: Making (Perfect) World (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Development Council, 2009), 4–5. 69 See http://www.venicebiennale.hk/vb2007/exhibition_curator.php, accessed July 2009. 70 The artistic director of the 53rd Venice Biennale, Daniel Birnbaum, adapted the title from Ways of Worldmaking (1978) by the American philosopher Nelson Goodman (1906–98). 71 All quotations are from Pak Sheung Chuen, “Initial Concepts for Making (Perfect) World,” Artist from Hong Kong: Making (Perfect) World (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Development Council, 2009), 25. 72 Ibid., 25. 73 Artwork list, handout, Hong Kong Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009. 74 Pak Sheung-chuen, Visual/Textual City ODD ONE IN II: Invisible Travel (Hong Kong: MCCM Creations and Para/Site Art Space, June 2009), 137. 75 Ibid., 222. 76 Divergence: Exhibits from Macau, China: Collateral Event of the 53rd International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia, press release, Arte Communications, June 2009, http://www. artecommunications.com/index.php/en/component/content/article/1370-esposizioni-e-mostre-2009- macao-53-esposizione-internazionale-darte, accessed July 2009. 77 Divergence: Macau’s Proposed Artworks for the 53rd Venice Biennale, eds., Terence Hun Kuong U and Isabel Carvalho (Macau, Museu de Arte de Macau, 2009), 28. 78 Ibid., 25. 79 “Macau Interview: Gigi Lee Yee-kee,” Air Macau Magazine, June 1, 2009, http://www. airmacaumagazine.com/2009/06/01/macau-incoming-8/, accessed July 2009. 80 Interview with the author, June 5, 2009. 81 Fang-Wei Chang, interview with the author, June 3, 2009. 82 Ibid. 83 Cheng-Ta Yu, artist’s statement, Foreign Affairs: Artists from Taiwan (Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan, 2009), 109. 84 Cheng-Ta Yu, interview with the author, June 3, 2009. 85 Chen Chieh-Jen, artist’s statement, Foreign Affairs, 60. 86 Ibid., 59. 87 Ibid., 82. 88 Hsieh Ying-Chun, artist’s statement, Foreign Affairs, 29. 89 “Official Awards of the 53rd International Art Exhibition,” La Biennale di Venezia, June 6, 2009, http://www.labiennale.org/en/news/awards-n.html?back=true, accessed July 2009. 90 Tang Fu Kuen, “Notes from the Curator,” Ming Wong: Life of Imitation, Singapore Pavilion (Singapore: National Arts Council, 2009), 9. The catalogue also contains essays by Hu Fang, Benjamin Mckay, Sherman Ong, Ben Slater, Russell Storer, Wong Han Min, and the curator, as well as an interview with the artist by Suzanne Prinz. 91 Ibid., 10. 92 Ibid., 10. 93 Suzanne Prinz, “Interview with Ming Wong,” Ming Wong: Life of Imitation, 52. 94 “Fiona Tan, Interview with Orsola Miletti,” 65. 95 Thomas Elsaesser, “Fiona Tan: Place after Place,” Fiona Tan: Disorient, Dutch Pavilion, 53rd International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia (Amsterdam: Mondriaan Foundation, June 2009), Section 2, 30. 96 Press release, Fiona Tan: Disorient, Dutch Pavilion, 53rd International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia. 97 Florian Matzner, “Kunstwerk des Monats im Juni 1994: Nam June Paik,“ Landesmuseum Münster. http://www.lwl.org/LWL/Kultur/WLMKuK/ausstellungen/kdm/kdm_archiv/moderne/1993_1998/1994_ 06/index2_html, accessed July 2009. 98 Britta Erickson, “Cai Guo-Qiang takes ‘The Rent Collection Courtyard’ from Cultural Revolution Model Sculpture to Winner of the 48th Venice Biennale International Award.” 99 “Investigation of a Journey to the West by Micro + Polo”, Hong Kong Pavilion, , 2005, http://www.venicebiennale.hk/vb2005/eng/index.htm, accessed July 2009. 100 A Collateral Event co-organized by the Venice International University; the Museum of Contemporary Art of Shanghai; and InCART (Institutions of Chinart), A Gift to Marco Polo was curated by the renowned critics Lu Peng and Achille Bonito Oliva and took place in the historic buildings of the University on the island of San Servolo. 101 Qi Baishi (1864–1957), Xu Beihong (1895–1953), and Zhang Daqian (1899–1983) were important early twentieth-century Chinese painters. 102 Lu Peng and Achille Bonito Oliva, eds., “Yue Minjun,” A Gift to Marco Polo, (Venice: Marsilio, 2009), 70.

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