2006 Shanghai Biennale - Shanghai Art Museum

On our way to JinAn temple sits on the end of Nanjing Xi Lu, we passed by an old blind couple playing 5-stringed Hu instrument right in front of the Ferrari / Maserati showroom. They moved forward slowly, he was playing music, eyes completely shut, she walked right behind, eyes mid-clos, right hand posed on his left shoulder pushing for direction, left hand held out with a dented bare lead rice bowl, with a few coins lying at the bottom. She murmured “thank you” at the sound of a few coins that I dropped.


A few yards further we bumped into the Shanghai Art Museum, where the Shanghai Biennale, a showcase of contemporary art that is growing in prestige since its launch in 1996, was held. The Museum occupies a heritage building, the landmark of Old Shanghai with the nostalgic clock tower that once overlooked a racecourse.


Spread over 5 floors were twelve exhibition halls showing a mixture of Chinese modern artist and a couple of Western especially the British Kristian Ryokan. The 2006 edition of Shanghai Biennale is themed “Hyper Design”, a fresh element in visual culture and consummation industry, the Biennial explores the complicated, overlapping social liaison and cultural meanings hidden behind the phenomenon of “Design”.

I discovered quite a few Asian artists, notably the infamous cartoon illustrator Jimmy from Taiwan. A collection of 120 paintings called “Four Seasons” consisting of ten scenes and ten groups of people, is seen as a receptacle of collective memory. It is a space for countless possible narratives in a metropolitan environment, in which each person tells a different story. The complex temporal and spatial configurations of the works form a microcosm where drama often caused by chance in daily life unfolds.

My favourite is the “nightlife - Xintiandi” by Daniele Lee. It pictures the scene of bar goings at Xin Tian Di. The structure is very much inspired by the Last Super, with 13 portraits lining up at different tables. No Juda was found, but there was a monkey under one table in the middle of the painting. Notable is the portrait of each individual – all of them are smartly dressed, only the animal alike facial expressions alludes to the duality of human and animosity of the modern Chinese up class nouveau riche in Shanghai, exposing a psychological drama of human instinct and desire. The artist forcefully captures those moments when figures in the portrait struggle for salvation. The oddly realistic and compelling images allude to our repressed primal instincts in a contemporary “urban jungle”, a place undergoing drastic changes.



The other favourite is Yan Jun's “Dialogue”, a set of classical Chinese furniture made of disposed pipes once used in the heating system, exposing the marriage of the classical furniture and the pipes creates a wide range of contradictions, tensions, and narratives: the past vs. the present, wood vs. iron, soft vs. hard, high vs. low, natural vs. industrial, rectangular vs. cylindrical, warm and cold, the mortise and tenor joining method vs. welding method. It is noteworthy that the pipe structure in the form of the classical Chinese hardwood furniture conveys the Taoist and Zen Buddhist concepts of naturalness and harmony.



Highly recommended. For a comprehensive view of the exhibition, check out the official website http://www.shanghaibiennale.com/.