Shanghai Biennial 2012

A rust-coloured tower soars seven stories into the air. Metal spikes and disembodied arms radiate from its tiered open centre. Splayed upwards in an awkward salute, most of these inert appendages clutch tools, talismans, or trophies, while others hold their fingers in different positions to form signs and symbols. Entitled Thousand-Armed Guanyin, the inflated scale of Huang Yong Ping’s large-scale reprise of an earlier sculpture sets the tone for the most recent edition of the Shanghai Biennial. Both artist and Biennial Foundation multiplied earlier iterations by a force of 10, resulting in an overblown scale and unwieldy conceptual sprawl.

Most reviews of the expansive 2012 edition of the Shanghai Biennial begin with a description of its main venue: the newly anointed Power Station of Art (PSA) on the banks of the Huangpu River. At 41,200 square metres, the hulking former power plant was used as a venue for the 2010 World Expo before its conversion to China’s largest contemporary art museum. The cavernous venue opened its doors on the Chinese National Day in tandem with the nearby 160,000-square-metre China Art Palace, in a dazzling, though questionable, display of state-sponsored leveraging of the arts.

A melange of internationalism and local boosterism, the biennial has been a particularly successful form for the presentation and circulation of contemporary art in Asian countries in recent decades. These large-scale temporary exhibitions become venues to expose local audiences to contemporary art practices that don’t find their way into regional museums, as well as a means to court national and international tourism and secure clout for regional artists internationally. At best, these exhibitions provide a testing ground for experimental artistic practices and curatorial concepts. At their worst, biennials’ perennial focus on ambiguous subjects such as site-specificity and contemporaneity give way to a topical blend of “glocal” concerns. Unfortunately, the organizers of the Shanghai Biennial opted to expand the exhibition’s physical scale rather than refine its conceptual scope, which inevitably led to this year’s edition falling victim to many of the clichéd biennial pitfalls: an elastic theme with oblique references to contemporaneity and social engagement; an artist roster comprising many of the all-star names that circulate among biennials internationally and a strained budget.

Organized around the elusively energetic and development-friendly title “Reactivation,” the Biennial’s curator Qiu Zhijie divided the exhibition into four parts: resource, renew, reform and republic. A key to the aspirations of these vague thematic subsections can be found in Zhijie’s densely wrought ink drawings that mentally mapped the exhibition’s concepts. Revised right until the opening of the Biennial, Zhijie’s maps comprise networks of exchange that impart an understanding of art that is inextricably linked to the civic. Yet if these intricately rendered arteries posit relationships between art and the social, they also obliquely point to the kinds of image work that large-scale exhibitions of contemporary art are called upon to do in the age of globalization. The scale of the works shown in this year’s Biennial is staggering, as is their number. Despite the grandiosity of the Biennial Foundation’s plans, the visual impact of the works presented in the Power Station of Art faltered, due in equal parts to the building’s grandiosity and its delayed completion date. With construction finishing in the immediate lead-up to the exhibition’s official opening, “Reactivation” seemed half-empty despite the fact that its main venue teemed with large-scale works. Rebekkah, Simon Fujiwara’s procession of 35 plaster-casts of a British woman who participated in London’s 2011 riots, descends a staircase adjacent to Yong Ping’s gargantuan sculpture. The installation’s orderly formation was interrupted by scattered plaster body parts and two of the figures lying inert on the bottom stairs; neither the work’s placement nor the broken pieces were intended by the artist. Directly behind Fujiwara’s commission an artlessly installed pile of unlit and unlabelled blue office chairs led many attending the preview to wonder whether storage had been left to spill out into the gallery. Days later, the chairs shifted position into Slinky-like loops, revealing themselves as an artwork by the Dakar-based Jean Michel Bruyère. Upstairs, Martha Rosler’s photo series “Cuba” occupied a series of rickety vitrines, and a number of unfinished video installations could be found throughout the surrounding galleries. Despite a solid artist roster—including Wael Shawky, Danh Vo, Maryam Jafri, Claire Fontaine, Jalal Toufic, and Tris Vonna-Michell—the Biennial’s main exhibition failed to coalesce because its oblique themes seemed propelled by promotional fodder more than a specific statement.

This edition of the Biennial also included ancillary pavilions as part of a push to further integrate the exhibition into greater Shanghai. In lieu of the traditional national pavilion model, the Biennial opted for city pavilions whose local focus and intimate scale provided a welcome antidote to an otherwise steroidal contemporary art experience. For the Berlin pavilion, the experimental architecture collective, raumlabor, combined two works by Richard Paulick, each conceived on either end of the German architect’s 16-year exile in Shanghai. The collective transformed a room of an empty warehouse on Nanjing Road into an improvised tea house. Housed in a reconstruction of Paulick and Georg Muche’s iconic, modernist, residential prototype, the Stahlhaus (steel house), the structure was fashioned from used windows from Paulick’s later design Block C—a segment of Berlin’s socialist boulevard, Karl-Marx-Allee. The Greenpoint-based curatorial initiative and project space, Cleopatra’s represented Brooklyn with the karaoke project CKTV, an immersive sound, video and performance installation conceived by artist Chris Rice. To create the work, Cleopatra’s and Rice commissioned dozens of Brooklyn-based artists to create karaoke videos to accompany a song of their choice, including Jennifer Sullivan, Josh Slater and Christie Brown. Next door, the San Francisco pavilion included ethereal site-specific works by Zarouhie Abdalian and Mitzi Pederson, as well as a video installation in which the Oakland-based artist and curator Post Brothers continued his exploration of one of the most sly and malleable bits of cartoon physics: the portable hole. It’s telling that the strongest pavilions veered away from boosterism and more towards positing distinct, self-contained projects and exhibitions. Those geared towards the older model of presenting an artist’s work on an international stage fared less well—and also exposed the Biennial’s inherent mismanagement. The video installations in the Sydney pavilion suffered from poor lighting conditions and their ambitious scale seemed out of place compared to more modest statements from surrounding pavilions. Even more telling was the fate of Brian Jungen and the Vancouver pavilion. After a significant media push leading up to their participation, the Vancouver Art Gallery silently withdrew the artist’s contribution citing poor gallery maintenance. Jungen’s suspended skeletal sculpture fashioned from recycled patio furniture was packed up after the professional preview and shipped back to Canada, and replaced by a book with photographs of the original work. ❚

The Shanghai Biennial runs from October 2, 2012 to March 31, 2013.

Jesi Khadivi is an independent curator and critic based in San Francisco and Berlin.