The first Beijing International Art Biennale China
The China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, the People’s Government of Beijing Municipality, and the Chinese Artists Association sponsored the first Beijing International Art Biennale (BIAB) under the theme Originality: Contemporaneity and Locality. BIAB brought together more than forty countries from five continents with an ambitious aim: to ‘reflect the exploration of the frontiers and current features of contemporary art and to become a hub of communications for global culture to bring together and emphasize new trends’.
At a budget of $1.1 million (US) the month long BIAB probably cost more than any other single visual art event in China. It featured more than 400 works by 270 artists from 43 countries, including representation from Australia of works by Richard Dunn, Matthys Gerber, Melinda Harper, Bronwyn Oliver and Imants Tillers. In addition to the extensive exhibition component, a Symposium was run over two days where most of the discussion focused on the nature of the evolving relationship between art and politics in China.
In recent times there has been significant debate, mostly between the older and younger generations of artists, on whether ‘new’ art forms such as installation and performance are ‘corrupting’ art and traditional values. However much of the heat went out of the discussion after China planned to join the Venice Biennale for the first time, and then the news was officially released that the BIAB was to go ahead.
‘We saw the Biennale as a signal of policy change that the new themes and forms of art, including the avant-garde, have indeed been accepted, if they were still regarded as being “underground” at the 2002 Shanghai Biennale’, said Zhang Wei, a Beijing performance artist. To... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline