SHANGHAI BIENNALE
The development of Shanghai since the central Government’s decision to make it the economic gateway to China in the early ’90s is the stuff of legends: half of the city has been razed to make way for over 200,000 high-rise apartment blocks; half the world’s cranes are in Shanghai; Asia’s tallest buildings; the world’s fastest train; World Expo in 2010; the Tennis Masters Cup; a Formula 1 Grand Prix; and of course a Biennale.
There is a model of the future city of Shanghai on public display in Urban Planning Exhibition Hall. The motto above it reads: ‘better city better life’. However, most Shanghai residents cannot find their homes, and probably cannot yet imagine their new lives in the imminent, tall towers that will cover the Huangpu delta. Urban development has created an uncertain, interstitial space between exponential developments to date and those still to come.
So it is the perfect time and place to question the success of the city’s design, and the 2006 Shanghai Biennale aimed to do so in its overarching theme of ‘HyperDesign’. Since 1989 the Biennale has measured the pace of the city’s development. The inclusion of international artists since 2000 has marked a symbolic opening up to the West, which has continued unabated. But there are still signs of a cautious and awkward engagement with the model of an international contemporary art event. Proposed work is vetted by committee and spies are supposedly at work during installation. An arcane committee structure includes five Committees with over seventy advisers. The title, too, seems formulaic (last time it was Universes in Universes) and, as Wang Jie unabashedly wrote in the Shanghai Daily, ‘Biennale as a... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline