‘Bourgeoisified Proletariat’
History in the Making
Shanghai 1979-2009
In recent years Shanghai has become the focus for a major international festival of contemporary visual art. This festival, which takes places each year during September and October, encompasses a number of recurrent art-related events, including the Shanghai Biennale, ShContemporary (an annual contemporary art fair first staged in 2007) and the Shanghai E-Arts festival, as well as numerous one-off exhibitions, performances and discussions.
Among the best of the exhibitions at this year’s Shanghai festival were two independent survey shows of contemporary Chinese art: ‘Bourgeoisified Proletariat’, an ambitious group show of the work of over thirty-six individual artists and seven art collectives currently working in the People’s Republic of China (PRC); and ‘History in the Making–Shanghai 1979-2009’, an equally ambitious historical overview of contemporary art practices in Shanghai over the past thirty years. Unlike other more commercially orientated exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art at the Shanghai festival, both of these shows gave much needed insight into aspects of contemporary Chinese artistic practice that have often been marginalised or downplayed both within the PRC and on an international stage.
For the most part, Bourgeoisified Proletariat conformed closely to established expectations with regard to the staging of independent survey shows of contemporary art within the PRC by bringing together a large and technically diverse body of artworks without the explicit imposition of an overarching curatorial theme. Less predictable, however, was the inclusion within the exhibition of non-Chinese as well as Chinese artists currently working within the PRC, including the Hangzhou based Alexander Brandt, who was also one of the exhibition’s nine-strong curatorial team (most of whom were Chinese nationals). The exhibition therefore departed from a prevailing tendency both within the PRC and