Shanghai art week shows city has sights set on being a global art hub
- The Shanghai Biennale, West Bund Art and Design fair and ART021 all showed impressive scale and variety of work
- Curators must be able to navigate Chinese state censorship
Is the world making progress or are we regressing socially, economically and politically? That is the theme of this year’s Shanghai Biennale.
The show, staged in the city’s cavernous Power Station of Art, is entitled “Proregress”, a word coined by the late poet E.E. Cummings.
“It seemed to speak to progression and regression in a seemingly fragmented world … so we wanted to show how contemporary artists see the world critically, in an age of historical ambiguity, no matter if you’re moving forward, backward or … in between,” explained the show’s chief curator Cuauhtemoc Medina.
With Medina being from Mexico and his three co-curators – Yukie Kamiya from Japan, Maria Belen Saez de Ibarra from Colombia and Wang Weiwei from China – all women, the show features both a substantial amount of art from Latin America and significant works curated with a female gaze.
The featured art tackles some hot-button issues. A section curated by Wang, “Imprisonment and Freedom”, covers globalisation and the power of information technology. Michael Rakowitz has reproduced some the artefacts lost from the Iraq Museum during the American-led invasion of the country in 2003. Artists use mediums including performance art (in Nadim Abbas’ Four Rooms) and light installations (Claire Fontaine).
