Introduction

This chapter traces the development of twenty-first-century biennials during which they scheduled their openings within days of each other, coordinating vernissage weeks that ensured international movement across whole networks of exhibitions. In Europe in 2007, then across the Asia-Pacific region in 2008, and by 2014 across the globe, these conjunctions became more and more common. The reasoning behind the networked semi-coordination of biennials was significant, as were the challenges. The historical basis for such networks was the Romantic-era paradigm of the World Exposition, as many scholars have noted, and behind that the even earlier vogue for the Grand Tour.¹ It was now updated for an age of global nomadism (or global commuting, as we said in the previous chapter) and internet connectivity. We then describe the shift towards the massive spectacularization of art that evolved after the Great Recession of 2008, but also the rapid emergence of a reaction against the postcritical attitude that this represented.

Across both North and South, the biennial format was returning to its nineteenth-century roots in exotic travel, despite the shock of the global financial crisis that temporarily disrupted the market in contemporary art and after which the collecting boom for contemporary art in China and India dipped temporarily but sharply. In Asia and the Middle East, biennial curators responded to the colonial pleasures of this romantic heritage even while they criticized it. For each city that aspired to Creative City status, the attraction of privileged, itinerant visitors was powerful. Biennials and triennials were a chance for a city to face outwards, maximize glamour, and showcase local artists during the brief visits of museum directors, curators, artists, and collectors. Most crucially, biennials were the opportunity to import the most experimental and the most critical of artists, and to transform those experiments into touristic spectacle, into Great Exhibition marvels for visitors and political masters alike. They were also the occasions for local museums to purchase art, a purpose that had long underlaid (and made more conservative) the operation of acquisitive exhibitions like the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale and the Asia-Pacific Triennial.

The turn across the continent after 2008, then, was away from the idea of “Asian art” as something cohesive to be displayed, and towards the dubious idea that a cumulative Grand Tour of biennials and art fairs, even if they were not marketed as such, might underpin global contemporary art. It locked biennials firmly within the staging of spectacles to both specialist and general incoming audiences, as occurred with the 2008 Beijing Olympics with which many Asia-Pacific biennials coincided that year, and simultaneously to large local audiences, with all the tension between the two that this dualism implies. New biennials with international aspirations appeared or were relaunched from previously nationally focused exhibitions: the list included the Shanghai Biennale (founded in 1996), and the Guangzhou Biennial Art Fair (founded in 1992, it was revamped with the First Guangzhou Triennial in 2002). These biennials could shift gear and relaunch themselves into the international arena, as did the Shanghai Biennale from 2000 on. The Yogyakarta Biennale reestablished itself still later, first in 2005 as the Biennale Jogja and then, after 2010, with a South–South agenda that reached well beyond Indonesia but which deliberately focused each edition on an exchange between Indonesia and one other nation or narrowly defined region on the Southern latitudes: in 2011 it showcased Indonesian and Indian artists together, in 2013 it hosted artists from the Middle East alongside Indonesian artists, and for 2015 it linked itself with Nigeria.² We have seen the tension of curating biennials for both local and international constituencies played out throughout this book without it affecting the durability and the popularity of the biennial as a form.

The Game of Comparison and Competition

We must now return to our earlier consideration of one of the core markers of contemporary art, of art that embodies the condition of contemporaneity with its stress on the concept of the “experimental” at the points of production and reception. This was an elastic concept that might include, at different times, avant-garde aspirations or digital technologies. But by the early years of the twenty-first century, the idea of experimental art was highly freighted, linked closely in China to the idea of art that was excluded from officially sanctioned exhibition and dissemination, as Thomas Berghuis has explained.³ For much of the new art that was likely to appear in biennials across the world, the division between production and reception (much like that, as we noted earlier, between theory and practice, or between the (neo-)colonial and the global) was now so blurred as to be virtually non-existent. This was precisely what marked contemporary art's clear evolution and differentiation from the self-consciously experimental arts of the 1960s and 1970s.⁴ So, increasingly, the idea of experimental art as more or less identical with the use of technology or with new media art was less and less convincing. A more adequate description of the production of experimental contemporary art hinged instead on works of art that were shaped by the double tropes of collaboration (so evident amongst the experimental Chinese artists that we are about to discuss) and the delegation of fabrication; this opened out to the transdisciplinary as much as the transnational, and to the kinship between experimental art and neoliberal capitalism. New media were not the pivot for contemporary art's development. Rather, contemporary art became as influenced by new spaces of display – by architecture, we emphasize – as it was by new technologies. Or, to be more precise, contemporary art was in practice defined by the dual reformulation of art's modes of reception into enormous gallery spaces, whether white cubes, postindustrial warehouses or featurist architecture, as well as by cultural contexts and urgent politics that stretched beyond the North Atlantic and its own, inward-looking modes of technological production. In 2003, when artist Yinka Shonibare MBE very publicly asked, “How did we get to a point where the rise of the global curator has brought artistic practice to its knees,” he was referring to this, just as ten years later Hito Steyerl, Pascal Gielen, and Geert Lovink were to separately ask similar questions about the internet, biennials, and “experimental” new media.⁵ The two questions were linked.

This situation was played out in various ways. First, spectacular and usually expensive new art such as high definition video installations or hybrid-space, interactive, game-like works needed venues able to provide the resources, scale, and public prominence required by them. This led to a second consideration, for it was usually only large biennials – sprawling through large museums, repurposed buildings, or across entire cities, and often with strong private foundation, business, and city backing to help them do so – that could meet these resource demands. Hence, biennials offered contemporary experimental artists a stage on which to participate in the global art scene while also enabling their dramatically expanded audience, far beyond the dreams of the older, utopian enclaves of second-wave biennials or new media art, the chance to see experimental art. Indeed, such was the case that by the second decade of the twenty-first century, experimental art, no matter what its genealogy and regardless of the often-resentful opinion of its technophile pioneers, had seemingly become the preserve of biennials. Net activist and theorist Geert Lovink presciently identified this now-clear trajectory in his 2007 book, Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture.⁶ In that recounting, the old spaces and practices of new media art had become obsolete; practitioners had either beached in new media departments scattered atomistically around the world or (as was the case with Raqs Media Collective, who we will discuss shortly) had shifted, for tactical and financial reasons, to using biennials as their platform to present their joint artistic and curatorial practices.⁷ For the vast audiences and extraordinary numbers of artists around the world participating in contemporary art, then, it was the sprawling yet exclusive worlds of big- and small-budget biennials and not the fleeting carnivals of the weekend art fair, nor the relatively low budgets and conservative programs of the commercial gallery dealer, that showcased the current state of artistic experimentation. Frequent claims made about the democratization of contemporary art – whether due to the global spread of biennials and their audiences, the use of new technologies, the demand for audience participation, or for access to biennials and new technologies – were now severely tested.⁸

In the early years of the twenty-first century, new biennials in the Asia-Pacific region made urgent claims to attract that contemporary, global attention out of the three (often conflicting and coinciding) motivations that we have just sketched in: cultural emancipation, civic development, and, less frequently, the political legitimization of a nation or an emerging state.⁹ But to succeed at this in authoritarian states such as China, biennial organizers had to gain official sanction for everything, for permits and visas for artists and curators to enter the country, and official sponsorship for access to exhibiting spaces in art museums that were dominated by deeply conservative cadres, for access to media coverage, and for the cooperation of institutions if the new generation of non-official curators and critics were to be able to curate these biennials and work with the artists. The impression of all this bureaucracy was of clear official interest in mounting biennials to attract contemporary global attention, but that it was to be on China's terms. There was an official as well as another, broadly shared, cultural agenda revolving around the recognition of China, shared by government, official, and non-official artistic circles alike, and part of this informed the understanding that recognition involved working with imported, international experts. But they would need to understand the balancing act required to achieve a result in contemporary China, and thus be prepared to negotiate their way in a complex, fluid but illiberal system. Widely respected curator Hou Hanru, an expatriate regarded as a highly successful local by Chinese cultural bureaucrats, was one prime example; Fan Di'an was another. Hou's name recurred frequently in the chronicle of Asian biennials (we will shortly discuss his co-direction of the Third Shanghai Biennale in 2000, and he was to go on to direct the Gwangju Biennale in 2002, the 2nd Guangzhou Triennial (2005), and the 10th Istanbul Biennial in 2007). He would be able to work with radical but also established Chinese artists, and represented less of a gamble than appointing potentially more openly critical locals like curator Li Xianting. Reputations like Hou's, trusted on all sides but also with considerable credibility amongst artists, recur in the curatorship of biennials generally and in this chapter in particular, as reliable interlocutors and constant, cosmopolitan collaborators. Hou repeatedly worked with the peripatetic Hans Ulrich Obrist, for instance (including the influential touring exhibition, Cities on the Move (1997–1999)) and with charismatic architect Rem Koolhaas. Reliable interlocutors were not necessarily curators themselves, but often writers or art historians, or even artists. Art historian Wu Hung, famous for his scholarship on earlier periods of art, also curated key biennials. In India, Delhi-based writer and intellectual Geeta Kapur (herself an important exhibition curator) occupied a similar gate-keeper position to that of Hou Hanru in China.

The most important contemporary art emerging in China over the preceding two decades had come from close-knit groups of independent artists and critics. It is important to acknowledge that most of them were trained at elite art academies, so it was not a black-and-white situation as to who had been organizing exhibitions and performances privately, and who faced scandal and censorship as they entered public art spaces. So would the creation of new biennials support or stymie experimental contemporary art? The First Shanghai Biennale in 1996 had restricted itself to traditional Chinese art forms, principally ink-brush painting (brush and ink painting is the usual term; ink art is another label for the same thing), presenting a relatively small number of local artists with a large number of works. The 1998 Shanghai Biennale was once again based on parochial, even chauvinist claims for the continuing development of ink-brush painting and calligraphy; in practice these mostly modestly scaled paintings represented either the acculturation and academization of 1950s, quasi-Tachiste abstraction or the minor tweaking of traditional landscape and flower painting.¹⁰ However, it was not the case that the perpetuation of such art forms into the contemporary period would result in weak art. A more inclusive understanding of the multiple modernities from which contemporaneity had appeared was already well under way in the Asia-Pacific region, and this included many artists' adaptations of anachronism, as had already been seen in Xu Bing's apparently meaningless, traditional block-printed scrolls in Book from the Sky (1987–1991), a work mentioned in an earlier chapter. But in 2000, a year after Harald Szeemann invited the largest number of Chinese artists yet to a Venice Biennale, the Third Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai – Over the Sea: A Unique Modernity, rebranded itself as a contemporary art biennial with a global rather than local perspective.¹¹ Two of the four curators were based abroad: Hou Hanru in Paris and Japanese curator Toshio Shimizu. Here we note once again the pivotal significance of key, trusted interlocutors such as Hou, and the important role played by Japanese curators and writers such as Shimizu, for despite very real political differences that have waxed and waned over long periods, Japanese cultural figures had played a crucial role in the modernization of Chinese art and visual culture from the Meiji period onwards.

There was now a heavy injection of state funding and an equally heavy influx of big-name international artists making enormous installations (such as Paris-based Chinese artist Huang Yongping's Bank of Sand or Sand of Bank (2000), an enormous sandcastle model of a landmark early twentieth-century Shanghai bank building) and video installations (with well-known works by Matthew Barney and William Kentridge). The 2000 Shanghai Biennale included thirty-three international artists and thirty-four China-based artists. This was also the year that artist Ai Weiwei and critic Feng Boyi curated an infamous satellite exhibition (one of approximately twelve non-official shows) that they titled Bu hezuo fangshi (An Uncooperative Approach: FUCK OFF). As the exhibition made abundantly clear, Ai was a master at protesting against both the new cultural behemoth that his own nation represented and “the threat of assimilation and vulgarization” that the Biennale represented, while at the same time, and in a quasi-parasitic relation to that behemoth, gaining significant windfall from it. (And this despite the show being shut down after the international visitors from the vernissage departed.)¹² For Wu Hung, the Third Shanghai Biennale was a compromise between the curatorial independence that simply had to be demonstrated to international audiences in order, over the few days of their visits to the exhibition and to public seminar programs during the opening week, to justify local claims that this exhibition was a landmark in the history of contemporary Chinese art, as opposed to the ubiquitous Chinese government demand to supervise, oversee, and proscribe political, sexual, or violent images.¹³ The two views were in such unstable conflict with each other that even the two curators of An Uncooperative Approach had been careful not to overstep the mark. An Uncooperative Approach's English-language subtitle had been very different: the much more threatening – and now far better-known – Fuck Off. The exhibition and its title had, therefore, a dual audience. Though a visit to the Biennale and its satellites would have revealed the body of a horse, a dog's skeleton, and live performances involving surgical procedures, Shanghai-based curator Li Xu, one of the four Biennale curators for the principal exhibition, still argued publicly that, “We could not choose works that the Beijing Cultural Ministry would not approve.”¹⁴

From all this and despite the controversy surrounding “peripheral” exhibitions, Wu saw the Biennale's significance in terms of experimental art being shown in a large, state-run museum, according to the same equation that we identified earlier. “Many ‘experimental exhibitions,’” he wrote, “have been organized to test the public roles of contemporary art and to ‘legalize’ new and novel art forms.”¹⁵ The internationalization afforded by biennials was the key to this normalization. Openness to these novelties, and the commissioning of international and expatriate curators, would still repeatedly continue to come up against the bureaucratic determination, in Zhang Qing's words, to “promote mainstream Chinese culture.” Freedom of action for curators was delicate and truly precarious to a degree simply not experienced by biennial curators in the North Atlantic. Writing about his Third Shanghai Biennale, at the time, Hou had bluntly written,

Curating such a biennale is much more than creating a good exhibition; it is a long-term exercise of strategy, negotiation and determination to achieve fundamental changes in institutional structures and the ideology behind such structures.¹⁶

This meant, in practice, accepting the continued exclusion of curators who were not officially sanctioned and, implicitly, the elimination of direct and too-cutting political and social comment.¹⁷ But the Third Shanghai Biennale had also shown that official definitions of the art that would henceforth be shown in art institutions would not be enforced as rigidly and that favored interlocutors like Hou were able to broaden the contemporary art that might be exhibited. Independent art or, more correctly, the art forms chosen by independent artists, might now be recuperated and grudgingly tolerated to a degree by the state in biennials instead of simply excluded. For “experimental” artists and curators, even grudging acceptance of the experimental was important on many levels – to reach a wide audience, to realize large-scale works, to create both a market and a public for experimental art, and to construct notoriety and celebrity – and so the establishment of biennials with an international focus had particular urgency and significance in China. Soon-to-be-famous video artist Yang Fudong made this point to a New York Times reporter shortly after the 2000 Shanghai Biennale,

“Now that the biennale has shown video and installation work,” said Yang Fudong, a 29-year-old artist, “the government can't turn around and say, ‘We can show this to the public, but you can’t'.”¹⁸

The Third and Fourth Shanghai Biennales and the 2002 Guangzhou Triennial were successes in these terms, part of a complex, evolving, booming cultural situation.¹⁹ But Chinese artists still faced very serious censorship and the “experimental” was still almost synonymous with the non-official, as opposed to the official, and officially sanctioned, art such as the academic paintings in the 1996 Shanghai Biennale and even Chinese biennials yet to come, such as the Chinese Artists Association-organized 2003 Beijing Biennale. This latter biennial limited itself to paintings and sculptures by its members and official academies in spite of, or perhaps because of, the flourishing unofficial, highly experimental Beijing art scene, epitomized by so-called “art villages,” from the East Village (and yet earlier art villages) to the newer art village at Dashanzi, which was often referred to as Factory 798 after its best-known art space. A retrospective view of the celebrated mid-century ink-brush painter Qi Baishi (1864–1957) was, by contrast, the feature of the first Beijing Biennale, which had been divided into two sections, one largely Chinese and another, mostly international exhibition curated by a highly conservative, little-known European curator, Vincenzo Sanfo, whose experience and kitsch selections were far outside any contemporary art mainstream.²⁰ The state and its academicians were not by any means ready to abandon their pan-Asian, neotraditionalist narrative of brush and ink painting, nor their control of patronage. But, for now in Shanghai and shortly in Guangzhou, the state was momentarily happy to orchestrate an explicitly international biennial for its own reasons, in order to expand the cultural and economic clout of China, and despite both the incomplete artistic control that this entailed and the admission of unofficial artists.

Other biennials were appearing across China's major cities, faced with similar hurdles but trying to negotiate the shifting boundaries created by the often-bizarre conjunction of official civic opportunism and unofficial artistic license. The Guangzhou Triennial was founded in 2002. Its ambitious and large first edition, co-directed by Wu Hung, Huang Zhuan, Feng Boyi, and the host art museum's director, Wang Huangsheng, on a very tight budget by international standards, was titled Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art, 1990–2000. It was, effectively, a triennial that historicized contemporary art, much like the Asia-Pacific Triennials that we discussed earlier, allotting enormous spaces to the artists that Wu Hung considered seminal, such as Cai Guo-Qiang, Xu Bing, and, once again, Ai Weiwei. We note the same curator, critic, and artist names already – and justifiably – solidifying into a contemporary canon, which was precisely what unofficial artists and critics intended. It did not remain uncontested, though, and enormous auction-house sales continued to concentrate on paintings, especially traditional forms of painting.

The First Guangzhou Triennial was a Chinese affair, building upon its more parochial predecessor, the Guangzhou Biennial Art Fair. But it was also a very significant, even landmark exhibition, internationalizing the south of China with no need of North Atlantic validation by imported curators, while at the same time surveying the important generation of artists who had organized exhibitions independently of state-run art museums and art-spaces since the 1980s (and met frequent censorship and official hostility as a result). Wu Hung and his co-curators had little interest in the celebratory and parochial forms that earlier, traditional media-focused Shanghai or Beijing Biennales had perpetuated. These traditionalist exhibitions had exploited the fashionably cosmopolitan connotations of the words, “triennial” and “biennial,” without experimenting either with “experimental art” or with any new exhibition form. The First Guangzhou Triennial also had to survive the need to work through an official institution, in this case, the huge, new Guangdong Museum of Art, which had been built in order to show exhibitions such as this. If these institutions with large buildings, so essential to the exhibition form of a biennial, were invariably opposed to experimental art forms, let alone independent commentary by artists about the new China or criticism of the ruling Communist Party, official opposition was now (confusingly) inconsistent. It was individuals and timing that were important. In the case of the Guangdong Museum of Art, the important factor was the art museum's director (and co-curator of the 2002 Guangzhou Triennial), Wang Huangsheng, who was later to move to the position of director at the Art Museum of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. If his move was an index of that institution's accommodation with the contemporary, then the Guangdong Museum of Art's subsequent aversion to risk was proof of this observation.

The result, though, was, and would continue to be, official unpredictability. Just before the opening, Huang Yongping's outdoor installation, Bat Project 2 (2002), the partial but full-sized recreation of a downed American spy plane, was removed. At the Third Shanghai Biennale's successor, in 2002, there was no repeat of Fuck Off, since officials scoured the independently curated peripheral shows for overt political content. But the Second Guangzhou Triennial, Beyond: An Extraordinary Space for Modernization (2005), co-directed by the ubiquitous Hou Hanru, this time with Hans Ulrich Obrist (with whom, as we noted, he had co-curated Cities on the Move) and Guo Xiaoyan, included local and international artists and artists in the exploratory, laboratory-style, work-in-progress format for which Hou's biennials had become known, in a project-based investigation of the Pearl River Delta region that continued both the 2000 Shanghai Biennale's and the 2002 Guangzhou Triennial's elaborations of global and local.

Negotiated Inequality

Complicated negotiations were not just a problem for biennial curators working in China. As biennials proliferated, what was permitted remained a real issue that faced biennial curators working in restrictive or authoritarian states across Asia: in China, in Singapore, in the Middle East at the Sharjah Biennial, in Cairo at its temporarily rejuvenated biennial, in Istanbul, and in many other cities. This was apparent even when, as often happened, family members of the ruling elite were the direct, founding patrons of a biennial, where biennials were more or less controlled by their corporate sponsors, or where biennials were linked to state museums. It had been the case at the 2000 Shanghai Biennale and was to be the case again in Sharjah in 2011, when director Jack Persekian was dismissed following criticism about and the removal of a work by Mustapha Benfodil. Both events showed that the creation of new, internationally networked yet regionally focused art worlds and the young audiences for contemporary art would not necessarily be accompanied by the creation of new, tolerant institutions. Artists Qiu Zhijie (who had shown at the First Guangzhou Triennial) and Lu Jie (founder of the Long March Foundation, a highly visible, Beijing-based artist collective tapping into the global vogue for densely researched reenactment art) warned people that, “Chinese contemporary art is in the earliest stages of constructing a formal system; yet it has already begun the game of comparison and competition with the West, buying wholeheartedly into a system based on major museums and biennial exhibitions.”²¹ They meant that participation in the new global network of contemporary art biennials also meant accepting new and different values, in particular about the validity of contemporary art in art museums and the transnational comparability of artists (even though the proportion of domestic artists was quite high in many of the new Asian biennials, especially at the Guangzhou Triennial). This rapid-fire, highly mobile process was not going to be easy to accept since it represented a definitive departure from previous national narratives, with their long-maintained traditional canons. It involved embracing art fashion and spectacle, which was easier if the host city had already chosen to architecturally, commercially, and culturally remake itself as a cosmopolitan, international center, as had Shanghai. Both Qiu Zhijie and Lu Jie had been, after all, amongst the earliest colonists of Beijing's increasingly gentrified and fashionable Dashanzi art precinct, as well as associated with the Central Academy of Fine Arts. But more important, as we saw in the earlier chapter on Asian biennialization during the 1990s, this new mobility reflected the wider metamorphosis in regional biennials around the world away from total regulation by governments and official cultural organizations towards direction by independent curators (who were themselves more informally regulated by peer networks and shifting consensuses of taste), and away from exhibiting an identifiable form of identity, which had almost certainly been produced within an art world governed and regulated by tradition, to exhibiting locality within a globalizing world. In China a lot was at stake. As Hou Hanru wrote of the 2000 Shanghai Biennale, “The global is not abstract and isolated from the local. It is a part of local life.”²² Hou was thus effectively sifting and separating the idea of traditional identity away from the apparently innocuous but quite different idea of contemporary locality.²³

This was one of numerous inevitable contradictions and the division between official and non-official was never fixed. International audiences may have presumed that the young artists they were now seeing in biennials were opposed to the official academies. This was in one sense true. Many of them had identified as independent and had been creating their own networks of exhibitions and art criticism outside official channels, though they had almost all been the alumni of the academies; the division between officially accepted and unofficial was not in practice clear-cut. Cai Guo-Qiang departed early, for Japan, in 1986. Many others, including Xu Bing and Guan Wei, went into exile after the catastrophic Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989 and the People's Republic's clampdown on freedoms (except, it turned out, the freedom to be rich) after that date. But then again, these artists often began to return home in the years after 2000, sometimes even into senior and influential positions in art schools and cultural academies. The returning artists were immensely significant on many levels, not least on account of their participation in the extraordinary global art boom. All this was more important because of China's arrival as an economic superpower, mirrored in the burgeoning size of its enormous art market with all its distortions and corruption.²⁴

The emerging Asian situation was emblematized best not by the older generation of artists, expatriate or not, who had shown in early editions of local biennials as an index of their prominence and contemporaneity within their home cities or nations, but by more recently established, younger groups of artists whose works embodied networked production, such as the Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective. Raqs quickly took on board the rise and fall of contemporary art's dependence on new media, especially as new media art and theory, along with reified concepts of interactivity and participation, were becoming first doctrinaire and then anachronistic by the early 2000s. Meanwhile, large-scale, spectacular installations and moving image projections had now become the dominant modes of “biennial art,” but this depended upon their status as the furnishings of sites for casual socialization, contemplation, study, and play as much as they were art works to be contemplated in themselves. Further, they could (though at some cost) be perpetually re-exhibited elsewhere around the world, thus dispensing with the constraints and the crusades attached to site-specificity. Geography, culture, diaspora, injustice, globalization: all of these forces had by the 2000s thoroughly periodized and thus (however ironically) rendered traditional the kinds of new media practiced by artist-experts in favor of the more discursive, skeptical, performance-based and hybrid-space art works that were increasingly common in biennials at the time. Raqs Media Collective epitomized this shift and moved into biennial spaces fast, but like invited outsider-experts rather than artists. As the number of invitations from biennials worldwide started to grow, they started referring to themselves as “using” art exhibitions. This was perhaps nowhere more apparent than at Documenta11 in 2002. Their installation, 28f28” N / 77f15” E :: 2001/02 (2002), juxtaposed video and still images, sound, software, and performance documentation on urban dispossession and displacement in India, bringing into their typical installation format the kinds of activist work the collective had sourced and developed at Sarai, the center for publishing and information exchange that they had founded in collaboration with a much older research center, the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), in Delhi. Raqs' rapid global renown and consequent, constant global mobility showed once and for all the errors in British new media pioneer Roy Ascott's claims made in a series of influential essays, including “Art and Education in the Post-Biological Era” (1996), that networks tend to erase hierarchy.²⁵ Networks actually consolidate hierarchies, though these were now indexed more by frequent flyer miles and experts' word of mouth than by living in London or Manhattan, and were to be mostly the province of artists whose address was, like Raqs, not to tradition or to established local institutions. In other words, this international network was regulated by intellectual capital, which was itself inevitably shaped by international taste, international nepotism, the international market (importantly, including art museums and foundations), and myriad curatorial contingencies. Each new Asian biennial gradually contributed to the emergence by the early years of the twenty-first century of a global biennial circuit, not just the sense – accurate or not – of a North Atlantic one. Raqs Media Collective was both a critical and a paradigmatic presence within this development.

Nonetheless, some biennials were still destined, by dint of difficult travel and the international art world's conservative ideas about travel security, to remain “peripheral.” Those exclusions were compounded by the fact that extensive global travel, like new technologies and readily available postindustrial spaces in which to socialize, costs vast amounts of money. Only the top tier of curators and very few artists were actually so much in demand or else wealthy enough that they traveled around the world for biennials, though at the same time the absolute number of those frequent flyers was now significant, partly reflecting the increased speculation in contemporary art both before but particularly after the Global Recession. For many cities and their cultural minders, then, the task was not to fall off this global biennial circuit. In the last chapter, we understood Tirana Biennale 1: Escape in analogous ways, for it had been shaped as a response to Albania's uncertain situation on the periphery of Europe. Such concerns were even more apparent in Asia. Singapore's Biennale, for instance, grew out of precisely this uncertainty, as the city-state sought to self-consciously locate itself as a regional and global hub, risking the charge that its financial and state-led investment in culture produced yet another, off-the-shelf biennial. The First Singapore Biennale: Belief (2006) was launched by the Singapore government as part of a suite of nation-building cultural initiatives, according to a by-now well-established formula: a high-profile, international curator (Fumio Nanj) assisted by local curators (Roger McDonald, Sharmini Pereira, Eugene Tan, and Ahmad Mashadi), a list of well-known Asian artists who were nevertheless not yet stars on the Euro-American art circuit (including Jane Alexander, Simryn Gill, Rashid Rana, and N.S. Harsha) combined with a short list of famous and established artists (including Yayoi Kusama, Barbara Kruger, and Mariko Mori), and municipal rhetoric about the “world-class” status of the host city. The Biennale opened just two weeks before a huge international conference of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and was therefore part of a carefully designed presentation of Singapore as an immaculately presented, safe, friendly destination. And as one might expect, this rhetoric was the immediate object of Biennale artist scorn: most notable here was New Zealand artist Daniel Malone, who re-enacted 1960s' activist Abbie Hoffman's team attempt to levitate the White House, gathering a line of assistants clad in happy-face vests to rip up and elevate Singapore's City Hall. Other cities, such as Fukuoka, cultivated a self-conscious distance from the Asian contemporary art boom (by and large deliberately avoiding the selection of artists who were already famous across the North Atlantic), while yet others cultivated membership of the international mainstream.²⁶ Gwangju was paradigmatic in this regard. In 2007, the Biennale's Foundation hired Okwui Enwezor, who then – unsurprisingly, given his collaborative history – appointed a select curatorial team that together transformed the 2008 Gwangju Biennale by restaging other curators' exhibitions held in different parts of the world, including the United States and Europe, during the previous twelve months.²⁷ The 2012 Gwangju Biennale, Roundtable, similarly sought to transform curatorial structures by inviting six relatively young curators from different parts of Asia – Nancy Adajania, Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Mami Kataoka, Sunjung Kim, Carol Yinghua Lu, and Alia Swastika – to work with each other for the first time. But though the ambitions were great, the result was both a large, sprawling exhibition comprising six, not always connected themes, and, not unexpectedly, a cavalcade of directorial disagreements.

Contemporary Play Time

This hierarchy of “world-class” curators and events sat uneasily with the assumption that biennials, along with contemporary art installations and video projections, are open and accessible to all, and curators themselves were questioning the proliferation of biennials in forums and in the emerging journals of curatorial practice. Among the key tropes was the “behavioral economy” engineered by relational aesthetics, as French curator Nicolas Bourriaud argued in 1998, as well as the influential, safe-house experimentation of Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich Obrist's Cities on the Move (which toured the globe from 1997 to 1999), and Obrist and Barbara Vanderlinden's co-curated exhibition in Antwerp, called Laboratorium (1999).²⁸ These curatorial discourses and practices had not shaped Documenta11, which had proceeded according to a different logic, but they had been the underpinning of Utopia Station (inside the 2003 Venice Biennale), and subsequently of Hou's and Obrist's Second Guangzhou Triennial. By the early 2010s, the discourse of laboratory-like biennials as democratic, experimental, and open to all was rife, if problematic, influencing such exhibitions as the 2012 Busan Biennale (subtitled Garden of Learning), as well as European biennials including the 2012 Berlin Biennale. These biennials largely defined themselves as sites where social democracy would intersect with new networks and the experience of playful collaboration or even community-building. More specifically, their rhetoric reflected the emerging consensus between biennial curators that experimentation was to be self-consciously fostered and featured through active, frequently politically loaded relationships with broad audiences, but not through the experimental, new media artists' notions of virtual reality and interactive technologies that had been popular in the earlier 1990s and which had circulated in exhibitions such as curator Jeffrey Deitch's Post Human (1992).²⁹ The repeated invocation by biennial curators of relational aesthetics, the laboratory, utopias, and the like as the basis for a presumed relationship between biennials and experimentation was undoubtedly sincere. But so too was the belief that, if hosting a biennial could boost a city's tourist profile, then the exhibition itself could also concentrate on socialized play and self-display, either as its main thematic concern or as something audiences could enact while holidaying at the biennial. Late-modern experimentalism had thus shifted from postmodern media expertise to socially responsible contemporary play time, just as relational aesthetics had shifted, as Hal Foster acidly noted, “from the Party à la Lenin to a party à la Lennon.”³⁰ Both the idea of localized modernities and the idea of an experimental art were signatures, in other words, of a globalization underwritten by dissimulation. The two were inseparable. Moreover, though biennials increasingly took on the mantle of social and urban laboratories, the curatorial performance of democracy was not necessarily activist nor even particularly egalitarian (and this despite Gwangju taking South Korea's democratization as its initial point of reference). The mass “democracy” of biennials was instead driven by the popular, the populist, and inclined towards a younger visitor demographic.

This conjunction was played out on several occasions in the early 2000s, but perhaps most notably in the renewal of the “grand tour” within biennial cultures. In 2007, Europe's main perennial art events – Venice, documenta, Art Basel, and the Skulptur Projekte Münster, an exhibition founded in 1977 by curators Klauss Bussmann and Kasper König and held every ten years in the small West German city of Münster – conjoined to form a circuit that was explicitly labeled the European “Grand Tour of the Twenty-first Century.”³¹ Those aficionados sufficiently wealthy and inclined could journey from one opening to the next over the course of June 2007, giving a formal spin to the long-held practice (for well-heeled visitors, at least) to meet in Venice for the vernissage and then again a few weeks later in Art Basel or another large-scale exhibition opening. Newly advertised – as a “platform,” no less, although not quite in Enwezor's sense of the word – that practice could come to replicate the elite Enlightenment traditions of venturing to Europe's south for cultural tourism. But as advertisers wryly noted, the audience for this new Grand Tour was slightly different from its eighteenth-century counterpart. It stated that,

The four partners will communicate the idea of the Grand Tour 2007 outside Europe in particular, too, in Asia, in Africa, in Latin and North America and in the Near East in order to win an international audience from all over the world for this art tour through Europe an opportunity that only arises once every ten years [sic].³²

Nor was the real Grand Tour of the twenty-first century necessarily European, for the following year the Asian biennials responded more spectacularly again. They loosely coordinated themselves through their different biennial foundations under the umbrella of an Asian Grand Tour that was labeled “Art Compass,” and marketed to cultural tourists, with specialist travel agents offering to create itineraries. Thus, in the latter months of 2008 (and then again in 2014), biennial audiences coordinated their flights and hotels across Asia to a rapid-fire sequence of exhibitions that included, in a list that is not even exhaustive but is without doubt exhausting to read: the Biennale of Sydney (director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev's Revolutions: Forms that Turn, the direct precursor of her 2013 dOCUMENTA (13), which was the culmination of a decade of her biennials and mega-exhibitions; Sydney ran from June 18–September 7); the Beijing Biennale (which coincided with the summer Olympic Games but which continued the conservative, official art-dominated previous Beijing Biennales, July 8–August 12); the meta-exhibition, Gwangju Biennale (director Okwui Enwezor's atlas-like compendium of the previous year's key exhibitions, Annual Report: A Year in Exhibitions, September 5–November 9); the Busan Biennale (directed by Won Bang Kim, Jeon Seung-bo, and Lee Jeong-hyung, September 6–November 15); the Guangzhou Triennial (the ambitious Farewell to Post-Colonialism, directed by Gao Shiming, Sarat Maharaj, and Chang Tsongzung, September 6– November 16); the Shanghai Biennale (Translocalmotion, September 9–November 16); the Nanjing Triennial, Reflective Asia, September 10–November 10); the Singapore Biennale (Wonder, directed by veteran biennial curator Fumio Nanjō, with locals Joselina Cruz and Matthew Ngui, September 11–November 16); the Seoul Media Art Biennale (Turn and Widen, directed by Park Il-ho, September 11–November 5); the Yokohama Triennale (Time Crevasse, directed by Tsutomo Mizusawa with a panel of co-curators, September 13–November 30); and the Taipei Biennale (directed by Vasif Kortun and Manray Hsu, September 13–January 4).³³

This crowded, almost indigestible coincidence of biennials and triennials was relatively unaffected by the Great Recession of 2008. For a start, after 2008, the Asian region bounced back fairly quickly amidst the stimulus provided by fast-growing, middle-class, consumer societies and, even more, by enormous infusions of government spending. In tune with this, the nature of the by-now capacious “democracy” of the contemporary art in the biennials above was epitomized in the viewers' experiences of spectacular stagings of interpersonality rather than politics. The 2008 Yokohama Triennale director, Tsutomo Mizusawa, was apologetic but clear about the strategies that constituted this. In an interview, he observed:

Well, when you have this many contemporary art biennales and triennales taking place around the world (one count puts it at about 120), there is a danger of them becoming homogenized. But, if you make performance the underlying theme, then the experience is of that place and that time. It naturally becomes differentiated from other events.³⁴

A year later, in 2009, the Sixth Asia-Pacific Triennial launched that edition's extraordinary education program for young visitors, called “Kids Asia-Pacific Triennial,” committing a large proportion of APT6 resources to its development. Children were able to experiment with model world building while young adults, sufficiently socially empowered by the image and experience of experimental play, mobbed the museum in order to hang out and flirt with each other. At APT7 in 2012–2013, children made their own art works to mimic the artists' works in the galleries above, or were photographed in front of Central Asian tourist attractions projected behind them as part of a work by Kazakh artist Erbossyn Meldibekov. The promotional blurb for another Kids APT work, Paramodel Joint Factory (2012), even read like Bourriaud's relational aesthetics for beginners: “In this spectacular installation, the walls, floor and ceiling are covered with toy rail networks. Children could try their hand at creating patterns and shapes to add to the installation.”³⁵ The resultant images of adults and children of all ages and races reveling in the special Kids APT section of the gallery proved, as one might expect, to be an advertising bonanza of smiling faces and manipulable art. But the Kids APT had also, in the process, become the unruly, extraordinarily successful offspring of experimental art's absorption and transformation within contemporary art and biennial exhibition strategies.

It was by no means alone amongst biennials in this trajectory since the experiences of art on offer closely resembled the biennial curatorship so differently developed by biennial directors like Bourriaud or Obrist. The mode of spectatorship now offered at APT was far from the liminality required by a feature film in a cinema or alertness by a modernist painting. Art works situated themselves instead along the spectrum from a children's playground to an Occupy site. This was no accident: the anarchistic Occupy movement of 2009 had been quickly transformed into a curatorial methodology and a visual style, a trajectory that sat seamlessly with the transformation of experimental art into plaything, and democracy into the populism that we have described above. Moreover, it was a new development that an increasing number of artists and critics, from artist Hito Steyerl to art historian David Joselit, were now identifying as the direction that biennials and contemporary art more generally were taking in the 2010s.³⁶ Curiously enough, the image offered by this new spectatorship was uncannily like the impression of diversity and mild-mannered chaos of Asia-Pacific regionalism promoted in the first editions of Fukuoka's and Brisbane's triennials in the early 1990s. As we saw in chapter 4, this had been a self-conscious and satisfying construction that did not imply historical or cultural homogeneity, to paraphrase Asia-Pacific Triennial curator Caroline Turner's mitigating sentiments.³⁷ Which is to say that, despite the various arcs at play in contemporary art that were in turn foregrounded at biennials across Asia, there remained a strong, surprisingly consistent, utopian idealism amongst artists and curators. It was supported rather than repressed by the accelerating globalization that many thought (and mistakenly think) produced cultural homogenization.

Nonetheless, it was also clear that, though globalization was not always a homogenizing force, it unremittingly destabilized regional art worlds. Globalization (and global curators) relentlessly insisted that artists look to their localities, the characteristic contemporaneity of which would be exaggerated, sorted through, reflected on, revised, and performed; it would be mediated by globalization and so would its appearance in art, screening the universal anonymity of capital in its unprecedented remaking of the world in which the creation of vast art museums and new biennials and art fairs in parts of Asia and in the Gulf States in the Middle East were among the most obvious examples. Locality was represented; artists were therefore able to transact their business across borders. No one was interested any more in a universal, modernist language of art, nor in any bland, corporate, transnational language of abstraction, nor even, despite the cultural orthodoxy of officialdom, in neotraditional artistic values. This was what Hou Hanru had meant ten years before in his introductory essay for the Shanghai Biennale. Instead, the ideas of access and deregulation (including but certainly not limited to those rebadged and reduced to the internet) were as important to artists as they were to global capital. So both the fragile artistic precariat and neoliberal states alternately cooperated and fought over the ownership of these ideas, with democracy, the public, and accessibility invoked as the tropes of choice by artists and curators, by civic elders and city strategists.

This “democracy” might in fact not be freedom but be play, as we saw. It might also be pushed indoors, into the relatively domesticated performance of political protest in conventional exhibition spaces, in the face of genuine repression that made art in public spaces dangerous for artists and audiences alike. Istanbul Biennial director Fulya Erdemci had given the 2013 Istanbul Biennial its title, Anne, Ben Babar Mıyım (Mom, am I barbarian?), intending that the Biennial would participate in the renewal of Istanbul's endangered public spaces in the face of their annexation and the appropriation of whole precincts by powerful Istanbul developers. (Halil Altındere's video Wonderland (2013), made just before Erdemci's Biennial would take place, took on a similar subject; its spectacular, fast-moving, hip-hop video protest (and inner-urban travelogue) was directed against the displacement of Roma families from the historic Sulukule neighborhood and its rushed, upmarket redevelopment.) For the largest exhibition space, Antrepo 3, a vast warehouse on the Bosphorus waterfront, Erdemci had idealistically planned an exhibition of installations, videos, and the re-exhibition of earlier works by activist artists from the 1960s and 1970s. She had negotiated permissions for interventions by contemporary activist artists outdoors in public spaces and cramped inner-city parks. They would “activate” public space. This was all hijacked by real events in the immediate lead-up to the Biennial. On May 31, 2013, protesters occupied Gezi Park in a campaign against the Islamist, pro-business, but increasingly authoritarian Recep Tayyip Erdoğan government's unilateral decision to redevelop seedy Gezi Park, on the edges of the city's fraying, central Taksim Square, as a shopping mall inside a simulated Ottoman-era barracks. Two weeks of sit-ins by a wide and unlikely coalition of largely youthful, but also much older, demonstrators were followed by the violent removal of the activists on June 15 and 16. In the wake of escalating government violence, Erdemci relocated all the long-planned, outdoor art works into conventional, ad hoc exhibition spaces, albeit ones that were sometimes hastily improvised, ahead of the Biennial's September opening. Elmgreen and Dragset reconfigured their contribution, Istanbul Diaries (2013), to incorporate the utopian character of early June, contracting out to seven locals the task of writing daily diaries inside the exhibition. All this was bravely invested in the vestige of the idea that art has social agency (rather than this being the exclusive province of capital), an idea that now persisted via curators such as Erdemci (who admired critical theorists Chantal Mouffe and Luc Boltanski) even when curators like her were forced back into conventional exhibition methods, makeshift buildings, and weary white cubes. Evidence of the post-Great Recession activist shift emerged across not just Asian biennials but also in Europe. The antagonism of this impulse was embodied in Berlin-based artist Hito Steyerl's artist lectures, played over and over on video, in which she quietly harangued the visitor. Her video documentation of a lecture-performance, Is the Museum a Battlefield? (2013), was a much-discussed centerpiece of the Istanbul Biennial. In her video-lecture, she calmly traced the chain of associations from a metal bullet casing found after an ambush on Kurdish rebels in southern Turkey during which Steyerl's friend, Andrea Wolff, had been killed, all the way to Turkey's rich industrial and armaments conglomerates, who included Koç Holdings, the major sponsor of the Biennial itself.

Steyerl's address emblematized an observation we have made throughout this chapter. Namely, that the presentation and production of publics brought together the very local (through the specifically adaptive, hands-on experiences of new technologies), the regional (Asia or, more broadly still, the Asia-Pacific region), and the global (renowned artists, city boosterism, globally networked technologies, and the complicated corporate structures and activities of biennial sponsors) in ways that were not homogenizing, nor didactic, nor foreclosed. This was due precisely to the vastness of biennials and because these exhibitions paired previously unimaginable access to cultural information with the demand that national borders be opened to foreign cultural goods and with the always-tainted support of governments and corporations. Steyerl's lectures and videos were underpinned by this discomfort. Her widely circulated lecture on the contemporary state of “too much world,” amid the death of the internet, elegiacally explained it:

Is the internet dead? This is not a metaphorical question. It does not suggest that the internet is dysfunctional, useless or out of fashion. It asks what happened to the internet after it stopped being a possibility. The question is very literally whether it is dead, how it died and whether anyone killed it.³⁸

Coda: 2014

Behind the scenes, the new “world art” of contemporary art – inclusive of art and experimental practices from around the world but structured by the somehow still-idealistic curatorial class of biennial organizers on semi-permanent safari from day jobs in the world's major art museums – was very obviously starting to replace the North Atlantic canon that still dominated art-historical discourse and art markets across the globe. New media art and the internet had fleetingly appeared at the horizon of this discourse, as alternative film had earlier appeared as postmodernism's liminal, experimental other. Within this conflicted context, it was biennials that could offer clear but bumpy insights into the form, structure, and changes underlying the developments of contemporary art, since they were inextricably imbricated with contemporary geopolitics and the politics of populist display. But for all that, ambitious biennial directors were also beginning to be less concerned with presenting a survey of contemporary art or illustrating a zeitgeist – through expansive themes or expanded geographies of artist selections – than with assembling a coherent historical argument through works of art. Jessica Morgan (who worked at Tate Modern but was about to take up a position as director of Dia Art Foundation in New York, illustrating the fact that previously nomadic biennial directors now held down art museum jobs) was director of the 2014 Gwangju Biennale, Burning Down the House. Her Biennale spanned several decades, from the Gwangju Uprising to the present. She pointedly insisted on the ability of a spectacular biennial to present a critique, writing,

The theme of the exhibition [Burning Down the House] highlights the capacity of art to critique the establishment through an exploration that includes the visual, sound, movement and dramatic performance. At the same time, it recognises the possibility and impossibility within art to deal directly and concretely with politics.³⁹

Such a densely researched mega-exhibition would once have been the province of a team of curators in a flagship national art museum, taking years to prepare, as Morgan realized:

Unlike exhibitions staged by museums, with their often hegemonic cultural policies and interest in denoting legacies and traditions, the biennale is a mobile and flexible event that offers a spectrum of creative expressions that are immediate, contemporary, and topical.⁴⁰

Such an exhibition now occurred in a purpose-built pavilion, independent of other museums, that the city had built a few years before to promote the Biennale, making it the centerpiece of the city's tourism. Burning Down the House, like Anne, Ben Babar Mıyım at Istanbul the year before and Okwui Enwezor's Venice Biennale, All the World's Futures, a year later, recounted how the tumultuous past arrived at the crisis-ridden present through works of art from across the globe that self-consciously narrated the history of the contemporary with a density of both obscure and canonical art works, from Ed and Nancy Keinholz's enormous 1985 tableau of rearing horses and evil politicians, to El Arakawa and Inza Lim's vast 2014 assemblage portraying 1980s street-theater activists. Morgan assembled a historical world-picture linked by the theme of burning, incorporating spectacular works of art, even some in the service of hegemony, in a jigsaw-puzzle mapping. Her selections were determinedly global and thoroughly conscious of the reformulations of the artistic canon that biennials across the world had led, not least at Gwangju. Moreover, they showed that the domesticated playfulness of the contemporary was always haunted by political rupture and resurfaced histories – or, to be more accurate, that the one was always contemporaneous with the other. The “end of history,” with its insistence on the universal triumph of globalized capitalism and liberal democracy so beloved by conservative writers, had very clearly given way to the more complex but also more informed condition of the contemporary. Whether this would take a progressive or conservative trajectory under the directorship of curators like Morgan, with their pursuit of both the speculative and the museological, of historical depth and geographical breadth, remained open to question. Nonetheless, by 2014, biennials were well and truly both a symptom of and a cultural platform for that struggle.