Topical Lagoon
Financial Times, June 17 2005

Extract:

"There are moments in the history of art when we can feel the cultural balance of power shift irrevocably from one country or continent to another. It happened straight after the second world war, when abstract expressionism signalled to the world that the US was ready to consign tired, battle-scarred Europe to posterity. And it is, so the received wisdom has it, about to happen all over again; for there is a country that can - and does - boast 3,000 years of culture, dizzying rates of economic growth and a long-suppressed determination to engage the outside world in its inexorable rise as a global power. Little wonder that all eyes were on China at the opening of Venice’s Biennale of contemporary art, which opened to the public on Sunday.

It is the first time in the exhibition’s history that the Chinese have been granted their own pavilion at the Biennale.

-----

The pavilion curator, the charismatic Cai Guo-Qiang, used the launch’s press conference to reinforce the point: the flying saucer was a symbol, he said, of a country that was trying hard to take off but was unsure where it was going. Whether it took off at all, he said, was unimportant: “We are not in an astronautical exhibition.” Such frankness, perhaps surprising to western listeners, is replicated in two more works: Xu Zhen’s “Shout” is a video installation showing passers-by turning suddenly to see who has screamed at them (like the “smack of a zen master” to a recalcitrant pupil, said Cai); Liu Wei’s “Star” is a light installation among the old oil drums of the Arsenale, disorienting the viewer with violent flashes of white light, a symbol, said Cai, of the “chaos and numbness of urban cosmopolitan life”.

http://snipurl.com/fomt