Jun 12 2018

Highlights from the Second Yinchuan Biennale

by Tom Mouna

The Second Yinchuan Biennale took place in the Museum of Contemporary Art Yinchuan. Situated on the outskirts of the city, the museum is one of the westernmost contemporary art museums in China. All photos by Tom Mouna for ArtAsiaPacific.

The Second Yinchuan Biennale, “Starting from the Desert: Ecologies on the Edge,” opened on June 9, 2018, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Yinchuan. The international curatorial team was led by renowned Italian curator Marco Scotini, and included Andris Brinkmanis, Paolo Caffoni, Zasha Colah and Lu Xinghua. Working with the term “group-being,” the curators moved to localize the biennale, anchoring it to the city of Yinchuan, the capital of China’s Northwest Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, close to the Gobi Desert—historically a key junction of the Silk Road trading route, and currently home to a large Hui minority and Muslim population—through a focus on concepts like nomadism, minorities and ecology. Using the city’s liminality to open up radical and proliferating questions and theoretical positions, the curatorial team was explicit, both in the guidebook and their opening speech, in their reference to Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s thoughts, especially on rhizomes and their “Nomad Science,” as the conceptual frameworks of their endeavors.

As detailed in the biennale’s materials, which were designed by the Milan-based art magazine Mousse, the exhibition was thematically and conceptually split into four interdependent and sometimes overlapping sections: “Nomadic Space and Rural Space,” “Labor in Nature and Nature in Labor,” “The Voice and the Book” and “Minorities and Multiplicities.” This loose division included contemporary and modern art works, live performances (unfolding within the museum and across nearby sites, including in the wetlands, artists’ studios and an outdoor amphitheater), as well as works from across historical periods, including locally found, ancient sculptural objects that were scattered throughout the museum along with historical maps, and numerous 19th-century, Western-style paintings created by Chinese painters, which, although not given their own spaces, dominated two rooms of the museum. The Second Yinchuan Biennale stood out for the breadth of its artists, especially for its centering on so-called Eurasian and Asian countries along the historical Silk Road, and opened up some interesting and increasingly relevant questions related to ecologies and minorities—for instance, how to utilize the theoretical and actual power of conceptual understandings from a minority position and how to reap the power of liminal ecologies, as found in parts of Yinchuan between the desert and the countryside—while also beginning to hint at some potential frameworks to redress these ideas.

Here are some highlights from the biennale.

SONG DONG’s The Center of the World (2018) was one of 40 newly commissioned works for the 2018 Yinchuan Biennale. The installation—based on the Altar of Land and Grain in Beijing’s Zhongshan Park, historically used for harvest ceremonies—was an exemplary part of the exhibition’s discussion on environmental issues. The top of the installation held 24 types of desert sand representative of the 24 global time zones.

MARJETICA POTRČ’s Yinchuan Rural House (2018) is a facsimile of a local house. This is the latest work in a series that sees Potrč recreate structures from across the world. Potrč sees rural dwellings and their surrounding activities as significant of citizens’ abilities to control and design the basic conditions of their lives.

KAN XUAN’s two-channel video work, 138 Yuan (2018), is made up of cell-phone videos and photographs of the interiors of cheap hotels across Northwest China. Kan is inspired by the vastness of the area and its nomadic and agrarian histories, as she explains in the biennale’s guidebook: “I end my work in the evening, take a ride to the next village, select a new hotel, pay for it, take in my luggage and leave the next day.”

The extensive photographic series titled The Great Silk Road (1994–2016) by Kyrgyzstani artist ALIMJAN JOROBAEV sets out to document the nomadic ways of life for people from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan. In this photograph, a boy from the Kyrgyz Manaschi group is captured in the middle of his performance of an epic national poem.

Shown as part of the biennale was the newly recreated “Zhuang Hui Solo Exhibition,” which originally took place at the Beijing gallery Platform China in 2014. Represented as text, videos and photographs, the exhibition documents Zhuang’s epic journey to the Gobi Desert, which was chiefly executed for Zhuang to exhibit four large-scale sculptural pieces within the audience-less no man’s land.

There were a number of ancient Chinese cultural relics interspersed throughout the biennale. This is from the series Rubbings, a printed rubbing of rock carvings from the hillsides of the Helan Mountain, 40-kilometers outside of Yinchuan. The rock carvings, loaned from the Ningxia Museum, can be dated back 6,000 years to the Ming and Qing dynasties.

The WUXU GROUP are a collective of young artists and researchers—including Zheng Ningyuan, Wang Kai, Sun Yicong and Liu Jing—who are from China and based in Italy. The biennale was the first time the group had exhibited, which spoke to the biennale’s broad and open curatorial approach. Their archival-based artwork presented a global history of falconry, linking this research to powerful Falcon Houses—groups of falcon hunters employed by Yuan Dynasty emperors, who were known for often abusing their positions of power.

There was an extensive presentation of historical maps of various parts of the world, with a particular focus on how Asia was mapped and perceived by European mapmakers, such as in this engraved Map of Asia (circa 19th century) by Arrowsmith’s, an English mapmaking family business.

KIMSOOJA ’s Porridge Project (2018) is a participatory performance work, which invited visitors to eat one of three porridges that the Korean artist produced from locally sourced ingredients. One of the artist’s intentions was to draw on the universality and history of porridge as a cheap source of nutrition, as well its slow simplicity.

Holiday in the Countryside (2013) is one of three oil paintings exhibited by DUAN ZHENGQU, a professor at the Fine Arts Department of Beijing Capital Normal University since 1999. For more than three decades, Duan has held fast in his commitment to painting the rural populations of Northern Shanxi, returning each year to paint the lives of the subjects, many of whom have become close friends with the painter.

There were also a number of works by the HUXIAN PEASANT PAINTERS. During the Cultural Revolution, peasants were given art classes by professional artists and art teachers, and works from the Huxian area in Xi’an became the models raised up for emulation, as they were viewed as most well-aligned with the Communist government’s requirements for painting, sculpture and printmaking.

LIU DING’s newly commissioned installation, The Orchid Room (2018), is a recreation of the Orchid Room in Zhongshan Park, one of Beijing’s Ming-dynasty imperial parks, where orchids, Chinese painting and calligraphy are displayed. In the restaged space, Liu displays historically significant works of art from his own collection and from the Yinchuan Contemporary Art Museum.

THAO NGUYÊN PHAN’s Voyages de Rhodes (2014–2017) was painted onto the pages of the book, Rhodes of Viet Nam: The Travels of and Missions of Father Alexandre de Rhodes in China and Other Kingdoms of the Orient, a 17th-century text that played a large part in the transliteration of the traditional Sino-Vietnamese script into the Roman alphabet. Phan’s paintings show children playing but also moments of darkness and cruelty, and spoke powerfully of the generations of disempowered children who couldn’t access or read their native language with immediacy.

ANG TSHERIN SHERPA’s Wish Fulfilling Tree II (2018) is a sculptural work inspired by traditional Buddhist mandalas, which saw the artist continue his exploration of the effects of the Tibetan peoples’ diaspora. Here, he placed his copper mandala sculpture within a contemporary context, taking debris and currency found in the local region and creating a new ground upon which the sculpture sat.

LI BINYUAN took visitors on a short journey into the wetlands situated around the Museum of Contemporary Art Yinchuan. He then locked himself into a plank position across two rocks, and attempted to hold this pose for as long as possible before inevitably crashing into the water. The performance was typical of Li’s exploration of the power of nature versus the power of humans.

The curatorial team and several of the participating artists of the Second Yinchuan Biennale.

Tom Mouna is ArtAsiaPacific’s Beijing desk editor.

The Second Yinchuan Biennale is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Yinchuan until September 19, 2018.

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