After the inauguration exhibition of the 4th Guangzhou Triennial launched last year, the theme exhibition is about to be unveiled.

The Guangzhou Triennial is constituted by five project exhibitions and one theme exhibition. The project exhibitions will be held one after another during 2012 and 2013, including a collateral event planned by Wan Lin for Venice Biennial and exhibition “The Third Nature: Chinese Reconstruction” curated by Gao Ling.

Mr. Luo Yiping, director of Guangdong Museum of Art, said, “The 4th Guangzhou Triennial is a three-year ongoing project beginning with an exhibition and a symposium, which followed by a case study of 5 project exhibitions held both inside and outside China. At last a theme exhibition and thesis symposium will conclude the triennial.”

Wan Lin’s project exhibition is the first upsurge. The exhibition, titled “Disenchantment of Chinese Imagination”, will showcase more than 100 artworks of painting, sculpture, video and installation and so on. More than 46 artists, including Bai Hua, Chen Xiaodan, Dai Guangyu, Dai Yun, Dong Zhong, Feng Feng, and Bo Wenjun (Weibo) will participate in the exhibition.

“Base on the inauguration exhibition, we adopt a broader academic view in this project exhibition,” said Luo Yiping. According to Mr. Luo, fascination is by nature extrinsic. Things could become seductive, infectious and attractive after artificial manipulation, and therefore distracts people from the nature to superficial beauties.
A question was brought forward in the inauguration exhibition: what have we seen, lost and had in the process of urbanization? To disenchant is to strip off all extrinsic attachments and to go back to the “meta-question”: the nature.

“Land deed”, a work of Mao Tongqiang showed in the exhibition, reflects relationships between peoples, people and land, and people and institutions in a text form.

Then comes “The Third Nature: Chinese Reconstruction”. The exhibition enlists Xu Bing and other 14 artists with artworks ranging from installation and video to easel art. At the same time ink-wash paintings by Liu Qinghe, Zuo Zhengyao and other painters will be exhibited with aims to explore “the combination of contemporaneity and tradition”. Speaking of this exhibition, which is curated by no other than him, Luo Yiping said, “The exhibition is defined to present diversity”.

After all appetizers are served, it is time for the main course.
Themed “the Unseen”, the theme exhibition of Guangzhou Triennial is defined with five key words: future object, future event, future realm, future city, and future faith. Jiang Jiehong, Professor of Birmingham Institute of Art & Design, and Jonathan Watkins, director of British IKON Gallery, will take charge of the show. While the exhibition is staged, the icon of Guangdong Museum of Art—works of photography and video will be exhibited in New York University.

Beside the inauguration exhibition, project exhibitions, and the theme exhibition, a series of forums called “Forums in Motion” will be held in Guangzhou, New York, Tokyo, and Birmingham. Zhang Xudong, professor of the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University and director of the Center of Literature and Art Criticism at Peking University, steers the project. In his opinion, Guangzhou Triennial and its symposium are destined for a mission: to explore the tradition and contemporaneity.

The tradition and contemporaneity discussed in 1980s stood against each other. At that time, Modernism, enlightenment and internationalization were stressed. Tradition was regarded as a burden and liability. But the tradition discussed today is about renovation rather than imitation or standardization. “It is an effort to find the value and meaningful cultural connotation of the tradition,” said Zhang Xudong, “in this sense, tradition could be rather positive”. 

Combining tradition and contemporaneity, “Forums in Motion” aims to reflect the development of economy and culture in Chinese society. Therefore Zhang targets “demolition and construction” for the exploration of “deconstruction and reconstruction”. The first symposium, “the End of Art” becomes the banner of Guangzhou Triennial.

“Does art end? What is art in a post-art era? Shall those we call art today apply new approaches, which are strong, radical and subversive in the view of tradition, so that they could inherit and push forward the mission and ideas of art in the future?” such questions have been raised by Mr. Zhang, alongside with issues such as the future of art, relationships between art and commercialization, art and capitalism, tradition and contemporaneity.

Xiao Yuqian, Reporter of Invest Journal
D05 on Jan.16th, 2012