AS WORKERS RAN around frantically trying to prop up a sagging arch made of plastic Coca-Cola bottles, one sarcastic onlooker asked: 'Is this performance art?'
If blame for the structural malfunction that opened 2002's Shanghai Art Biennial could have been somewhere in the blueprints drawn by notoriously exacting Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, the spectacle at least lent some comic relief - and an unfortunate amateur quality - to Shanghai's last attempt at a major visual arts event.
Don't expect any such chaos at Shanghai's fifth Art Biennial, which opens on Tuesday at various venues around the city. Co-curator Shengtian Zheng has an established reputation and is a board member of the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. His three co-curators are: Jiang Xu, president of the China Academy of Art; Sebastian Lopez, who comes to Shanghai from the Netherlands by way of Argentina; and Qing Zhang, named by CCTV as one of China's best curators in 2000.
Organisers of this year's biennial, entitled Techniques of the Visible, 'will focus on the close relationship between art, science and technology - in particular, how art has revealed the interdependent social and political forces that produce and suppress technology and humanity'. Expect pieces to include the sort of tech-based video-art installations now dominating shows in China and abroad.
Zheng, who has been a close observer of the biennial since its inception in 1996 and served on the event's academic committee, says 'there are a lot of gaps that need to be filled' in China's museum system, but that Shanghai's biennial has come a long way. 'The progress is tremendous,' he says. 'In 2000, we didn't even think the biennial would come together because there wasn't an established tradition of showing international contemporary artists in China's large museums. In fact, the director couldn't be certain if the government would come in and close the show or not'.
From these uncertain times, the biennial emerges into a new era. Zheng says this biennial enjoys the full support of the government and, although the budget has grown to double that of the last biennial, all of the funding was settled well in advance.