EVEN BY ITS own feverish standards, the Chinese contemporary art world has had a busy week. With the Sixth Shanghai Biennale well under way at the Shanghai Art Museum and nearly a dozen other shows elsewhere, the city has become the centre of the mainland art boom, and attracted the crowds to prove it.
As international curators and collectors converged to see the latest works of China's rising stars Cao Fei and Qiu Anxiong and the master Ai Weiwei, important questions emerged this year about the state, focus and future of Chinese art. And Hong Kong artists and curators are finally joining the debate.
Hong Kong works have appeared in most biennales, and reflect the local art scene's anxiety and excitement about its potential integration with the mainland.
Curators selected designer Alan Chan Yau-kin and craft collective Mindcraft Group to represent Hong Kong under the biennale's Hyper Design theme. Chan's work on two soft-drink multinationals is prominent at the show's entrance. Mindcraft Group, which comprises Hong Kong ceramicist Mak Yee-fun, Hong Kong-based sculptor Zhang Beiru and mainland artist Ruan Jiewang, take on traditional Chinese design in a corner room. Their work consists of a table spread with unadorned pottery, cabinets full of carved objects and what could be a scholar's desk, rendered in minimalist, life-sized plastic and lacquered bright red. Hong Kong curator Johnson Chang Tsong-zung of Hanart TZ Gallery says that this primarily Hong Kong group produced 'the only handcraft with traditional roots in the entire bienniale', especially when the sprawling event turned more to pop western and pan-Asian works than the Chinese art on which it was founded.
In People's Park, the gleaming Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art presented Entry Gate: Chinese Aesthetics of Heterogeneity, which features Hong Kong's Sara Tse Suk-ting's delicate installation of porcelain-cast T-shirts and Wallace Chan Sai-ying's crystal carvings of small, knick-knack Buddhas. But if the Hong Kong works evoked a specifically Chinese craft tradition, they seemed meek compared with other aesthetic-based pieces such as Zhan Wang's stainless-steel rock garden boulder, or Ai and Serge Spitzer's massive rows of trompe l'oeil blue-on-white ceramics.
At the Bund's Shanghai Gallery of Art, David Chan Ho-yeung, a former director of Para/Site Art Space included Hong Kong new-media artist Hung Keung's mirrors and simplified characters in City in Progress: Live from Zhang Jiang, an exhibition responding to the building of a new hi-tech factory centre on the fringes of Pudong.