ART DIGESTION

It's been about ten days that i came back from Europe to China.10 days that already feel like months. China happens fast and i'm getting older too, so the two aspects put together make time fly!
After spending one day in Beijing i took a plane straight to Shanghai to spend a few days checking the SH contemporary art fair www.shcontemporary.info, galleries, people etc... actually , people wise , it was not a great change from usual as the whole Beijing crew was there! bea, claudia, federica, Douzi etc...






It was such an entertaining game to wander in the huge halls of Shanghai post Stalinian exhibition center; because i don't really work in the contemporary art field but still i know a lot of it , because it' s a sort of bubble where all "laowai" who don't work for a big firm in China find a sort of artificial international shelter runned by westerners who managed to establish in the time of a decade the rules and the prices of what is now the most hypped "art for sale".



Chinese contemporary art is already part of the icons of my subconscious, i recognized its faces and colors like the characters of some fairy tale : the pink smiling faces , the dinosaurs ,the over used chairman Mao , the credit cards... i know all of them but sometimes i forget what they mean, because there are just too much of them!



In the meantime as SH contemporary , the 7th edition of the Shanghai Biennale was taking place in the old and beautifull Shanghai museum of Fine Arts.
Entitled "Translocamotion" , the biennale intented to bring a reflexion on the citie's power of attraction, the migrations they provocated, the human fluxes throughout the planet etc...
A big locomotive was supposed to be a metaphor on the human motions in China today. Back in the 60's-70's this train was taking young intelectuals from the cities to the country side to learn from the peasants . Today it's the other way around , peasants are jumping in those trains without tickets , ready to invade the huge human supermarket that big cities have become in China.
Inside the big hall of the ground floor there was also this huge installation that was a composite vehicule , a mix between a plan, a tractor and a "sanlunche". Next to it there was a display of bags and purcells that was an evocation of migrants camping with their stuffs in front of the train stations....
A huge population of young chinese was strolling around the installations and art works , mainly to take pictures of themselves next to the art , as if it was some kind of "hello kitty" store.
I've heard the average number of visitors was 5000 per day, which is a success of course , but maybe a photo cabin with Yueminjun's dinosaurs as background set up in the middle of People's square would have been enough to fill up the hunger for art of the chinese youth....
well i don't know... who i am to judge...
the thing is that the visit of the biennale was made difficult because of the loads of people there.It made the digestion of all these representations of the current world painfull for the brain.
but actually maybe that's the whole point of these mega exhibitions : they try to grasp a snapshot of the world and end up with an heterogenous display of medias and informations.But i guess it's just a portrait of the world today. Heterogenous , scattered, over populated. Curators and artists are just like you and me , they're just vulnerable witnesses of the signs of the time.