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July 09, 2005
Saigon-Shanghai
Emerging exhibitions, HCMC, District 7. It reads "Exhibition center".
"The efforts of artists to carve out a public sphere has not gone unnoticed by government authorities, and there has been a palpable change over the past several years in terms of how they deal with contemporary art. Their newfound receptiveness can be seen as a strategy of co-optation and motivated by a concern for surveillance. On the one hand, art has become a tool to promote the city's image as a postmodern cosmopolis in its fierce desire to become a leading city in Asia: the recently opened Doland Museum and the Shanghai Biennale can be seen as showcases for the city's creativity, in a strategy within which cutting-edge art is just one more vector in the aestheticization of labor under contemporary capitalism. On the other hand the authorities realize they cannot stop art production, and thus prefer to provide it with an arena where they can keep an eye on it. Though these strategies provide appreciable latitude for art production, openly dissident views are not tolerated. Under the circumstances, Shanghai artists - though more independent and perhaps more entrepreneurial than their more numerous Beijing counterparts – have recognized there is little point adopting kamikaze tactics and tackling "sensitive" political issues head-on, acknowledging that the only way forward is to negotiate a space for themselves within the ambit of reformist culture. The fact remains, however, that if Chinese contemporary art were not opposed to something, it would never have emerged at all; which explains why the best art being produced in Shanghai today deals obliquely but determinately with issues of public space – for it is there that its own future lies."
Shanghai: Spaces Without Qualities/Spaces of Promise
Stephen Wright
Parachute. No.114 pp. 13, 16.
Posted by rst at July 9, 2005 01:30 PM
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