Next to the Guangdong Museum of Art on Er-Sha Island sits the Museum of Overseas Chinese, a tribute to the diaspora that has left the country, largely from southern ports like Guangzhou. Perhaps in response, a work that questions this presumed portability and durability of Chinese identity and heritage has been installed in the plaza between the fifth Guangzhou Triennial and first Asia Biennale (until 10 April)—Yuan Gong’s Traces: Collecting Soil of Zhougong Temple (2015), inflatable pools filled with a combination of water, rice sprouts, soil from an excavated Shaanxi Province temple and the distinct scent of Chinese calligraphy ink.
Organised under the theme of Asia Time, the exhibitions show the level of cultural confusion sowed in China by decades of relentless, anonymising development and modernisation. Nostalgia for the recently eradicated past and concern for an uncertain future were already creeping into the collective conscious back when the country’s juggernaut economy seemed unstoppable—and those feelings are more prevalent than ever as it finally, alarmingly, slows down. This can be seen in Once More With Forest (2015), Hu Xiangcheng’s assemblage of wooden refuse from traditional Chinese dwellings packed into modern demolition and construction equipment. Meanwhile, visitors must crunch through a room of clear plastic tarps, umbrellas and water bottles when they come to Bu Bing’s The Corridor Project (2015). The space could be Hong Kong during the protests, but denuded of colour it could be anywhere—rather like most of post-modernised China.
The upheaval of industrialism finds its expression in World Factory (2015), in which the Chinese collective Big Dipper Group installed an apparel factory into a museum hall. The machines are stilled and the lights are dimmed while a video showing cacophonous scenes of production and promotion plays above. Even more visceral is Re-Voice (2015), the Korean artist Airan Kang’s engrossing documentation of “comfort women” from the Second World War, centred around filmed interviews with survivors. Text projected on the walls evokes similar crimes on the western margins of the continent, where Isil is currently using sexual slavery as a tool of war.
Middle Eastern artists are threaded quietly but distinctly through the exhibition that is otherwise heavily focussed on Chinese and European artists, with Iran’s Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi and Turkey’s Jalal and Graziella Rizkallah Toufic contributing films about their respective port cities. The French-Lithuanian artist Esther Shalev-Gerz presents a filmed interview with the French-Lebanese philosopher Rola Younes about the relationship between language and the colonisation of ideas, with a sound installation of Younes’ singing in Arabic, French, English, Yiddish, Persian and Hebrew—as well as a translation into Chinese.
But everything ties back into China’s state of flux. The superstar painter Yue Minjun shifts his usual tack of doppelgänger portraits with Ink Shirts (2015), an installation of white shirts splashed with calligraphy ink, hanging from the skylight. Referencing perhaps the apocryphal textile-miller’s dream (“If we could add just one inch to the tail of every Chinese man’s shirt…”), or maybe straightjackets, the work is a move towards tradition in sync with Chinese art market trends: the writing may not be on the wall, but it is on the shirtwaist. Liu Yue delves into Chinese tradition more bluntly, with God of the Land (2015), a film of interviews with peasants around Suzhou who speak about vanishing folk religions, many brought by their ancestors from northern China centuries before.
Nostalgia and sentimentality get little space at Shenzhen’s Urban Architecture Bi-city Biennale (until 28 February), organised under the theme Re-Living the City. China’s industrial transformation brought millions of migrants and billions in manufacturing and trade to Shenzhen, and even more to the surrounding Pearl River Delta, including Guangzhou. This human density has created a place like no other, with problems and possibilities existing on the same outsized scale. The Shenzhen biennial is likewise enormous, spread over three floors of the repurposed Dacheng Flour Factory—itself an impressive work of found architecture—and around the industrial site, including a park of stacked shipping containers. A series of aquaculture filtering ponds, populated with ducks, fish and lilies, installed by Thomas Chung and the architecture school of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, adapts traditional methods of landscaping to contemporary challenges of pollution and food safety.
The main exhibition area opens with a ground floor given over to experiential installations: one enters through Dennis Maher’s A Hole in the (Window of the) World, a migrant home as fantastical flotsam. Rob Voerman then takes temporary housing into a Gaudi-esque direction with the cardboard Shenzhen Entropy. Hood Design’s Symbiotic Village aims to represent the region’s ecology with 150 glass bowls holding live carp suspended by silken nets in a grove of mulberry trees. A wall contains the 1,000 music boxes of Topotek1 and Rebecca Saunders’ Cacophony Collage, their clashing plinking driven by user whimsy.
The regional and thematic pavilions on the upper floors present their own cacophony, while the case studies and proposals of the PRD2.0 and Radical Urbanism blur into a sea of architectural models. Individual projects, like Handshake 302’s n=distortion, in which Pearl River Delta cities as represented by objects installed on a sampan boat, attest to the region’s richness. Combined, however, they illustrate the exhausting scale and sameness of China’s boom cities.