Amid reports of poor planning, Shanghai Project, a multi-disciplinary biennial organised by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Yongwoo Lee that was scheduled to open at the Himalayas Museum in September, has shifted its focus from an art exhibition to a community-based event. Its first phase, to launch that month instead, includes interactive pavilions, pop-up libraries, and public forums, while the exhibition itself has been moved to April 2017.
“Shanghai Project has restructured its priority from exhibitions to public programs and prioritised the difference of its context,” says Yongwoo Lee, the director of the Himalayas Museum and the founding director of the Gwangju Biennale. He describes the initiative as “an audience-centered platform where citizens can discuss, relate, act and communicate with programmes such as a community participation.” Opening the interactive element of the project months ahead allows community feedback to more fully inform the exhibition. Lee stresses that, “Shanghai Project is not an art-dedicated project,” with only 30% of its researchers coming from visual art. “We seek to diversity and differentiate the Shanghai Project from existing visual art events of a similar nature.”
Within Shanghai, reports of disorganisation and inadequate funding have dogged the project. “We have previously experienced difficulties with rescheduling of funding, but it has been sorted out,” Lee says. The project’s theme of Envision 2116 and its Envision Pavilion are named after the lead sponsor Envision Energy. There have also been reports of conflicts with local staff and volunteers, bureaucracy, and the unique operational culture in Shanghai, caused by the project leadership’s relative inexperience in China. “I refute those claims,” Lee says. “Of a total staff of 24, 17 are Chinese. We are not mostly foreign, but mostly Chinese. However, we believe that we have the advantage of a diversity of backgrounds and cultures that many homogenous Chinese institutions, not just art institutions, lack. This helps us to better understand and relate to our audience.”
The project’s first phase will kick off on 3 September with the 2016 International Biennial Association Conference, co-hosted with Shanghai’s Power Station of Art, home to the Shanghai Biennale. The next day, Shanghai Project will hold a two-session forum, featuring its organisers, participants and multi-displinary academics, and launch the Envision Pavilion, a new construction. Designed by Sou Fujimoto, it will imagine the human condition a century from now, with art including a neon sign panel by Douglas Coupland, an installation by Cildo Meireles, and a performance by Otobong Nkanga. “The Envision Pavilion will serve as the physical and symbolic center of the Shanghai Project,” Lee says, “a temporal transparent scaffolding, a non-permanent structure that shares a futuristic space… that merges the natural and the man-made.” Another pavilion, Seed Planet, designed by Liu Yi, is an architectural and educational playground in the adjacent Century Park.
As part of the community participation programme, architects including Yu Ting and his Studio Wutopia will transform abandoned spaces around the city starting in July. Qidian, meaning starting point in Mandarin, ties into Obrist’s 89plus project of working with young talents born after 1989. A competition will select 12 young Chinese practitioners, who will join with 12 of their international peers for an exhibition this autumn in Himalayas's space in Zhujiajiao, a traditional canal town outside of Shanghai.
Shanghai Project will also have a pop-up bookstore, library and event areas within Shanghai’s Jifeng Bookstore as well as six Shanghai university libraries. Finally, the Shanghai Project Academy, an international seminar about the intersection of art and technology, will be held in coordination with the Royal College of Art, London, Tokyo University of Art and Shanghai University.