Everyday Miracles

　　In fact, globally, the question of women's creative contribution to the restructuring of today's artistic, cultural, social, economic and political reality is becoming a centre of attention today. However, the presence of woman artists in the "mainstream" of the international art world is still relatively limited. This reality urges us to reconsider the very mandate of the pavilion itself. It's time to make it into a break-through and an exemplary case for both the Chinese and international art worlds to reconsider their inquiries of imagination, values and meaning production. Shen Yuan, Yin Xiuzhen, Kan Xuan and Cao Fei are certainly amongst the most remarkable figures in Chinese and global art scenes of our time. Their presence in the Chinese Pavilion, as this year's "representatives" of the Chinese art community, can clearly emphasize the urgency and importance of such a value shift. Grouping them temporarily under the banner of the pavilion can foster the promotion of their particular roles and innovative voices, which should be equally influential as those of men, in today's creative community. In the meantime, the significant context of the Chinese Pavilion, both culturally and physically, provides perfect conditions for the artists to explore and express their formal imagination and social commitment.

　　For the pavilion, Shen Yuan, Yin Xiuzhen, Kan Xuan and Cao Fei are working on new and site-specific projects. Residents of different cities in China and abroad, and born and raised in four very special periods of recent history, they have developed and adopted very different artistic and intellectual positions and approaches. Based on these diverse experiences, they will produce highly personal but complementary installations to form a common project in the pavilion spaces, the petrol warehouse (Cisterne Building) and the garden (Vergini Garden). At the same time, they share a kind of common female sensational, intellectual and spiritual instinct: they are all deeply interested in contemplating and grasping everyday life as the starting point of their work. Shen Yuan, living in Paris and working internationally since 1990, focuses her concerns on the relationship between non-Western female identity and cultural conflicts embodied in bodily, linguistic and culinary differences. Yin Xiuzhen, born and based in Beijing, resorts to everyday objects such as clothing and textiles to construct testimonies to the mutation of the city and its impacts on her personal, familiar and social life in the process of China's integration into the global economy and power system. Kan Xuan, living between China and Europe lasting recent years, chooses to concentrate her energy on building up a sphere of solitude around herself and on turning that particular state of being into a spiritual and transcendent yet beautiful image flux in her video installations. Cao Fei, the youngest member of the group, opens herself to embrace the fresh, exciting and increasingly globalized lifestyles of the urban youth at the turn of the millennium, navigating through electronic entertainment, pop culture, virtual reality and adventurous urban drifting and turning these into multimedia and trans-disciplinary expressions. At the end, in spite of the apparent differences of their experiences in dealing with the everyday, these four artists have a remarkably common talent: they always manage to transform everyday objects and experiences into miraculously innovative and affecting pieces of art. In other words, they turn the everyday into the miraculous.