Four Women Artists in the Chinese Pavilion

　　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.