Chinese Pavilion in the 52th Biennale

The presence of the Chinese Pavilion in the Biennale, despite its brief history, has become a necessary element of this event, while its influences on the Chinese art community are equally significant.

　　A project for a national pavilion in the Biennale should be a relevant reflection on the current tendency of the development of the art world in a given nation. More importantly, it should be able to answer to some of the most urgent questions raised from the ongoing reality of that particular society, or more precisely, the negotiation between individual creators and their social context, offering insightful visions. At the same time, a national pavilion is also a particular, specific but open platform to contribute to the enrichment of the global art scene itself. The artists present should be able to carry out relevant projects to implement such a dynamic but often complex, mission.

　　After examining carefully the general situation of today's Chinese art scene and the specific context of the 52nd Biennale, we would like to focus the Chinese Pavilion on the work of four female artists, a project which seems to us both urgent and valuable in both the Chinese and international contexts. They are Shen Yuan, Yin Xiuzhen, Kan Xuan and Cao Fei. Ranging in age from their late 20s to their mid-40s, and with highly personal, original and diverse languages, they exemplify in particular ways the evolution of the engaging relationship between female artists and the Chinese art scene, and speak to the claims of women on the rapidly changing Chinese society of the last two decades.

　　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.