A silver lining in a global crisis

The chief curator Jaque, being an architect, has different visions, and in his selection of artists for the Shanghai Biennale, he intentionally avoided the usual gallery system, Gong says. "This made it possible for us to see new artists, some from areas that we rarely paid attention to." Among the 68 artists featured at Bodies of Water, one-third are Chinese artists, while artists from France and Japan, usually widely represented at the contemporary art scene, are not found this time. Also a lot of interdisciplinary artists have emerged in this biennale, who built their creations on the wide and in-depth research in the subject they had chosen, according to Gong.

Gong also says that almost half of the artists are women. Actually the biennale's theme, Bodies of Water, was influenced by a book of the same title of Australian philosopher Astrida Neimanis. Neimanis brought to the Shanghai Biennale A River Ends as the Ocean, a performance project she created together with visual artist Clare Britton and Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor, an activist and artist.

The performance is presented at PSA in the form of video projection and pictures on cardboard walls. A group of walkers, led by the three, followed the tide 16 kilometers out of Sydney's Cooks River to its ending at Botany Bay. In Shanghai the biennale will also host a group walk along the city's disappearing water channels, to "help people rediscover the city", Gong says.