The 2nd Yinchuan Biennale | Spike Art Magazine

The 2nd Yinchuan Biennale

Recently, the second Yinchuan Biennale, entitled "Starting from the Desert - Ecologies on the Edge", closed at the Museum of Contemporary Art there. Currently still a remote city in northwestern China, Yinchuan will soon become one of the starting points of the Chinese government's New Silk Road infrastructure project. Biennial curator Marco Scotini talked to Spike editor Christian Kobald about multiculturality and biodiversity as traces of the ancient Silk Road, how to exhibit eco-artistic practices today and the liberation of the biennial format from Western universalism.

Christian Kobald: Let’s start with the city. Can you tell me about Yinchuan?

Marco Scotini: Below the Gobi Desert, above the Yellow River, and at the foot of the Helan Mountains, Yinchuan is the capital of the Ningxia, a Chinese autonomous region. This location is geographical but also geopolitical, as we find ourselves on the extreme edge of the so-called “Western provinces” of China. Territories located further west have historically been areas of rebellion and secessionism. In this city, we can find archaic signs that coexist with hypermodern devices. In fact, Yinchuan is being re-developed as the future smart city of China, so it is a very particular case study and perhaps a place where contemporary art is the least expected. But at the same time it is a crucial spot from a cultural and anthropological point of view, not only in respect to the past but also to the Chinese state’s future plans. Yinchuan was also one of the stations on the ancient Silk Road, therefore a place of great flow, hybridisation, and exchange of people, knowledge, languages, technologies, religions, goods, and more.

View of Yinchuan

What is the art scene like?

Yinchuan is still a sort of a remote island in respect to the Chinese art system because it is completely separated from Beijing and Shanghai. Yet, from the 1930s to the present day, the region has always been a destination that artists are keen to visit as a westward journey or sort of self-exile, which characterises Chinese modern and contemporary art. Zhuang Hui, Kan Xuan, Duan Zhengqu, and others frequently visit because of its rich archaeology and majestic landscapes. In the biennial, we included two artists from the region: Mao Tongqiang, who is internationally recognised, and the emerging collective WuXu. Before the construction of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Yinchuan, in 2012, the only artistic initiative was the architectural project “Hope Land” in 2004, which invited twelve well-known Chinese artists to design buildings. MOCA Yinchuan, as all Chinese museums, has a problematic identity. It was founded as a private enterprise and only became a joint venture between public and private capital this year.

"There is no nature without history, socio-botanics without acoustic ecology, vegetable minorities without ethnic minorities"

What was the specific aim in founding the Yinchuan Biennale? Why Yinchuan?

The Biennale began one year after MOCA had opened, the well-known Indian curator Bose Krishnamakari was appointed Artistic Director, and there were many reasons to start it in such a remote spot. First of all, there was an idea to bring cultural opportunity to a place primarily known for its landscape and also to empower local cultural contexts by providing missing infrastructures. The second aspect has to do with the original intention of the investors and the fact that in the near future Yinchuan will find itself as the starting point of the government’s Belt and Road initiative. For this reason, the main focus of the current biennale is a retrospective gaze on the rich layers of multiculturality and biodiversity produced and left in the area by the original Silk Road. Our vision starkly contrasts the current threat of future plans, which wishes to reduce this area of China and Central Asia to a mere project of geo-economy.

Xu Tan Social Botany. 12 days (2018) © Photo: Courtesy the Yinchuan Biennale

Can you explain the basic concept of the current edition?

For many years, my research has focused on the relationship between art, nature, and politics as well as on a social analysis of plants, and I’ve dedicated exhibitions to the pioneers of eco-artistic practices. When a new consciousness of environmental crises came to the fore after 1968, the art scene tried to respond and continues to do so today. Yet upon my arrival to Yinchuan, all of this experience was insufficient. The word Yinchuan means “Silver River”, but the city is located in a relatively dry area and is connected with the desert as well as with the Muslim Hui minority – Ningxia hosts twenty percent of the entire Hui minority living in China. There is no nature without history, socio-botanics without acoustic ecology, vegetable minorities without ethnic minorities. For the first time in my career, and together with the curatorial team, we tried to re-create a sort of oikos (a “habitation” in ancient Greek) in which everything could be linked and connected: work, space, time, forms of expression, language, feminist struggle, minerals, animal and vegetable elements. Of course, many references and ideas were provided by the artists themselves and through relationships with intellectuals and archaeologists from Shaanxi province. It was thus an exhibition with many components from areas that we can consider extra-disciplinary, yet still strongly connected to aesthetics.

Large and Boundless Corn, Li Naiti (1959) Courtesy: Huxian Painting Museum

How do you view the relationship between ecology and art?

I believe that today ecology has to be an extended field, open and inclusive of psychic, environmental, and social elements. Otherwise it becomes reduced to a mere technocracy. What Deleuze and Guattari were able to read in the desert, where life is seemingly impossible, became the origins of a new dimension of ecology, which they define as “nomad science”. Contrasting “state science” – a theoretical model which requires a space to be measured, centred, homogenous, and subject to civilised rules destined to limit and control – nomad science takes on the burdens of transformation, heterogeneity, and continuous variation.

During a conference at the Yinchuan University, a young woman asked me: “But why, if you’d decided to do an exhibition on ecology, did you choose the image of the desert? For us, ecology is associated with greenness and not the brownish yellow seen in your advert.” She perfectly captured the fact that we didn’t want to talk about market ecology. I think the apocalyptic way in which environmental problems are posed today can only generate new aesthetics of the sublime, which still lies within the technocratic dimension of modernist and capitalist rationalism. So the question becomes: What can an artist – or any civilised subject – do within such a scenario? The state and businesses only encourage techno-bureaucratic and “economistic” solutions through authoritarian decisions, whereas artists can shape new values and new imaginations to reperceive and reconsider the world – or, rather, in Silvia Federici’s words, to “re-enchant the world”.

View of Shapotou desert southeast of Yinchuan

Before the Yinchuan Biennale, you also curated “The Szechwan Tale: China, Theatre and History” at the FM Centre for Contemporary Art in Milan, which evolved out of “Today’s Yesterday”, your contribution to the first Anren Biennale in Anren, Sechuan last year. If you had to characterise the specifics of contemporary Chinese art, what would they be?

Throughout the 1990s we identified contemporary Chinese art with large-scale paintings or huge sculptures. I believe that the Chinese scene is much more diverse and conceptual elements also play an important role. One aspect that I can underline is that these semiotic languages – for political and cultural reasons – are never too direct or explicit. It is hard to find art with a straightforwardly contesting stance, yet that does not mean antagonistic viewpoints do not exist. On the contrary, we have to learn to decodify different stratifications of meanings.

"Not only is the biennale format in crisis, but so is the principle of the universality that guides it"

What are the main differences between working in China and the West?

Western people often outline the issue of censorship in respect to China, but I don’t think it is just Chinese; rather, censorship is a global problem today. The difference is that in China it is declared, while elsewhere it remains invisible.

Performance by Enkhbold Togmidshiirev © Photo: Courtesy the Yinchuan Biennale

Many think the very format of the biennale is exhausted, so where do you see its strength?

Not only is the biennale format in crisis, but so is the principle of universality that guides it. Perhaps, just as Donna Haraway talks of situated knowledge, situating a biennial means liberating oneself from all the principles based on neutrality, objectivity, and universalism. I believe that today biennials are devices of governmentality; they go hand in hand with the presiding idea of western democracy and capitalism. Belonging to the contemporary art world means renouncing to one’s own specific nature in favour of embracing a monolingualism without proliferations and transversality. Biennials operate like political organisations so that “being equal” means nothing more than being part of the same “art institution”. As a consequence, emancipating oneself would mean belonging to art as a homogenous world in which the system continues to reproduce the dialectics of integration-exclusion. On the contrary, in the clash with “difference”, the notion of art as such can do nothing more than fall apart, dissolve into sand. I think the theoretically limitless idea of western modernity is the true “limit” of our thinking. Are we sure it wasn’t just the so-called Third World that was decolonised, but our way of seeing and thinking about the Other as well? Decolonising our understanding of art requires us to abandon the modern idea of art with its notions of neutrality, autonomy, and timelessness.

"Starting from the Desert – Ecologies on the Edge"
2nd Yinchuan Biennale
MOCA Yinchuan, China
9 June – 19 September 2018

MARCO SCOTINI is a curator, writer, and the artistic director of the FM Center for Contemporary Art based in Milan.

CHRISTIAN KOBALD is a curator and an editor at Spike. He lives in Berlin.