Feeding Asia's art

Experts see professional biennials as a way to elevate the continent's defining contemporary artists, Xu Jingxi reports from Guangzhou.

A telephone and a thick phone book were all that Zhang Qing was given to make China's first genuine biennial happen. "The 'make-it-work' magic was my enthusiasm for biennales and determination to win back the right from Western curators to judge and choose Chinese contemporary art," recalls the curator who was the chief organizer of the acclaimed Shanghai Biennial from 1999 to 2012. In those memorable days, he sat in a hallway of the Shanghai Art Museum making phone calls one after another to raise sponsorships for the event in 2000. Chinese contemporary artists made their debut in a grand international exhibition in 1993 at Venice Biennial. Achille Bonito Oliva, the chief curator of the biennial at that time, came to China to choose what he thought represented Chinese contemporary art.

"In the 1990s, it was the West that set the standards for what is Chinese contemporary art and what qualified to be shown at international exhibitions and art markets. By hosting biennials, we have our own platform where we have a say about choosing contemporary art of China and other countries," Zhang says.