Time to reflect
The participation of Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Sejima is certainly one example of boundary-defying artists that Feng is referring to.
Her outdoor installation Another Layer of Surface Water is a pool of mirror-polished chairs set out on a stone-paved piazza that spread out like waves. Visitors can sit on the chairs, chat and watch the reflection of the trees, sky and nearby traditional architecture.
The video installation of 30-year-old Amalia Ulman, who likes to blur the line between fact and fiction in her enduring performances on social media platforms like Instagram, centers around Yiwu, a city in Zhejiang known for its small commodity market.
Starring in the video, Ulman captures city life through her distinctive narrative style, adding subtitles in her mother tongue Spanish, as well as English, German, Japanese and Chinese, and dubbed into Russian, where she ponders whether she might always feel alienated.
Some of the exhibits not only promote dialogue with their surroundings-a typical water town to the south of the Yangtze River-but also with their neighboring artworks.
On the square for open-air movies at the West Scenic Zone stands the renowned India-born British sculptor Anish Kapoor's stainless steel work Double Vertigo, whose concave and convex surfaces reflect one another on one side, while inverting the scene of the square on the other.