1st Asia Biennial / 5th Guangzhou Triennial
11 December 2015–10 April 2016
Opening: 11 December
“Asia Time” symposium: 12 December
Guangdong Museum of Art
Yanyu Road 38
Er-sha Island
Guangzhou
China
asiabiennial.gdmoa.org
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This year, for the first time ever, the Guangdong Museum of Art (Guangzhou) organizes a unique combination of the renowned Guangzhou Triennial and the new Asia Biennial. Be ready to behold great works that present Asian history, Asian culture, Asian trade and the problems facing contemporary Asia.
This Asia Biennial will be one of the largest biennials in Asia, with an international curatorial team and artists from all over the world. This ambitious project aims to extend the topics of Asian consciousness and Asian experiences established in the Asian Art Curators’ Forum of 2013, held by GDMOA and designed to explore Asian art development in a global context.
Curatorial team
Chairman
Luo Yiping: Director of Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou
Chief Curators
Henk Slager: Dean of MaHKU and Research Professor, University of the Arts, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Zhang Qing: Head of the Curatorial and Research Department of the National Art Museum of China, Beijing
Curators
Ute Meta Bauer: Founding Director of CCA, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; Curator of Performance Program
Kim Hong-Hee: Director of Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul
Sarah Wilson: Professor of Courtauld Institute, London; Curator of Academic Program
Sun Ge: Researcher, Institute of Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing; Curator of Academic Program
Curatorial theme
The narrative of the 1st Asia Biennial / 5th Guangzhou Triennial explores two paradoxical perspectives: Western, global or “World Time” (the perspective of acceleration, speed, visibility, exhaustion, a transgressive/progressive modernity, ultra-capitalism, knowledge production, and economy) versus Asian time (the perspective of tranquility, reflection, concentration, various forms of modernity, and emphasis on values and wisdom). With the internal conflict of not being able to exist without each other, the West-East paradox, with all of its contradictions, is perhaps a necessary agonistic provocation nowadays, shaping or reshaping an Asian understanding and experience of time.
Starting from this insight, the 1st Asia Biennial / 5th Guangzhou Triennial intends to be a critical catalyst for querying the current “World Time standard”—not for the sake of replacing it with another form of time, but with the attempt to end the self-centred, exclusive and expansionistic logic that seems to be intrinsically linked to it. To that end, the biennial/triennial mainly focuses on a local understanding of Asian time, the ultimate goal being to recalibrate the current “World Time” from an Asian perspective. A new way of thinking about time that comes from the arts: this may lead to a response to the crisis that is currently unfolding in the face of globalization and capitalism.
From the specific context of Guangzhou—a location that not only played a crucial role in the ancient Silk Route, but also has a significant function in the current ultra-modern Asian economy—the biennial/triennial is devoted to searching for alternative models and multiple perspectives that can better articulate the curatorial concept of “Asia Time,” and develop a new thinking about Asia that goes beyond geographically and historically defined concepts.
More information
More information about the project and the participating artists will be forthcoming in mid-October.
Contact
Office of Asia Biennial, asiabiennial [at] gdmoa.org
