Text by Robin Peckham

The 2009 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of UrbanismArchitecture, affectionately known as “shuang shuang zhan” to its devotees, is now open in full force across a number of sites in Shenzhen. Projects span a range of methodologies, curatorial frameworks, and goals, not to mention venues: from outdoor public art in the city square to shopping malls and urban villages, this exhibition has it all. Here’s a quick look at what to see first, and a few sites to leave off the itinerary.

Highlights:

Bai Xiaoci, “Public Building”

This photography project examines the territory of the “county town” as a site of mutual influence and struggle between urban and rural cultures, offering images of the grandiose municipal buildings constructed by local governments. The photographs appear as an earnest analysis of the ways in which local officials wish to present themselves architecturally. Bai Xiaoci, one of the few contemporary artists remaining in Shenzhen, may yet emerge as a significant outsider figure akin to Zheng Guogu in Yangjiang or Chu Yun’s previous life in Shenzhen.

Inheritance: Shenzhen, “Permanent Migrants”

Organized by London-based curator Claire Staunton, this satellite exhibition in a non-profit space sandwiched between a shopping mall and an urban village presents a modest retrospective of the nascent art history of Shenzhen, including work by current and former residents Bai Xiaoci, Chu Yun, Guy Delisle, Liu Chuang, Christian Jankowski, Jiang Zhi, Daniel Knorr, MAP Office, and Yang Yong. Although the work included is familiar, the format is inventive. Keep an eye on this space for further developments in its program through spring 2010.

Lara Almarcegui, “A Wasteland in the Shenzhen River”

This conceptual intervention focuses on a site on the north bank of the Shenzhen River known as Liu Pok. This fascinating territory once lay to the south of the river and thus belongs to Hong Kong, but due to waterfront reclamation and rerouting projects it is actually contiguous with mainland China. One of the very rare undeveloped pieces of land against the border, the Shenzhen government is lobbying to gain access to the property–a goal Almarcegui works towards by attempting to offer access during the biennale. No resolution has yet been reached.

Lin Chi Wei, “Social Measurement through Sound”

No doubt familiar to followers of the Chinese experimental music scene, the Taiwanese sound artist exhibits an installation based on his “sound tape” project. In the context of live performance, the artist passes a long band through the audience, hoping they will collectively read the characters written on the tape. Ideally, the result is a harmonic voice of hive-like poetry. The installation presented here includes videos of such performances under idealized or constructed social situations, adding a layer of the visual surreal to the eerie soundtrack.

Tor Lindstrand and Marten Spangberg, “Four Ecologies of International Festival”

This is a party, and don’t let the pretensions of any curator or architect tell you otherwise. In fact, it was such a good party that a significant portion of guests to the biennale opening were drawn away from the official opening ceremony and towards this makeshift bar (at which drinks are ordered by color, not ingredient), karaoke rig (with remixed videos, at least until a hardcore local audience demanded a replacement DVD), and t-shirt giveaway (quickly confiscated by the more fashionable of the biennale security guards). One of the few projects reducing architecture to its basic principles, International Festival simply creates a place in the midst of space.

Wang Wei, “Natural History”

One of the subtler participants in the main exhibition of the biennale, Wang Wei is up to his usual architectural interventions. Here, he covers two walls with colorful tile patterns borrowed from antiquated animal enclosures in the Beijing Zoo, bringing the exhibition back towards the idea of architecture as both decoration and constraint–that is to say, hegemony and control. It would be easy to believe that the installation simply belongs here, attached to the car park of the Shenzhen Civic Center.

WEAK! Architects, “The Bug Dome”

Consisting of Hsieh Ying-chun, Roan Ching-yue, and Marco Casagrande, the team working on this project attempts to realign the conversation of architecture from the rhetoric of artistic monumentality towards the discursively “weak.” Their project succeeds magnificently, although their idea of weak architecture loses some of its appeal when its pseduo-utopian aims–the transformation of cities into slum-like super-villages like Taipei’s Treasure Hill–become apparent. Nevertheless, the “Bug Dome” itself sits handsomely on a construction site between skyscrapers in the north of the city.

Lowlights

Alterazioni Video and AnotherMountainMan, “Lanwei”

Research into the “lanwei lou,” or uncompleted construction project, as a figure on the cultural landscape can be fascinating, but here Hong Kong-based artist Stanley Wong and his Italian collaborators do little more than present their photographs and point out the fact that construction projects have been halted globally, often as a result of the continuing economic slowdown. Perhaps most interesting is the reuse and habitation of these unfinished structures, a phenomenon just barely touched upon here.

Chen Zhen, “Danser la Musique”

Although little blame can be placed with the artist, this debut realization of a participatory sculpture may end up doing more harm than good to the legacy of Chen Zhen. Consisting of a trampoline draped with a number of bells with bullets for clappers, the work is “completed” when children are allowed to jump on the structure. Dated multicultural conceptualism aside, the project ends up looking like a trashy amusement park attraction situated as it is in a shopping mall parking lot between a 15 meter Christmas tree and a neon billboard advertising “Happy Valley.”

DnA Design and Architecture, “Construction Noise”

The ideas of sound art and field recording are apparently quite new to the world of architecture. This piece consists simply of the recorded sounds of a construction site replayed in an open space on the Civic Square–unfortunately, the site is physically and audibly overwhelmed by an actual construction site on one side. The project is also packaged in awkward rhetoric drawing attention to migrant workers, another idea lost in the din of industrial machinery.

feld72, “Public Trailer”

Foreign architects and researchers studying China are often drawn to a strikingly similar set of phenomena; one feature figuring prominently in so many of these exhibitions is the cargo tricycle. Here the Austrian architects imagine themselves redefining public space by crossing the tricycle with karaoke and public address systems (both of which already exist on the streets of Shenzhen). Lack of creativity in conceiving an architectural installation would be understandable–there is, after all, a place for archival analysis–but such a failure of observation is unforgivable.

Neville Mars/DCF “10,000 Flowers”

The Dynamic City Foundation may be the best representative of a specific school of Chinese urbanism, one that celebrates speed, scale, and monumentality coupled with pretensions to artistic production. This video similarly presents a vision of Beijing highways as a kaleidoscope, recalling the Italian Futurists as read through the lens of contemporary China’s will towards development at any cost. Exhibitions such as this should reflect upon the shortcomings of this status quo, not provide an easy rationale for the inhumane pressures of reckless urban development.

As mentioned previously, one of the densest and most ambivalent projects in the 2009 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of UrbanismArchitecture is the “Bug Dome” pavilion installed on the outdoor space northeast of the Shenzhen Civic Center. The sculptural space is designed by WEAK! Architects, a collective consisting of Hsieh Ying-Chun, the Taiwanese architect best known for his philosophy of architecture as social activism, Roan Ching-Yueh, a Taiwanese architectural curator dealing with many of the same issues, and Marco Casagrande, a Finnish architect interested in structural ecologies and all manner of new age theories of spiritual construction.

Their project here is formally interesting, forming a loosely woven shell amenable to both open air performances and more casual social activities along the lines of Hsieh Ying-Chun’s former projects with tent-based amphitheaters in suburban Taipei. Its shape recalls a partially submerged cicada skin, semi-translucent and emerging organically from the ground. It is constructed of solid bamboo ribs shaped into arches perpendicular to the length of the sculpture, while thinner strips of bamboo are woven between these ribs. Broken bricks and mud lend support like primitive buttresses. Although it is physically possible to enter from either end, one side houses a flat stage, and the remaining ground surface is covered with small stones that conceal upward-facing electric lights. The structure is immediately placed on an overgrown construction site immediately abutting a residential camp for temporary workers, but the skyscrapers and official municipal buildings of Shenzhen are visible on the remaining three sides.

I first experienced the “Bug Dome” one day before the official opening, when project curator Xu Ya-Zhu invited the Taiwanese participants in the biennale to host a small event in and around the structure. Unfortunately Hong Kong poets Liang Wendao and Liu Wai Tong did not make it in time for their scheduled readings, so instead a discussion with the architects was held on the makeshift stage. The ensuing conversation strayed quite far from the subtle aesthetic ambiguities of the project itself, and several participants proceeded to negate the urban experience with an at times naive and utopian tirade on the merits of rural communities. Notably, Roan Ching-Yueh mentioned that architecture has no reason to become remain as complicated as it has become, that civilization did not appear out of a vacuum in the early 20th century, and that there is no reason to pay the government to dispose of our waste.

All three of these architects deserve the utmost respect for their suspicion of breakneck urbanization and Futurist urbanism, and even more so for their willingness to work with vernacular materials and styles in the service of disadvantaged rural communities. Some of their projects, including Marco Casagrande’s work on the Treasure Hill area in Taipei, have been absolutely groundbreaking in terms of how we think about the limits of growth for the Chinese cities of the future. But an inability to accept multiple planes of construction and levels of systemic integration is simply futile. The “Bug Dome” successfully negotiates the territory between the construction, metropolitan architecture, and rural past of Shenzhen, but it is not a habitable structure. It would be foolish to claim that this kind of work could represent any kind of solution–even theoretical–to the problems facing south China.

Thankfully, the architects also distributed a broadsheet paper called “Cicada” during the opening days of the biennale. The textual and visual materials contained therein lay out the discursive basis for these projects sensibly and realistically, a far cry from the rhetoric that led me to all but dismiss the pavilion during that opening event. In this conception, “weakness” is a form of architecture based on insect construction, rejecting engineering in favor of a bricolage that collects debris from around the site for its structural materials. In a remarkable conceptual move, the figure of the ruin is viewed as a form of third-generation urbanism in which the man-made is integrated into natural systems.

WEAK! projects are thus paradoxical attempts at the design of ruins. In another project, the “Post-Industrial Fleet,” decommisioned commercial ships are berthed outside of Tianjin and inhabited as units for residence, recreation, and survival. What is at stake here is often the scale of the design of systems: although Roan Ching-Yueh may have overstated his case when he claimed that there is never a need to choose the “big system” over the “little system,” this is indeed a category of analysis to which more attention needs to be paid. This is something akin to open-source architecture, consisting of shanzhai hardware components that can be remixed and recombined according to the exigencies of the moment. In southern China, there may be no other way.

The 2009 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of UrbanismArchitecture (not to be confused with the similarly named but politically distinct 2009 Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of UrbanismArchitecture on the southern side of the border) opened yesterday in the environs of the Shenzhen Civic Center. Extraordinarily distributed and only rarely thematically coherent, it seems that nearly everyone has both a few good words and a few shrugs for the work on display. Observers coming from an art background will be disappointed by the lack of imagination evident in much work belonging to the realm of architecture proper, but it seems here that even projects placed by artists operate within a relatively narrow framework of curatorial understanding. The architecture biennial is a unique site on which a number of forces seem to converge; this year, with artist-designer-filmmaker-critic Ou Ning as primary curator, Shenzhen presents a test case for the future of the biennial model. Any such exhibition, be it dedicated to art or architecture, is generally related to urban space–indeed, many of these events are founded by municipal governments in an attempt to boost tourism and cultural economies. For the same reasons, high-profile internationally-operating curators are often invited to organize these exhibitions, and because these individuals work through similar networks and methodologies, we have the emergence of what critic Jerry Saltz has referred to as “the curator problem”: a tendency towards installation and video art that is either “about” something or “refers” to something else.

A biennial of architecture and urbanism makes these goals explicit, presenting itself as something akin to the limit case of the biennial model. Works included must be documentary, analytical, or “about” the city itself. There is no place here for art about art; instead, art must be about architecture. Virtually everything in Shenzhen falls under the rubric of installation, and often includes text and/or video. Painting, long considered the fetish object of art history, is entirely absent, and photography is only present in several documentary segments. But in a moment when architects seem to be moving further away from the design of environment and space and in the direction of installation and monumental public sculpture, what does it mean to abandon the less sensible sides of artistic production? Is there some way to integrate architectural practice and curatorial art into a larger vision of urbanism that maintains a certain degree of uselessness?

Of course, this is not to say that there is no aesthetic work in the Shenzhen biennial. Tor Lindstrand and Marten Spangberg’s “Four Ecologies of International Festival,” despite the damning words of the project curator in the official description of the work, seems to be about nothing at all: the artists present a site for the social activity known as the party, which then takes on its own cultural life in each of the cities in which it is presented. In Shenzhen, they give away t-shirts printed with the name of the city, operate a bar at which drinks can only be ordered by desired color, and play edited karaoke videos projected on the rear wall. This work negotiates space but refuses to be about space, initiating an activity that cannot be constrained or defined by the accompanying analytical text. The “Bug Dome” created by WEAK! Architects provides a similar space, but their project carries a certain ethical baggage related to ruralism, resource use, and humanitarian construction. This complex work will be discussed in greater length in another post at a later date.