Many top figures of the art world travelled to Wuzhen, one of China’s historic water villages, straight after Art Basel in Hong Kong, which closed on the weekend. Among those at the launch of the inaugural Art Wuzhen earlier this week were the Swiss collector of contemporary Chinese art, Uli Sigg, and Hou Hanru, the director of Rome’s MaXXi, both of whom are members of the ambitious event’s advisory board, as well as the artists Sui Jianguo, Song Dong, Xu Bing, Ann Hamilton and Roman Signer among others. The inaugural exhibition features an impressive mix of publicly-engaging and conceptually-provocative art, presented with an attention to detail, down to well-written and clearly translated texts, that is unusual in China. Participating artists include Ai Weiwei, Marina Abramovic, Damien Hirst, Maya Lin and Martin Parr, with the Chinese artists predominantly Beijing-based and 1960s born.
The 1,300-year-old reconstructed traditional eastern Chinese water town, which is a major tourist destination, is hosting the exhibition of 43 works by 40 of China’s and the world’s most established contemporary artists. Organised by the chief curator Feng Boyi, along with Wang Xiaosong and Liu Gang, the exhibition aims to make top-notch contemporary art more accessible to China’s broad public, not just the more sophisticated residents of its major cities.
“Usually this sort of large-scale, international exhibition happens only in metropolises,” not a county-level village like Wuzhen, says Chen Xianghong, the chairman of the exhibition and chief executive of Cultural Wuzhen, which launched the Wuzhen Theater Festival in 2013. Art Wuzhen’s curators had just one year to assemble works by 20 Chinese artists and 20 international artists and organise them into a coherent exhibition, Utopias:Heterotopias (until 26 June).
In Wuzhen’s old town there are seven site-specific installations, including Ann Hamilton’s Again, Still, Yet, featuring a loom being worked by a local woman on the stage of an old-style theatre, which links to Wuzhen’s historic textile industry. In a nearby square, Liu Jianhua recreates his signature ceramics of common goods with grey cement on black metal shelves, to blend with the traditional architecture.
The bulk of the exhibition, which includes 13 works created specifically for Wuzhen, is held in the North Silk Factory, a converted 1970s industrial space still retaining many rough edges and ornately retro flooring.
Though Art Wuzhen includes several one-note crowd pleasers, most of the show manages to be critically conceptual yet accessible. Song Dong’s Avenue Square recreates Tian’anmen Square as a frothy, plastic pink paradise wrapped in selfie-friendly mirrors. The revelers within the space are filmed and images are broadcast to an adjacent room. It winks to a nearby trailer for Xu Bing’s film Dragonfly Eye, which the artist is creating using surveillance footage. Taiwanese artist Lai Chih-Sheng’s Scene_WZ drops the ceiling of one room, using light and space to evoke senses of depression and claustrophobia. Icelandic artist Finnbogi Petursson likewise plays with mood through reaction to physical space and cues with Intra-Supra, an installation of sound and light bouncing off a pool of ink mixed with water, a tribute to the canals outside.
“The art work could not be pretentious or too obscure, since the audience is mostly tourists and villagers— so it’s extremely basic,” says the exhibition’s chief curator, Feng Boyi. While China’s first and second-tier cities struggle to build professional cultural institutions, with a slap-dash army of new museums and art fairs, Wuzhen offers a different model. “All artist selections I did on my own, it was completely independent, otherwise I would not do it," Feng says. He also accepted the job because Wuzhen wanted the exhibition to be so international. He says the chairman of Wuzhen Culture, Chen Xianghong, is “very open-minded, unlike most rich people,” adding that there is nothing like Art Wuzhen in China, “and in a small village, no less”.