If we refer to the Mono-ha and Gutai movements in Japan and the Dansaekhwa movement in Korea, contemporary art in China begins with a movement advocating a cleansing movement, or with specific exhibitions and creations. Then the phenomena such as Xiamen Dada, Northern Art Group, and New Scale Group, which emerged under the name of the “85 Movement”, can be regarded as the initial signs. After forty years of evolution, art groups and related practices based in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou have been making mistakes in their own different contexts, and have given rise to important venues with local ecological styles such as the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Guangdong Times Art Museum. The changes in the past forty years have brought not only significant economic growth to the entire country, but also support and tolerance in many aspects of humanistic construction. The spring breeze blowing through Shenzhen has also given rise to the germination and breakthrough of local culture and art. From the He Xiangning Art Museum and Guan Shanyue Art Museum, which were approved by the government in the late 1990s, to the Shenzhen headquarters of the OCAT (Overseas Chinese Town Contemporary Art Center) museum group, which once marked the great victory of Shenzhen’s “culture-based city” strategy and became a highland for theoretical research and practice of contemporary art in the mainland, Shenzhen can be said to have demonstrated its ambition and “report card” to become a first-tier city in China in terms of production volume and topic popularity in a very short period of time. It was not until the beginning of 2019 that people suddenly realized that Shenzhen seemed to have the ability to build a new generation of cultural and educational system that could “challenge” Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, rival overseas, and feed back to the local area. Pingshan Art Museum came into being at that time.
Then, to a certain extent, the “phenomenal effect” set off by this art institution located in the northeast of Shenzhen can be regarded as a special and important piece of the puzzle in the archives of contemporary art practice in the mainland and even Southeast Asia. We enumerate the five important “actions” of Pingshan Art Museum on the timeline to give a glimpse of this Shenzhen public institution’s first introduction and response to its positioning and other issues in the form of an archive review on its fifth anniversary. In fact, Pingshan Art Museum has always emphasized the “contemporary expression” of the art museum since its establishment, focusing on presenting contemporary art, contemporary architecture, contemporary design and contemporary thought, and has been paying attention to and promoting the local ecology of Shenzhen with an entrepreneurial team spirit. Therefore, its exhibitions and projects, research-based academic brands, and public education ideals are all based on the current work of the art museum. Not only actively raising questions, but also through exchanges and discussions, independent analysis and deconstruction experiments are conducted on the current development issues of art museums and the contemporary reality in which art museums are located.
Looking back at the beginning of the museum’s establishment in 2019, the first international benchmark “starting” is the exhibition “Synchronicity”. On November 30, 2019, Synchronicity opened at Pingshan Art Museum. This exhibition is the first contemporary art exhibition launched by Liu Xiaodu since he became the director of Pingshan Art Museum. It is curated by Li Zhenhua, and artists such as Lv Shengzhong, Hu Jieming, Wang Jianwei, Qiu Zhijie, Xu Wenkai, Roman Signer, Barbara Signer, and Michael Bodenmann are invited to participate in the exhibition. The term “synchronicity” originated from a concept proposed by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) in the 1920s – “synchronicity” (also translated as “simultaneity, synchronicity”), which includes “meaningful coincidence” and is often used to express the meaningful connection between events that occur without causal relationship. The exhibition “Synchronicity” is the first “international exhibition” of contemporary art launched by the museum team after its establishment. It can be said that it provides a good path for Pingshan Art Museum and inspires the institution to use this exhibition as the height and standard of academic direction in the future, and then gradually build Pingshan Art Museum into an important role in the art ecology of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, facing the contemporary and focusing on current development goals. The “International Exhibition” planned by Li Zhenhua, who is also a curator and producer, for Pingshan Art Museum will be launched again two years after the museum was built. On December 18, 2021, the largest solo exhibition held in Asia by German-Romanian artist Daniel Knorr was unveiled. When re-discussing “internationalization” in an advanced way, Pingshan Art Museum started from the artist’s own creative review, and gradually became proficient in the discussion of media relations, social issues, and concepts and material extensions that spread like ripples. As the curator said: “Because it continues the art history clues of Dadaism, conceptual art, new media art, and relational aesthetics, it can also respond to multiple knowledge aspects of art evolution, constitute mutual reference with the development and evolution of Chinese contemporary art, and integrate into the context of global art history.”
The second action is the exhibition “Muse, Yugong and Compass”, which is the first academic exhibition launched by Pingshan Art Museum on June 30, 2020 after the epidemic. It is an influential exhibition example that calibrates the vision with the cutting-edge research and solo exhibitions of first-tier cities in the mainland. Curated by curator and scholar Dr. Lu Mingjun, the exhibition invited ten artists/groups including John Akomfrah, Chu Bingchao, Duan Jianyu, Fang Di, Gong Jian, Ho Tzu Nyen, Bird Head, Rachel Rose, Yang Fudong, and Zheng Guogu to participate in a journey of investigating historical sites and writing contemporary fables. In this exhibition, which has brought the “contemporaneity” of Pingshan Art Museum to the “first-line level” through a series of high-quality salon discussions, the relationship between the viewer and the author is two-way effective: the creator fully transforms his inner gushing vitality into a perceptible experience, and the viewer opens his own perception to embrace this experience with great uncertainty. Pingshan Art Museum’s “public” gene and its “aesthetic education” function for the public have also made significant breakthroughs in visitor visits and participation in public education activities when it gradually stabilized in the second year.
In fact, in the practice archives of Pingshan Art Museum, the exhibition series “Basil – Magic of Space and Vision” can be said to be a new experiment in a broader sense after it began to embody the “Shenzhen nature” and truly anchored the core of the museum. It is well known that Shenzhen, as a special zone of reform and opening up in the mainland, has “risen from the ground” in a short period of time and its almost mythical economic capacity. In such a city that emphasizes effectiveness and innovation, Pingshan Art Museum has hired Cui Cancan, a curator born after 1985 who is based in Beijing, and has joined forces with many well-known artists, architects and graphic designers to break the established role limitations and jointly conduct 9 parallel creations and new attempts of mutual inspiration. “Effective cross-border” is the original intention of the curatorial work of the “Basil” series of exhibitions: the exhibition invites 9 artists/groups to provide works as the basic materials of the exhibition, and invites 9 architects and 9 designers to form nine temporary teams. The three parties of artists, architects and designers work together, without “primary and secondary” and “center”, just division of labor and collaboration, and finally form 9 new types of exhibitions. Since the launch of the first and second series of exhibitions on October 24, 2020, the high-frequency mode of two-by-two output has lasted for 13 months and 9 “Magic of Space and Vision” until November 30, 2021. It can be said to be an interdisciplinary “knowledge device”. On the basis of covering different forms of artistic expression, artists, architects, and designers jointly collaborate to explore new application strategies with exhibition forms as the core. When deploying these 9 exhibitions, the organizers of the exhibition did not deliberately construct a certain clue and framework, but disintegrated the “power” of the curator and gave way to artists, architects, and designers. At this time, as an “absent narrator”, all the questions were placed in an equal and diffuse dimension to reveal and present. If we used to discuss “strong curation” and “weak curation” to compete for who occupies “subjectivity” at the level of the binary opposition between curators and artists, “Basil” puts forward a proposition of another dimension; and Pingshan Art Museum is also becoming more sonorous and tenacious in its third “action”.
Although Shenzhen always mocks itself as a “cultural desert”, under the dual pressure of the long Lingnan culture and the typical history of urban change, sorting out the memories of “just happened” and “happening” is itself full of meaning, and even closer to the conceptual core of “contemporary art” (con-temporary, shared and instantaneous). Therefore, under sufficient and necessary conditions, “Shenzhen/Contemporary/Artists” have become several responsible keywords-the series of exhibitions named after them by Pingshan Art Museum naturally contain more diverse meanings about the ecology of existence. The “action” of Pingshan Art Museum to pay attention to the local art ecology since 2021 is reflected in the eight “Shenzhen Contemporary Artist Series” that will be presented from August 8, 2021 to around November 15, 2023. Director Liu Xiaodu believes that in 2019, the museum will “start internationally”, in 2020, it will “benchmark Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou”, and in 2021, when it has established a certain reputation and is able to seek common ground while reserving differences to find the “foundation of the museum”, it will launch a unique cross-border collaborative exhibition. This series of considerations is that after establishing the curatorial style, industry recognition and practice standards, it is responsible and obligated to return to focusing on and studying the local ecology, and to sort out the creative careers of 8 representative contemporary artists in Shenzhen from the perspective of case studies, so as to promote the long-term and organic development of humanities in one area. The artists invited to participate in this series are “famous” contemporary artists in Shenzhen, whether from the perspective of their generation or the stage of creation. They are already well-known and influential in the art history of Shenzhen and even the Greater Bay Area. They include: Xue Feng, Zhou Li, Shen Shaomin, Wang Chuan, Jiang Zhi, Li Liao, Yan Shanchun and Liang Quan.
Compared with the fruitful achievements of representative cases, the young city of Shenzhen has never had an art museum to “take the lead” and take the initiative to do the first “basic” work of summarizing and sorting out the ecological construction represented by institutions. Pingshan Art Museum spent two years and three months, and after having an international contemporary vision and the ability to produce large-scale exhibitions that take into account both volume and quality, it has continued to make bold moves to produce its “super exhibitions” for global audiences. Such phenomenal museum management strategies and outstanding achievements are also the director Liu Xiaodu’s repeated helmsmanship based on his identity as an architect and his understanding and love of Shenzhen. For a responsible art institution, it is an unquestionable ideal to give back to the local community with every bit of benefit, so the local nature engraved in the genes and blood of Pingshan Art Museum also reminds the entire team to “find ways to do something for the local ecology.” Since the opening of the “Shenzhen Contemporary Artists Series”, Pingshan Art Museum has been open to receiving feedback and suggestions from all sides, and has gradually shifted its focus from top to bottom to the local young artists, who are sometimes confused and sometimes isolated. Although they have received good education in the mainland or even overseas, and have their own wonderful thoughts and creativity, for a young artist who is “born and raised” in Shenzhen, it may be much more difficult and arduous to hold an exhibition and “become successful” than their peers in Beijing and Shanghai. Perhaps out of a “family head” mentality, Director Liu Xiaodu and Pingshan Art Museum always believe that they should open up some good opportunities for young creators in this city, give them a hand, and give them a stage, and perhaps success is not so far away. At this point, the fifth and largest “action” since the establishment of Pingshan Art Museum came into being – “Nomadic in the South: Rivers, Tunnels, Humidity, Star Clusters”, which opened on December 23, 2023, once again cooperated with the young curator Cui Cancan, who had worked together before. By establishing a “South” map, searching and recommending young artist groups and researchers from all over the country, and local institutions that have long been building for the local land, curator Liu Xiaodu and curator Cui Cancan invited young director Ju Anqi to go to various parts of the south to conduct research and record, and finally formed a project exhibition with 101 artists/groups from nine provinces and cities, nearly 100 local interview documentaries, academic articles and publications as the entire text content. If the 2022 “Shenzhen Contemporary Artist Series” is a systematic launch of local narratives, then the 2023 “Nomadic in the South” is enough to be a magnificent commitment tour.
There are countless archives to be included in the creation of a contemporary art history that is in progress. Even in the context of late-maturing cities and regions with complicated topics, differentiated formats have only evolved more dramatically and have never been absent. From the perspective of an institution as the cornerstone of a local ecology, artists are invited to join this multi-person collaborative “propositional work group” to create a contemporary group portrait archive that is captured from key areas and magnified in detail. This is enough to reflect the demeanor and actions of a “phenomenal” institution that is eager to alleviate the cultural difficulties of a place and is full of optimistic imagination and ambition. Following the “two museums” (Contemporary Art and Urban Planning Museum) in the heart of Shenzhen and the “Design Society” (Sea World Culture and Art Center) in the Shekou area of Shenzhen Bay Port, as the jade brick and the opening knife of the new district, Pingshan Art Museum continues Shenzhen’s “3E” principle for the establishment of art museums (Educate, Entertain, Enrich: education, relaxation, enrichment), and has always presented high-quality exhibitions, lectures, workshops and publications to the public for free since its establishment, effectively expanding the local community while also gaining wide recognition from professional circles. As a practical case in the map of Chinese contemporary art institutions, it resists the cultural trend of accelerated iteration and excessive homogeneity, and is also committed to reawakening the participants who are immersed in numbness and forgetfulness and their thinking and empathy.
Thunder at the beginning, cultural belief, collaborative creation, embodied reflection, soil construction, these keywords extracted from the “actions” of Pingshan Art Museum at various stages, are also the “medicine” for this relatively suburban art institution to try to break through and establish itself in the “traffic hot city”. The promotion strategy and scale benefits with “super exhibitions” as the main output form are not only the vivid answers given by the district government and the museum director Liu Xiaodu after various considerations on how to balance the local and international, the traditional and the present, the newcomers and the masters, but also another sustainable and forward-looking breakthrough for contemporary art in the Greater Bay Area and Asia, based in Shenzhen, a special city located at the southernmost tip of China and the northernmost tip of Southeast Asia.
*Originally published on ARTIST (Hong Kong), Issue 21, Spring 2024: 1–10.
Yuting (Roxy) TANG 