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. 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. 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). “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. 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.
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. 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 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. 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. 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.
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