The Medium Is The Message

Trans-local Motion, the somewhat cryptic title of the 7th Shanghai Biennial, is a term coined by the organizing committee for the occasion. It refers to the popular issue of worlds’ current state of global urbanization. The Biennial focuses itself on the migration of people and subsequent culture to international cities. Like most art and cultural pageants in China, Trans-local Motion is a government-sponsored event. Conveniently situated between the Olympics and the 2010 Expo, the exhibition serves as a "theoretical starting point" and a "cultural warm up" for the upcoming world expo. The preface of the 7th Shanghai Biennial proclaims that the exhibition, "illustrates that the Shanghai Biennial has grasped the frontier of contemporary international art." While taking advantage of the current art frenzy, the primary goal of the biennial appears to be a championing of the rapid cultural and economic development of Chinas showpiece city. It is extremely successful in this ambition as a publicity campaign by attracting an outstanding number of visitors each day. Additionally, the biennial employs an organizational technique that divides the show into three distinct sections. The noticeably cautious theme and presentation of this year’s survey is a balance of eastern and western participants with visually enticing and unconfrontational artworks. A few artists however, do manage to provide a potent cultural critique and indirectly undermine the self-promoting attitude of this year’s biennial.

Harun Farocki's piece entitled, In-Formation presents the viewer with a barrage of information graphics in the form of a slide show. A comment on the tendency of technology to reduce identity to quantitative values, the piece indirectly undermines the biennials agenda to promote Chinas current condition of modernization. The massive introduction of the digital medium into mainstream culture marked a new realm of expression while simultaneously calcifying the restrictive capacities of sources for creative outlet by further reducing complex amounts of information. In-Formation is a compilation of "chartjunk", a term from the lexicon of Edward Tufte to denote useless, non-informative elements of quantitative information displays. This popular pseudo science of info graphics exemplifies the simplistic thinking prevalent in modern culture.

While 7th Shanghai Biennial brings together some of the art worlds most respected players in juxtaposition with local favorites to present the audience with a moderate dose of contemporary art viewing, in the end the biennial remains another form of nationalist propaganda for modern China. Just like the posters of the 1960s, the biennial represents a populist scheme to conceal the unfortunate reality that media is still censored and society remains repressed.