My interest in the subject of biennials and their participants’ national affiliations dates back to the Taipei Biennial of 2004, the fourth such event in our city, and my reaction to a curatorial provocation there. I had been kept waiting for more than three hours for what turned out to be a crisp 30-minute interview with one of the two curators of the show, the Brussels-based Barbara Vanderlinden. I kicked off by asking her to explain the curatorial policy regarding the number—five—of native Taiwanese artists chosen to appear. To this she replied by curtly throwing a question of her own back at me: ‘Do you know how many Taiwanese artists were represented in the Shanghai Biennial?’ Meaning, of course, that five local representatives seemed to her quite adequate, thank you very much, and people would certainly be wrong to expect more.footnote1 Her reply took my breath away. I had no come-back at the time—not only because I did not know the answer, but also because I felt I was speaking to a foreign expert who knew her own business better than I did. In those days I enjoyed neither the funds nor the working conditions to enable me to travel long distances to biennials, as global art-world insiders apparently can. More recently, however, I have been able to fly to biennials as remote as Havana and São Paulo, as well as to most of the Asian and European events, and I find that the question of artistic representation at such international gatherings is still, after all this time, haunting me.
It may seem odd, even retrograde, to think of contemporary art practice in terms of artists’ nationality and place of birth, at a time when there is so much talk of globalization, hybridization, transnationalization, world markets and so on. Nevertheless, the question of national affiliation is critical to what the biennial (or triennial, or quinquennial) has come to stand for since the 1980s. An increasingly popular institutional structure for the staging of large-scale exhibitions—some observers refer to ‘the biennialization of the contemporary art world’—the biennial is generally understood as an international festival of contemporary art occurring once every two years.footnote2 Here the operative words are, of course, ‘international’ and ‘festival’. On the first of these depends the second: without the national diversity of its participants, there could be no real celebration or festivity. ‘International’ in this scheme of things means that artists, almost by definition, come from all four corners of the world; even events with a specific geographical focus, such as the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, cast their net far beyond their immediate backyard; they rightly see this as imperative not only for their legitimacy but also for their success.
The fact that artists from remote areas now appear centre-stage in Western events such as the Kassel Documenta or the Venice Biennale is often taken as further proof that the distinction between centre and periphery has collapsed. In his studies of global cultural flows, for example, Arjun Appadurai uses the terms ‘artscape’ and ‘ethnoscape’ to characterize the space through which uninterrupted flows of people—including artists, curators, critics—and high art criss-cross the globe, as city after city vies to establish its own biennial in order to claim membership of the international art scene.footnote3 Like other globalization theorists, Appadurai emphasizes the growing planetary interdependence and intensification of social relations. Nowhere, however, are we told in what directions such ‘flows’ flow, nor what new configurations of power relations these seemingly de-territorializing movements imply.footnote4
Hence this attempt to understand the power implications of biennials by looking more closely, and empirically, at the artists themselves—a luxury in which most theorists have too little time to indulge. I am, of course, well aware of the risks that a nation-based approach may involve, including the possibility of inviting criticism from the pro-globalization lobby in particular. I do not wish to assert that the international art scene has not undergone significant changes over the last two decades. But what ultimately is the nature of these changes, and for what reasons have they taken place? Is the much-discussed collapse of the centre and dissolution of the periphery as irrefutable as some people would have us believe? Has the global art world really become so porous, open to all artists irrespective of their origins—even if they come from what Paris or New York would consider the most marginal places?