Biennale, Dog
2003 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Xu Tan
Biennale, Dog is an appropriation of the posters made to promote biennial art exhibitions. Displayed alongside the official marketing materials of biennials (Shanghai, Berlin, Venice, etc.) Xu’s works provide a satiric and provocative alternative to the official system and make publicly visible images of many realities. Biennials help various localities produce their own art scenes and provide playgrounds for the international art world to expand its activities and influences. This is a highly contradictory process that renders local productions globally visible, but yet risks reducing their complexity, difference, and independence. In a way, these temporary art exhibitions are the perfect example of the negative and positive impact of globalization that affects both social reality and personal destiny. Xu’s Biennials enact and publicize different “possible scenarios” that these contradictory factors might effect on the social imaginary.
Xu Tan began his career as a member of the well-known Guangzhou-based artist collective Big Tail Elephant. His installation and video works explore issues crucial to the post-Cold War, post-colonial, and increasingly globalized world like urbanization, the geopolitical relationships between the developed and developing worlds in terms of political, economic, and cultural production and their impacts on personal lives and their expressions. Xu’s works are often site-specific, dealing intimately with everyday experiences to critically demonstrate the tension between globally circulating images, modes of communication, and the impact they have locally. Powerfully and intelligently, Xu’s work calls for contemporary art to engage with social reality in our time.
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