The Anren Biennale, founded 2017 in the heritage town of Anren in Dayi County, Sichuan, has across three editions argued — under the artistic direction of the Chinese contemporary art historian Lü Peng — that the principal continuing site for Chinese curatorial argument may be a Republic-era museum-town rather than a metropolitan kunsthalle.
The Anren Biennale is the contemporary art biennial of Anren, a heritage town of approximately ten square kilometres on the western edge of the Chengdu plain in Dayi County, Sichuan. Anren has been designated by the Chinese national tourism authorities as the country's only "China Museum Town" — a designation that registers the town's unusual concentration of Republic-era courtyard mansions (more than twenty are preserved across three principal streets) and its inventory of more than thirty museums, of which the Liu's Manor Museum and the privately founded Jianchuan Museum Cluster are the principal anchors. The biennial was founded in 2017 to insert a contemporary curatorial argument into this working heritage economy, and across three editions it has continued to test what that insertion can be made to mean.
The inaugural edition, Today's Yesterday, opened on 28 October 2017 and ran to 28 February 2018 under the artistic direction of Lü Peng, the Chinese contemporary art historian (president of L-artUniversity, professor at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute and the Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts) whose three-decade critical work has been one of the principal scholarly positions on the history of Chinese contemporary art since 1979. Lü's premise — that the dialogue between historical inheritance and contemporary practice is the constituting problem of work made in twenty-first-century China, and that Anren's heritage inventory makes it the structurally appropriate site at which that problem can be argued out — was developed across four thematic sections, each curated by a separate Chinese or international team.
The four sections of the founding edition
The four sections were: The Szechwan Tale: Theatre and History, curated by the Italian curator Marco Scotini (artistic director of the FM Centre for Contemporary Art, Milan), which took as its departure point the relationship between Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan (1940) and the Rent Collection Courtyard — the 1965 socialist-realist clay-sculpture cycle of 114 life-sized figures permanently installed in Anren's Liu's Manor; Crossroads, curated by Lü Jing and Liu Jie, which staged a survey of the Chinese contemporary scene; A Future That Never Returns, curated by Du Xiyun and Lan Qingwei; and Rhetoric of Genealogy, curated by Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu, the artist-curator pair whose continuing critical project on the writing of Chinese art history is one of the principal contemporary positions on the question. More than 120 artists from over a dozen countries participated.
The 2nd Anren Biennale, A Confrontation of Ideals, opened on 12 October 2019 under the joint curatorial direction of Lü Peng, the Chinese art historian He Guiyan, and the Netherlands-based independent curator Siebe Tettero. The edition's premise — that the present moment of cultural and geopolitical contest is structurally a confrontation of ideals rather than of material conditions, and that contemporary art can stage that confrontation in a way no other institutional form can — was developed across multiple sub-themes and ran into early 2020. The 3rd edition opened in 2021 under the directorship of Gu Yuan, with a curatorial team that included Wang Lin, Zhao Li, Xia Kejun, Elsa Wang, Li Xiaofeng and Wen Ya; the edition brought together approximately 150 contemporary artists across multiple sub-themes and over 300 works.
The principal continuing venue is the Ningliang Old Factory — a renovated industrial site within Anren — together with selected interventions across the heritage mansions and the streetscape of the old town. The biennial's institutional sponsor has been the state-owned Overseas Chinese Town (OCT) Enterprises, the cultural-tourism developer which has invested at municipal scale in Anren's continuing development as a museum-town. The biennial's relationship to the OCT investment programme — that the cultural argument the biennial mounts is staged within an economic argument the developer is making — is the institutional condition the biennial is read against.
