The CAFAM Biennale, founded in 2011 at the Central Academy of Fine Arts Art Museum in Beijing, is the only continuing biennial in China programmed from inside a fine-art academy. Its argument across three editions — Super-Organism (2011), The Invisible Hand: Curating as Gesture (2014) and Negotiating Space: I Never Thought You Were Like That (2016) — has been that the academy's scholarly apparatus is the appropriate institutional frame for a biennial in the People's Republic, and that the categories of research, methodology and pedagogy must displace the categories of spectacle and market.
The Central Academy of Fine Arts (中央美术学院, CAFA) is one of the two senior fine-art academies of the People's Republic of China — alongside the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou — and traces its institutional lineage to the National Beiping Art School founded in 1918. In October 2008 the academy opened a new museum building, designed by the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, on its new campus at 8 Huajiadi South Street in Beijing's Chaoyang District: a six-storey grey-slate volume of 14,777 square metres total area and approximately 4,150 square metres of gallery space, the architect's first completed museum in China and a deliberate institutional statement that the academy's research and exhibition programmes would, from that point, be housed in architecture of international ambition. The CAFAM Biennale is the programmed expression of that statement.
The inaugural edition, Super-Organism: A CAFAM Biennale, opened on 20 September 2011 under the curatorial leadership of CAFAM director Wang Huangsheng — who had come to Beijing in 2009 from the directorship of the Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou, where he had founded the Guangzhou Triennial in 2002 — with art director Xu Bing, then vice president of CAFA, and a curatorial team including Pi Li, Guo Xiaoyan and Wang Chunchen. The framing argument was that the biennial form, as it had been imported from Venice through São Paulo and Havana, had to be reconstituted on Chinese institutional ground around an academic rather than a market or state apparatus. The theme unfolded across four conceptual rubrics — machine, urbanity, body and bio-politics — and the exhibition's structuring metaphor was the super-organism of distributed networked intelligence, both as the contemporary condition the work documented and as the institutional model the biennial itself sought to enact.
From research to method: the 2014 and 2016 editions
The second edition, The Invisible Hand: Curating as Gesture (28 February – 20 April 2014), refocused the institutional argument from the work to the method. Six curators were programmed in parallel — Kit Hammonds (Royal College of Art, London), Hu Danjie (CAFAM), Angela Jerardi (Witte de With, Rotterdam), Ma Nan (Beijing), Veronica Valentini (Madrid) and Xiaoyu Weng (Kadist, San Francisco) — each producing a discrete exhibition within the building. The title's reference to Adam Smith's invisible hand was deliberate and inverted: the exhibition argued that the curatorial gesture, like Smith's market, is the self-regulating mechanism whose effects are visible everywhere but whose operations remain unseen — and that the work of a contemporary biennial in China was to make the curatorial apparatus itself the object of public examination. The edition was the first sustained Chinese argument for curatorial studies as a discipline distinct from art history and museum administration; it was developed across two preparatory years of seminars and publications, and remains the institutional reference point for curatorial pedagogy at CAFA.
The third edition, Negotiating Space: I Never Thought You Were Like That (9 November 2016 – 8 January 2017), pushed the institutional argument one further turn. The exhibition was staged without a single curator; instead, an advisory committee chaired by CAFA president Fan Di'an, with Su Xinping, Wang Huangsheng, Qiu Zhijie, Tang Bin and Wang Chunchen, operated as a screening apparatus for proposals submitted in open call from across Chinese society — artists and non-artists alike, working under the institutional designation of "negotiator." The premise was that the contested terrain of public space in contemporary China — between state, institution, market and citizen — was best examined through a curatorial form that itself made the negotiation of authorship and admission visible. The title quoted a Chinese internet phrase used to register surprise at unconventional behaviour; the exhibition's institutional gesture was to admit that surprise as a curatorial criterion.
Wang Huangsheng's directorship of the museum closed in May 2017, when Zhang Zikang — previously director of Today Art Museum and deputy director of the National Art Museum of China — succeeded him. Under Zhang's directorship the institution programmed the inaugural CAFAM Techne Triennial in 2020, curated by Zhang Ga, around the relationship between art and technology; the triennial's opening was disrupted by the COVID-19 outbreak but the programme proceeded later in the year. The CAFAM Biennale itself, in its original numbered series, has not been restaged since the third edition of 2016. The eight years between Negotiating Space and the present moment are the longest hiatus in the programme's history — and the open question of the institution's second decade is whether the CAFAM Biennale will resume under its original title at all, or whether the art-and-technology cycle has displaced it as the museum's principal recurring exhibition.
The Beijing Media Art Biennial and the 2024 Beijing Art and Technology Biennale
Across the same decade in which the CAFAM Biennale's third edition closed, two further recurring programmes have emerged from the broader CAFA institutional orbit. The Beijing Media Art Biennial (BMAB) — founded in 2016 with the inaugural edition Ethics of Technology, chief-curated by Bernd Kracke, Su Xinping and Song Xiewei across the CAFA Art Museum and the China Millennium Monument under the umbrella of Beijing Design Week — continued in 2018 with the second edition, Post-Life, chief-curated by Song Xiewei and Qiu Zhijie at the CAFA Art Museum (5–24 September 2018). The BMAB is programmed from CAFA's School of Design rather than from the Art Museum's curatorial team, and its institutional argument is the convergence of art, design and technology rather than the curatorial-method argument of the original CAFAM Biennale.
The CAFAM Techne Triennial of 2020 has, in turn, been reframed and continued: the second edition of the same lineage opened on 26 October 2024 under the renamed title Beijing Art and Technology Biennale (BATB), with the theme Earthwise, curated by Fei Jun and Wang Naiyi at Genesis Art Gallery — a venue outside the CAFA Art Museum's principal building. Fifty artists and scientists, including Tim Yip, Wang Zhigang, Thomas Feuerstein, Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, A.A. Murakami and Nolan Oswald Dennis, were assembled around the curatorial argument that "intelligence" must be extended beyond the human to plants, machines, planetary and extraterrestrial systems — a Planetary Intelligence frame the curators positioned as the conceptual evolution of the inaugural Techne Triennial. The 2024 edition ran through 23 February 2025. The institutional question for the original CAFAM Biennale apparatus is whether the academic, curatorial-studies argument of The Invisible Hand and the open-call apparatus of Negotiating Space will return under a fourth edition, or whether the museum's recurring exhibition function has been permanently absorbed by the art-and-technology cycle and its expanded venues.
