The Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale is the OCT Contemporary Art Terminal's continuing programme of contemporary sculpture in Shenzhen, originating in 1998 as the He Xiangning Art Museum's inaugural Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Sculpture and reconstituted in 2012, under the new institutional umbrella of OCT Contemporary Art Terminal (OCAT), as the Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale proper. From 1998 to 2010 the He Xiangning Art Museum — the state-owned museum dedicated to the memory of the early-twentieth-century artist and political figure He Xiangning, opened in Shenzhen in 1997 — organised the exhibition across seven editions, with support from the Overseas Chinese Town (OCT) conglomerate of state-owned enterprises whose Shenzhen cultural-tourism complex (Splendid China, Window of the World, Happy Valley) had made the museum's institutional home possible. In 2012, with OCAT taking institutional responsibility, the seventh and eighth editions made the rename official.
The seventh edition, Accidental Message: Art is Not a System, Not a World, opened at OCAT on 12 May 2012 under the joint curatorship of Liu Ding, Carol Yinghua Lu and Su Wei, with the participation of forty Chinese and twelve international artists. The exhibition was organised in two principal sections — Unexpected Encounters, a research-based recovery of Chinese art of the 1990s, and What You See Is What I See, a survey of recent work by international artists — under the curators' central proposition that contemporary artistic practice should be read not as the function of a system but as the accumulation of individual "self-practices," the unsystematic and accidental being for the curators the proper subject of contemporary art exhibition. The eighth edition, We Have Never Participated, opened on 16 May 2014 under the sole curatorship of Marko Daniel, then Convenor of Public Programmes at Tate Modern, with associate curators Lu Peiyi, Claire Shea and Wenny Teo and the participation of more than fifty artists; the title, a riff on Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern, framed the edition's argument that audience participation in contemporary art had become an expected and even banal procedural convention rather than the radical re-shaping of the artwork that Joseph Beuys's social sculpture had once proposed. The edition closed on 31 August 2014; in 2022, OCAT's Participating Sculptures: Memories from the OCAT Biennale opened as an academic retrospective of the programme to date and as a warm-up for the new OCAT B10 building, URBANUS architect Meng Yan's white-box renovation of the former disk-production factory at the centre of the OCT-LOFT complex.
An institution constituted out of an industrial zone
The structural feature that distinguishes the Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale from the older Chinese biennial programmes — the Shanghai Biennale (founded 1996 at the Shanghai Art Museum, the senior continuing Chinese biennial), the Guangzhou Triennial (founded 2002 at the Guangdong Museum of Art) and the Beijing Biennale (founded 2003 at the China Artists Association) — is the slow, institutional transition by which a state-owned-museum sculpture survey, organised across three years of cumulative editions in the late 1990s and early 2000s, became, after 2005, the programme of a new contemporary art terminal at the heart of a converted industrial creative zone. The OCT Contemporary Art Terminal opened in 2005 as the He Xiangning Art Museum's division for contemporary art, occupying a converted furniture warehouse in the Eastern Industrial Zone of the Overseas Chinese Town that the Shenzhen architecture practice URBANUS — founded in 1999 by Liu Xiaodu, Meng Yan and Wang Hui — had begun renovating in 2003 as the OCT-LOFT creative cultural park. OCAT was significant, the Biennial Foundation noted at the time of its founding, as the first professional contemporary art institution in China established in association with, and administered by, a state-owned art museum.
The argument the seventh and eighth editions made — through their titles, their structures and their curatorial teams — was that the constituting subject of contemporary art in China after the institutional consolidation of the 2000s was not the rehearsal of an art-historical system but the close documentation of individual artistic practice, and that the proper institutional form for that documentation was the medium-specific biennial: the Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, by holding to sculpture (rather than to a generic "contemporary art" rubric) as its constituting category, made the argument that medium discipline was the working condition rather than the limit of contemporary practice. The 2012 and 2014 editions are the most fully developed institutional statement of that argument.
