Founded 2016 at the waa-designed MOCA Yinchuan, the Yinchuan Biennale was constituted as the contemporary art institution of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region — the Muslim-majority province at the bend of the Yellow River where the historic Silk Road met the Mongolian steppe and the Gobi Desert. Across its first two editions, the programme has made the Sino-Islamic and the desert-ecological its working subjects: a curatorial argument unusual within the Chinese contemporary biennial system, and one held inside the museum that is, by its own institutional self-description, the first contemporary art museum of north-west China.
The Yinchuan Biennale opened on 10 September 2016 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Yinchuan, a year and three weeks after the museum itself opened to the public in August 2015. The biennale's first edition, For an Image, Faster than Light, was curated by the Mumbai-based Indian artist and curator Bose Krishnamachari — co-founder of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and the inaugural artistic director of that institution's first edition in 2012 — and presented seventy-three artists from thirty-three countries across the museum's fifteen thousand square metres of exhibition space and into the surrounding ecological park. The curatorial argument was, in Krishnamachari's framing, an examination of spiritual and social consciousness inflected through the Sino-Islamic and pan-Asian geography in which the museum sits: the Yellow River bend that has, since the Tang dynasty, marked the institutional and ecological frontier between settled Chinese agriculture and the Mongolian-steppe and Central Asian routes of the historic Silk Road.
The second edition, Starting from the Desert: Ecologies on the Edge, opened on 9 June 2018 under the curatorship of the Italian critic and theorist Marco Scotini — then Head of the Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies Department at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (NABA) in Milan and Artistic Director of the FM Center for Contemporary Art — with a curatorial team of Andris Brinkmanis, Paolo Caffoni, Zasha Colah and Lu Xinghua. The exhibition presented more than ninety artists across thirty-seven newly commissioned works and extended out from the museum's fifteen thousand square metres into the surrounding Hui Nongqu Eco-Park and the International Artist Village of the River Origins. Scotini organised the programme into four thematic sections — Nomadic Space and Rural Space, Labor-in-Nature and Nature-in-Labor, The Voice and The Book, and Minorities and Multiplicity — and made the working argument that the desert, in both its physical and its theoretical Deleuze-and-Guattari nomadological reading, was the contemporary subject the Yinchuan institution had been constituted to programme. The edition closed on 19 September 2018.
The institutional argument
The Yinchuan institution is unusual within the Chinese contemporary biennial system in three structural respects. The first is geographic: Yinchuan, capital of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, is one of five autonomous regions of the People's Republic and the only Chinese province-level entity with a Hui Muslim majority of historical and continuing institutional standing. The second is ecological: the museum sits at the precise geographical inflection where the Yellow River, on its great northward bend, divides lush irrigated wetland from the southern reach of the Gobi Desert — a site that no other major Chinese contemporary institution occupies. The third is architectural: waa's MOCA Yinchuan building, with its facade of more than 1,600 unique glass-reinforced gypsum panels referencing both the rigid strata of the Helan Mountains and the curved erosional patterns of the Yellow River, is one of the most ambitious museum-architecture commissions of the Chinese 2010s, and a continuing point of architectural-press reference (Architectural Review, ArchDaily, Dezeen, Designboom).
The biennale was constituted under the artistic direction of Suchen Hsieh — the founding artistic director of MOCA Yinchuan from its 2015 opening — whose curatorial argument, decided upon in August 2014 in advance of the museum's launch, was that the institution would focus on Sino-Islamic art: the only museum in China to adopt that self-definition, and the framing decision that distinguishes the Yinchuan programme from the many private contemporary art museums of the Chinese coastal east. The institution operates under a public-private partnership BOT (build-operate-transfer) model in which the land is held by the Yinchuan municipal government and the non-profit institution is owned and operated by the Ningxia Minsheng Group, a regional property developer. The biennale, in turn, has been programmed against the wider state-policy context of the Belt and Road Initiative — the Chinese international infrastructure programme inaugurated in 2013, which derives its naming from the ancient Silk Road and which has positioned the Ningxia region as a designated cultural and logistical node of the western corridor.
