Yongwoo Lee

Professor, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University

Gong Yan

Born in Shanghai, Gong Yan graduated from Ecole Nationale Superieurdes Beaux-Art,Paris. She is a professor of Shanghai lnstitute of VisuaArt and the former Chief-Editor of Art World magazine. Since 2013Gong Yan has been the director of Power Station of Art.

Onsite Talk and Exhibition Visit

Launched in 1996, the Shanghai Biennale is not only the first international biennial ofcontemporary art on the Chinese mainland, but also one of the most influential in Asia. In 2012the Power Station of Art became the main organizer and permanent exhibition location ofthe Shanghai Biennale. The Biennale has always maintained Shanghai as its primary focus. ltupholds the mission of supporting academic and cultural innovation, while continuously trackingsocial changes and trends in knowledge production in a global context with an open viewGathering in Shanghai every two years, the Biennale has also become a large-scale platform forthe exhibition and discussion of contemporary art.

For as long as we have been able to look up, humans have been observing the sky, intuitinga relation between our lives on Earth and events beyond its atmosphere. The interpretationof stars and planets gave rise to our origin stories, religions, systems of time, navigation.agricultural planning, science, social order, and most other key aspects of the organizationof human life. Nonhuman forms of life are just as conditioned by its forces: no part of theterrestrial world can be separated from the effects of the sun, the moon, and the heavenlybodies. The 14th Shanghai Biennale will reflect on how artists have advanced our understandingof the relationship between life on earth and the cosmos that nourishes and conditions it. Thechief curator of the biennial, Anton Vidokle, has assembled an extraordinary artistic team towork on the realisation of this exhibition.

We have always looked to the night sky to make sense of ourselves, as we might look to ascreen onto which the past and the future is projected. Titled "Cosmos Cinema" the 14thShanghai Biennale will offer visitors a spacetime in which to reflect on the operations of theuniverse and our place within it. The Greek word from which "cosmos" derives connotes not onlythe universe but also beauty and harmony; the Chinese term yuzhou (宇) , connotes infinitetime and space, resonating strongly with the cinematic.