Before it won me over, Shubigi Rao’s exhibition at Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum, titled “These Petrified Paths,” gave me pause. Rao’s installations and videos concern the Armenian genocide as well as earthly extraction and the destruction of books—and the parallels she draws between them left me skeptical. She says the works, made between 2003 and 2023, are meant to show “how the normality of our daily lives relies on violence.”
I care deeply about the nonhuman world, yet I hesitated at Rao’s suggestion that oil extraction, banned books, and ethnic cleansing belong together under the umbrella of “violence.” In a talk at the opening of her show, however, Rao convincingly insisted that the parallels are by no means metaphorical and, rather, relate to tragedies that are deeply intertwined. Armenian people, the artist said, “have only rocks and dust.” Then she pointed out how Euro-American countries offer aid to peoples rich with oil but seem less concerned with the plight of those without. Attesting to the entanglement of electric and geopolitical power, a 40-foot sculpture of an energy pylon shoots up the central cavity of the museum, as if extracting energy while it stands tall to transmit stories.
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Rao, who represented Singapore in the 2022 Venice Biennale, has long devoted her practice to narratives both censored and untold, deftly weaving together seemingly disparate topics. The Rockbund commissioned a new feature-length film, These Petrified Paths, that centers on the preservation of manuscripts by forgotten Armenian feminist writers, as well as on the work of women librarians preserving those texts. The film advocates preserving Armenian culture alongside Armenian life. Surrounding the projection screen is a sinuous vitrine in which a black, oil-like liquid flows. Elsewhere, on the wall, a provocative footnote ties it all together by asking a question I’ve been chewing on ever since: “What is more short-sighted and fleeting than fossil-fuel reliance, and what has proved more enduring and persistent than the power of story and retelling?”
I was thinking of that footnote—which is really a sort of thesis—as I visited the Shanghai Biennial. There, I read a quote by one of the artists involved, a Filipino filmmaker named Kidlat Tahimik, who, in wall text next to his cinematic installation, states that “colonizers subjugate indigenous people by first destroying their mythologies,” then adds that “we become the stories we consume.” The Shanghai Biennial—like Rao’s exhibition, and other shows that opened as part of Shanghai’s art week in November—offers a chance to think about how we narrate the world around us through both art and science.
This year’s edition, titled “Cosmos Cinema,” concerns the enduring human impulse to explore outer space, literally and metaphorically. Curated by Russian American e-flux founder Anton Vidokle, the giant yet focused exhibition is born of ideas put forth by the Russian Cosmism movement spearheaded by philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, who wrote in 1851 that science, philosophy, art, and social organization were all “equal partners in the common task” of the project of humanity. Artists and scientists alike have long looked to the stars to ask who we are and where we come from. (Carl Sagan memorably described this impulse as “life looks for life.”)
The most compelling works make plain how scientific facts are often narrated from specific points of view. Black Liberation Zodiac (2017–) by Johannesburg-based artist Nolan Oswald Dennis looks to the stars from the perspective of the Southern Hemisphere, where constellations appear different than they do in the North. On intricate astral maps papering the walls of a room, Dennis charts new Zodiac signs, mapping the stars not according to the familiar Eurasian myths but borrowing from the symbology (a panther, a fist) of Black liberation. Our understanding of the universe, Dennis shows, is not universal. Instead, it is a matter of perspective. It’s a reminder to think critically about where ideas come from, and to consider whom certain stories serve.
Sometimes when artists play scientist or ask us to question established truths, I get nervous about how they might play into our culture’s already eroding faith in facts. One such work that made me wonder was by Los Angeles– and Shanghai-based artist Alice Wang, who has on view a grid of glass tiles that form a starry sky as if in 8-bit. The label describes her medium as “leftover radiation from the Big Bang,” casting what is commonly referred to as a theory (that, billions of years ago, a giant explosion suddenly created the entire universe) as certifiable fact—and in an authorless, authoritative, institutional voice.
While art doesn’t always have to be factual, artists should fabulate with caution, as the danger in doing so can’t be overstated. Powerful narratives, as Rao and Tahimik remind us, get ingested whether or not they are true. Fact and fiction both impact the way we understand the world, and that understanding then spills back out. There is no better evidence of this than the Big Bang Theory itself—which originated not in the work of scientists but in that of the great storyteller Edgar Allen Poe, whose 1848 poem “Eureka” sketched out the idea 80 years before scientists started considering the physics behind how it might have worked. His powerful narrative took hold long before we had anything that might constitute evidence.
Truth and metaphor, or science and art, meet to different effect in Wang’s and Dennis’s hands. Both artists hew to the middle of the spectrum of factuality organizing art-science projects (though Dennis plays with order and reason for purposes that seem clear and useful). At one extreme of this spectrum, there are illustrative factual works that just look like exhibits at a science museum. These are typically harmless and well-intended—usually driven by that sense of the sublime that can come from learning something new about how the world works—but they are also often boring and didactic. One such work in the Biennial is an installation by Dutch artist Jonas Staal, who created a matrix of lightboxes displaying pictures of various creatures that were sent into space—a guinea pig, an insect, a dog. The boxes are marked with the creatures’ names, along with details concerning when and how they went up—and whether or not they survived the extreme conditions. It’s interesting information, but Staal didn’t do much to transform or make meaning from it, save for slapping on a slogan: exo-ecologies unite.
At the other end of the spectrum, artists might engage science but make work that is obviously absurdist. My favorite such spin in “Cosmos Cinema” is Shuang Li’s ÆTHER (Poor Objects), a frenetic nonnarrative video from 2021 in which shots of an eclipse are intercut with scenes showing a preening online influencer using a ring light. It’s a celestial phenomenon reduced to a domestic scale, wherein the sublime experience of the expansive universe gets flipped into simple narcissism.
Buttressing all this heady art were two bustling fairs brimming with abstract paintings. At West Bund, you got more established, international galleries, whereas the energy at Art 021 was younger and more local. At first, I felt relieved that maybe the figurative painting craze might finally take a breather, but it quickly became clear that most of the abstractions were pretty forgettable. Exceptions included some trippy textural works by Jiang Miao and disorienting assemblages by Wang Xin, as well as Zhong Wei’s canvases, with splatters so cartoony that they caricatured the grand emotion associated with Abstract Expressionism.
Maybe the move toward abstraction was born of figuration fatigue, but I also wondered whether it might simply be easier to get by the censors in China, where everything in fairs and exhibitions must be submitted for approval before it can be shown. Artists and exhibitors made it sound as if a lot of guesswork went into what did and didn’t get accepted, but everyone I talked to either had been censored or knew someone who was. Some artists spent years on projects they didn’t think were controversial, only to learn they couldn’t show the results. One artist had videos censored several times, and told me that if it happened once more, they feared they’d wind up on a kind of blacklist. So, they stopped making videos altogether and switched to sculpture. Because of this, many young people—based on my brief visit and supported by conversations while there—seem to have developed an aversion to the black-and-white herd mentality and moralist thinking so common in the United States, since that is the attitude of their own reactionary government.
As China rapidly urbanizes, much of the younger generation of Chinese artists and curators who were educated abroad are now coming back to lead the country’s booming art scene. Shanghai has far more museums, galleries, and art malls than I could see on my 144-hour visa. But punctuating all this growth, glamour, and globalization, one more art-science installation makes a quiet but powerful urban intervention. In the courtyard of the Rockbund, a collection of British colonial buildings that David Chipperfield recently converted into a luxury complex, sit potted plants arranged by Hong Kong–based artist Zheng Bo. They are species native to the region and under threat, many having been weeded out or replaced by construction. This has rippling effects, since they are the species most friendly to the bugs and birds in the local ecosystem. They are also a symbol—clearly, yet oh so subtly—for the effects of globalization on Shanghai: a quiet protest that questions which traditions, and which beings, will be given a chance to thrive.