State-Backed Biennials and Criticality in East and Southeast Asia

This paper discusses the criticality of state-backed contemporary art biennials in East and Southeast Asia. In the late-capitalist reality of relentless competition, and against the background of ideological government agenda’s, over the last decades it has become increasingly common for cities, regions and nations to fund perennial art events. As a result, in Asia and beyond, these events have now become formative for exhibition cultures. In Charles Green and Anthony Gardner’s (2016: 3) words, they are “the exhibitions that created contemporary art”. On first sight, state investment in biennials seems positive for art. It could be especially important in places where it supports under-funded art infrastructures. However, these opportunities might come at a price. If art is meant to create a positive image of cities, regions or nations, funders might want to increase control over its contents. Eventually, this might put at risk the critical potential of art as a means to support what Chantal Mouffe (2013) has called counter-hegemonic practices. Such a narrowing of the public sphere could be detrimental to the social role of contemporary art. However, it remains an open empirical question if this dystopian view is actually realised in practice. This paper engages with this question through an analysis of four state-backed biennials. Based on exhibition visits and interviews at the most recent iterations of the Singapore Biennale (2019), the Biennale Jogja in Indonesia (2019), the Asian Art Biennale in Taichung, Taiwan (2019), and theThailand Biennale (2018), we wonder which forms of criticality emerge; and we question if and how these translate into counter-hegemonic practices.