Culture

Five flavors to savor in Venice

By Wang Chao (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-03-21 08:03

The white clouds outside the China Pavilion. Photos provided to China Daily

On the green lawn, big white clouds made of stainless steel drift in the wind, emitting the faint smell of tea; in the brick building artificial snowflakes melt on fragrant lotus leaves. At the 54th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, the China Pavilion will not only be dreamy, it will also be aromatic.

Started in 1895, the Venice Biennale art exhibition has become one of the most important stages for contemporary artists from all over the world. Known as the carnival of artists, it is one of the three most important international art shows in the world - the other two being Kassel Documenta in Germany and the Bienal Internacional de Sao Paulo in Brazil.

China debuted at the Venice Biennale in 2005 and has participated ever since.

Peng Feng, professor of aesthetics at Peking University, is the curator of the China Pavilion of the La Biennale di Venezia. In May, he will bring the artists to create the installations in Venice, two weeks before the exhibition opens. The Biennale lasts until Nov 27.

This year the China Pavilion will be a fuel storage facility and the lawn in front of it in the Arsenale area of the city. The artists have had to be highly imaginative to make the best use of the space assigned.

Unified under the theme of the "Pervasion of Chinese Flavors", these installations make a sensuous world, he said.

While most of the Western exhibitors have chosen to use light to explore the theme of "ILLUMInations" - a play on the words illumination and nations - Peng took the approach of smells, which he said are "unique and more pervasive".

Peng has chosen to focus on five elements, wine, medicine, lotus, tea and incense, which are traditional icons of China.

"Five flavors is one aspect of the five elements which was taken to explain the origin of all things in the world by ancient Chinese philosophers. Five flavors means both the basic flavors and all flavors and implies, metaphorically, the reconciliation of the universeand diversity," Peng said.

"Beauty is usually defined by light in Western aesthetics. But Chinese aesthetics finds a closer relation between beauty and flavor, as well as smells," he added.

The five chosen artists are aged between 30 and 60 years old and specialize in different media, such as brush and ink, oils, sculpture, and installations.

"It shows the great diversity of contemporary art in China," Peng said.

One of the five installations, All Matters Are Visible, created by Yang Maoyuan, shows thousands of medicine pots of all sizes on the ground, with nothing contained in the pots except for the smells of medicinal herbs.

Traditional Chinese medical prescriptions will be carved on the interior of the pot and its outside will be decorated with traditional designs.

"According to the theory of traditional Chinese medicine, all things are visible, be it the acupuncture points, meridians or collaterals; but they do not exist at all to modern science," Yang explained. Visitors will get one small pot as a gift.

The various scents are also a ploy to attract more visitors to the China Pavilion. Since the venue is isolated from other exhibitions, Peng said he hopes the clouds on the lawn and the smells will lure visitors into the China Pavilion.

"Everything delightful to the five senses can be beautiful," Peng said. "The most beautiful thing is properly a spiritual experience. Beauty in Chinese tradition never reaches a totally abstract and transcendent area; beauty is not an ideal in platonic sense, it is never separated from its root, the senses, the body consciousness."

That will be immediately apparent to visitors entering the China Pavilion as they walk through the installation Snow Melting in Lotus, created by Pan Gongkai, as the temperature will be controlled at 10 C, creating a welcoming retreat for tired and hot visitors walking in the summer Venice sun.

"I hope Chinese artists will stop following their Western counterparts, and use Chinese philosophy in their artworks," Peng said. "Hopefully, I can change the artists' focus from the conceptual to body consciousness."