The theme of this year’s Biennale is ‘Surviving Images’ in a direct translation from Chinese and the English title given to it is ‘Techniques of the Visible’. Artists from all over the world presented their works that varied from the work created with cutting edge technologies to the work of Chinese traditional paper-cutting. The impression I had was that of the garden covered with a profusion of flowers. The work that impressed me most was the one created by an Israeli artist ,which was the visual images of ancient Jewish letters reflected on the surface of a slate. The letters themselves look like chromosomes or the movement of the reflected letters can make themselves look like a dancing shadow of an abstract image of a person.

I can tell you the very reason why this work gave me such a strong impression, though. Around five years ago when Israel was enjoying its short-lived peace, I took a trip there for about ten days. I visited a memorial park located in a suburb of Jerusalem during my stay. There are almost uncountable numbers of huge slates of 4 or 5 meters high placed like maze walls there. On the surface of each slate are the names of Jewish people who became the victims of the Holocaust during the Second World War. Each Jewish letter engraved on the slates represents the life of the people, who were terminated to live so irrationally in the madness of war. I felt as if a part of these slates had flown over thousands of kilometers to appear in this Biennale.

Well, it was the last day of the Biennale and Saturday, the exhibition space was crowded with young people and families of Shanghai. Everyone seemed to spend his or her holiday enjoying the contact with art works. But wait! Something is different. What is it? Oh, yes! Almost everyone there was taking pictures or video-recording the works there. Usually it’s a ground rule for museums that you must not take pictures there. Even the slightest hint of holding a camera invites a guard who gives you ‘No!’ signal. What’s going on here? Almost everyone, elbowing his or her way through the crowd freely takes pictures using flashes. I remembered there was a sign of ‘No Pictures’ at the entrance. And the guards were everywhere. Anyway hiding myself in the crowd, I took pictures , too, with a small sense of sin.

One of the other things that impressed me was that in the description about the artists of the works, the cities of their activities and not the countries from which they come were written. For example, the Israeli artist I mentioned above was introduced to be from Tel Aviv. Now in the world of art and design, cities of the artists’ or designers’ activity center have come to be more important than the countries they are from. You cannot choose the country you are born in but you can choose the city where you live and work.

We can firmly say that such metropolis as London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, NYC are competing with each other as a city beyond the concept of its country. I could feel the power and the determination of Shanghai that wants itself to be the center of Chinese culture. I felt such a power and the determination was pretty strong here.