Tiong Ang’s project Models for (the) People employs the historical map of The People’s Square, the 1930s map where the building of the Shanghai Art Museum still functions as the clubhouse for the equestrian sporting club. In those days, the building was a specific location where entertainment created a clear awareness of a collective identity. That form of constructed identity, as Tiong Ang’s dialogic explorations show, seems to have been replaced in The People’s Square by today’s logic of mobility and the more fragmented experience of collectivity a karaoke bar creates. Such experience is characterized by repetition and difference based on an ongoing confrontation with various stereotypical systems of classification.

How do current global developments influence the level of local classification systems and constructions of identity? That issue is tackled by Kim Sang-gil’s research in general. His photographic images inform us about solidity and fixed identities. In the group portraits of the Off-line Series, Kim Sang-gil stresses how identities can be constructed in a one-dimensional way, whereas in his architectonic studies, one-dimensional functionality is at the core of the work. Both identity and functionality are categories trying to represent reality in a transparent manner. In order to deconstruct these categories, Kim Sang-gil uses in his Re-Model project the artistic strategy of remapping while picturing temporarily dysfunctional spaces around e.g. The People’s Square; spaces still lacking any distinct identity because of an actual mobility.

休伍丝为上海双年展带来了一件文字条幅，内容看上去很简单，就是要求艺术作品一定要有意义。出乎意料的是这件条幅是用法文写的，而不是用流行的英文。首先，这是对上海那一段沉淫法国影响的过去的暗示。再者，相对来说法文是大家比较陌生的语言，对观众产生了至关重要的瞬间：我不认识，我不懂。她的另一件作品更加剧了这种艺术效果：一架古老的、典型的法国空瓶烘干机的模型，这是杜尚在其装置作品中也用过的。但休伍丝把这一红色霓虹光闪烁、不知来处的物品放置在展厅中，像一艘外星人的宇宙飞船停驻到双年展，引起人们无尽的疑问。两件作品所强调的恰好都是那些我们被深深吸引的、那些由于文化差异而不能理解或是很难理解的实物和语言。

Bethan Huws’ native language is Welsh; her second language is English; she lives in Paris and Berlin. Against this backdrop, her early drawings, installations, objects, text works and films addressed the questions surrounding the place, origins and identity of people and places. Language as an indicator and locus for social communication and organisation is of central importance to Huws. During the course of her intense study of the presumptions and premises of modern art, Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), one of the founding fathers of radical modern art, became a key figure in her thinking. Not only does she have a surprising new take on his work, she has also produced formulations of her own with an explosive contemporary relevance. For the Biennial Huws has created a text for the exterior of the museum that suggests, with apparent simplicity, that works of art should have a meaning. Contrary to expectations this statement appears in French, not in the lingua franca, English. This is a gentle reminder of the French influence in Shanghai’s past. However, the relative foreignness of the language in this context also alludes to an archetypal moment of not-recognising, of not-knowing, that is heightened yet further in Huws’ second work in the Biennial. This is a recreation of an old-fashioned, typically French bottle-drier, of the kind that Duchamp himself used. But Huws presents it as a glowing red, neon object, of uncertain origin. Like a UFO, it has landed in the Biennial posing endless questions. Both of Huws’ works focus on the deep-seated fascination generated by things and words that we either partly understand or do not understand at all – due to cultural differences – but that could nevertheless have some meaning for us.

Ayşe Erkmen develops almost all her works from particular spatial or social situations, be these exhibition venues or their urban settings. Her choice of artistic means is specific to each project and ranges from the translocation of existing objects to wall texts to discrete interventions in a material or sociological situation. Sometimes she responds to the particular formal characteristics of a space and adds something to it that casts the situation in a new light. In other cases her point of departure is an analysis of the social structure or of a theme that influences the form her works take. Without exception her works have an air of lightness that never dominates a given situation but rather subtly complements it or undermines it.Her video for the Biennial arose from the simple fact that Erkmen did not have the time to travel to Shanghai and to develop a work in situ. So she turned her attention to the ever-increasing volume of news and images emanating from this city and addressed the biased speculations, clichés, dreams and desires that so many associate with Shanghai and its legendary dynamism. During an intercontinental flight she filmed a popular television programme from Shanghai being shown in the monitor in the back of the seat in front of her; she also included snippets of what was going on around her. This work is not least also about the transitory nature of the projections that the Shanghai phenomenon prompts.

Rainer Ganahl is an artist whose work addresses social, political, cultural and historical themes. Typically, over the years he has tried to teach himself all sorts of different languages and has recorded his efforts. It is almost like a globalisation experiment applied to one’s own person. Ganahl has exposed himself on a basic level to the omnipresent demands of intercultural exchange and has pursued successes and misunderstandings and absurdities alike. This type of effort directed towards learning and communication can simply be too much for an individual, whether driven by good will or sheer necessity; at the same time, however, it can be an important contributing factor to the flexibility required of modern human beings.On Ganahl’s cycle tours through different cities these excessive demands on the individual become physically visible in the shape of the risk incurred to life and limb. Even in the heaviest of traffic, he cycles freestyle against the flow of the traffic using his hands to film what is unfolding around him. His routes are determined by historical or current events that have a social or political significance for that place. However, in his video for Shanghai he deliberately avoided the already hackneyed sight of teeming, chaotic roads. Instead he rode across the Hangzhou Bay Bridge, not yet opened to traffic, and captured the intrinsically contradictory image of a sublimely romantic encounter between the individual and the landscape. However, the sense of freedom felt by the cyclist is simultaneously countered by a parallel video of a drive across the same bridge in a car.

Mapping The People’s Square is a process literally explored by Mariana Castillo Deball. Her research focuses primarily on the archive of historical geography, where classifying representation systems have always recorded in different ways how Shanghai’s urban landscape has become transformed in the 20th century.Departing from a number of historical topographic maps of The People’s Square, Deball developed an archeology of the future, a science fiction narrative based on a current technological method of source research (a methodology that can be understood in the light of Levi-Strauss’ entropology: a discipline dedicated to study the process of disintegration) and seemingly introducing a reversed awareness of historicity.

Zhang Weijie started his career as a documentary artist in the 1990s and has been recording changes in the lives of the Chinese people for over a decade from his humble and sincere perspective. His Ode to Joy records the annual peak ‘Spring Rush’ travel period in China, a large movement of people that attracts great attention across the world. During the Spring Festival every year, people across the nation would go back to their hometowns to celebrate this most important traditional holiday with their families, constituting a soul-touching picture of ‘Translocalmotion’ (kuaichengkuaike). Around 200 million home-bound migrant workers would swarm to train stations, bus stations and piers, carrying their color striped polypropylene woven bags and their hard earned money that they had saved throughout the year. They scurry furiously towards stations and ports, hoping to make the trip from their places of work (kuaicheng) to their hometowns as soon as humanly possible. The Spring Rush is a major event that is only possible in China at this special stage of its development. This event not only has a great visual impact, but also reflects the interaction between the sociological, demographic, economic and urban features of “Translocalmotion” (kuaichengkuaike) in contemporary China.