Yokohama Triennale
- Dates: 15.03 - 09.06
- Title: Wild Grass: Our Lives
- Artistic Director: Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu
- Admission is free for CIMAM Members
Taking place in Yokohama, the second largest city in Japan, the 8th edition of the Yokohama Triennale brings together artists/groups and their works spanning 100 years under the title “Wild Grass: Our Lives.”
The Artistic Directors, Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu, started conceptualizing the theme with the Chinese writer Lu Xun’s anthology Wild Grass, penned from 1924 to 1926, during a turbulent period in Chinese history. In 20th-century China, Lu Xun was a singularly solitary individual who constantly rebelled against existing situations and simultaneously a thinker who stayed attentive to the movements of the world, contemplating the fate of individuals and humanity within them. In Wild Grass, Lu Xun affirmed his conviction to confront desperation and to find a way out of complete darkness. The exhibition theme “Wild Grass: Our Live”s aspires to Lu Xun’s philosophy of the universe. It signifies a way of life that elevates the unquenchable force of individuals to a respectable existence that transcends all systems, rules, regulations, and forms of control and power. It is a model for flexible expression of individual subjectivity.
The Triennale, consisting of seven thematic chapters, features 93 artists/groups from 31 countries/regions, with 20 new commissions. The exhibition makes visible the correlation between art and reality and the importance of ongoing and critical engagements with life and society for artistic practitioners. Overall, it is a timely response to the current art world where the intellectual capacity and the political agency of art are at risk as a consequence of the prevailing capitalization of art and the logic of the art industry.