What is “landscape”? Is it scenery, terrain features, culture of a place? Or is it about political situations, industries and ethnic structure? What kind of approach should we take to better handle the connection between certain landscapes and our daily life if we construe the concept of “landscape”, based on concrete reality, as the fostering of a relationship between residents and a place or the generation of “cultural landscapes”?

So the theme of the 5th Shenzhen Biennale of Contemporary Art employs the interpretation of “landscape” as the “main axis” of our analysis of the relationship between us and the surroundings, and, with “poetic wisdom” as the “energy” haunting around, the exhibition attempts first to answer a seemingly more essential question: how can we position ourselves in complex landscapes, and how will we behave?

This biennale edition has invited local artists who focus on the environmental or historical context of Shenzhen, and art practitioners from the Pearl River Delta region and other different areas of China. With the extensibility of mediums and metaphors, their exhibits manage to “position” or “recognize” natural and social landscapes. The agency of practitioners is liberated in their collaboration or interaction with the surface of the earth, and their feelings or imagination underlying visual forms are gradually revealed through the transformation of the “substances”.

From the “poetic” perspective, as poetry embodies the free mind and independent personality of man, art practitioners work humanistic will and vitality into different objects – as a result, the poetic spirit is noticed… Moreover, as one of aesthetic features, “poetry” also leads us into thinking: how does the aesthetic practice of contemporary art depict and remodel the object(s)?

In the macroscopic narrative about “landscape and imagination”, “reality and poetry”, the “gravitational field” reflects the dynamic relationship between different individuals and landscapes. Meanwhile, the relationship between man and the object(s) is gradually clear, and in this process, the approaches to perceiving the object(s) are being explored and adjusted repeatedly. More importantly, the “landscape” in the field is the “outcome” of interaction or harmonization of different relationships, and, as “part of the game”, we should reflect on the generation and modeling of the landscape based on our daily life, participate in its re-modeling, and eventually, consciously construct the form of the landscape around.


Duration: Nov. 18, 2023- Dec. 14, 2023
Venue: Hall 2/3/4, 2nd Floor, Dafen Art Museum, Longgang District, Shenzhen
Funded project of Shenzhen Cultural Development Promotion Funds
Coordinators: Yang Xiaoyang, Hao Qiang, Chen Xiangbing
Curator: Yang Yong
Executive Team: Shangqi Art
Sponsor: Shenzhen Federation of Literary and Art Circles
Organizers: Shenzhen Artists Association / Shenzhen Public Culture and Art Creation Center (Shenzhen Fine Art Institute) / Dafen Art Museum / Shangqi Art
Acknowledgements：1979 Gallery / Enclave Contemporary / ArtBay / Gallery daSein / Arbre Art Centre / MadeIn Gallery