Art What!: “Super Fusion 2021” Chengdu Biennale to Open on November 6, 2021

“Super Fusion 2021” Chengdu Biennale will take place from November 6th 2021 to April 6th 2022 at two new world-class museums in Chengdu’s Tianfu Art Park, the Chengdu Museum of Contemporary Art and Chengdu Tianfu Art Museum. 

Curated by Fan Di’an, Chairman of Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, the Biennale will present over 500 pieces from 272 top Chinese and international artists across eight themed exhibitions that fuse the local and the global, the traditional and the avant-garde, representing one of the largest and most ambitious modern art exhibitions of the post-COVID era. With famous art historian Lu Peng as director of the academic committee, the Biennale brings together well-known art specialists from all over the world to participate as members of the curatorial team, including Lu Peng, Jeffery Shaw, Fang Zhenning and Han Tao.

The Chengdu Museum of Contemporary Art and Chengdu Tianfu Art Museum – both of which will be open to the public for the first time — comprise over 70 thousand square meters of world class exhibition space.

“A biennale is one of the most influential forms of international art exhibition and is an opportunity to present the spirit of the city in which it is hosted,” said Mr. Fan Di’an. “As an international, cultural and academic event held on a large scale, it is an ideal platform for exchanging artistic ideas and displaying the latest achievements and innovations of art – both local and global. As one of the largest-scale, most academically minded art biennales of the post-COVID era, the 2021 Chengdu Biennale embodies the vitality of Chengdu’s cultural development and the fruits of its artistic labors.”

“The arrival of the Chengdu Tianfu Art Museum and Chengdu Museum of Contemporary Art as new fixtures in Chengdu’s cultural landscape provides a new opportunity to discuss the future of the art museums in a globalized era,” continued Mr. Fan. “The new museums feature complementary design characteristics and the Tianfu Art Park, in which both are situated, will soon become an important cultural hub in Chengdu. With the arrival of this Biennale, these two venues will formally open to the public.”

272 artists from China and overseas have been invited to attend from a total of 35 countries and regions, including such international figures as Anish Kapoor and Tony Cragg from the United Kingdom, Katharina Grosse from Germany, and Chinese artists Xu Bing, Zhang Xiaogang, Zeng Fanzhi, Song Dong and Cao Fei. The biennale will feature internationally renowned Chengdu artists like Zhou Chunya and He Duoling and present works by the new generation of young local artists.

The Chengdu Biennale will also feature seventeen parallel exhibitions bringing the spirit of the Biennale to artistic spaces across the city of Chengdu.

The Super Fusion 2021 Chengdu Biennale is being held under the guidance of the Chengdu Municipal Bureau of Culture, Broadcast-TV, and Tourism and is hosted by the Chengdu Art Academy (Chengdu Art Gallery) and co-hosted by Chengdu City Construction Investment Management Group.