Team of LIU Ding and Carol Yinghua LU Chosen as Artistic Director of Yokohama Triennale 2023

Yokohama Triennale 2023 Artistic Director. Right: LIU Ding. Left: Carol Yinghua LU. Courtesy of the Organizing Committee for Yokohama Triennale.

Yokohama Triennale 2023
December 9, 2023 – March 10, 2024
https://www.yokohamatriennale.jp

The Organizing Committee for Yokohama Triennale (Chairperson: Kondo Seiichi [Chairperson, Yokohama Arts Foundation]) has appointed the team of Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu as artistic director of Yokohama Triennale 2023, the 8th edition of the tri-annual event.

The Triennale will be the first major event held at Yokohama Museum of Art after extensive renovations are completed. The event’s second venue will be PLOT 48. This edition of the Triennale will be the first to be held in winter.

Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu are an artist and art historian respectively who started joint curatorial work in 2007. Based in Beijing, they have participated in international exhibitions around the world including the Venice, Gwangju, Istanbul and Busan biennales.

In a time of historical flux, their curation seeks out kernels of wisdom for surviving the present in both the minutiae of individual endeavor and the grand turning points of history. Their frame of reference transcends time and place, as they seek ideas in everything from traditional oriental philosophy to the globalized lifestyles of the 21st century.

The Yokohama Triennale welcomed its first non-Japanese artistic director for its 7th edition in 2020. Since then the ongoing challenges of COVID-19 and war have shown us just how inextricably interconnected our world has become. For the 8th edition, we once again welcome as artistic director a team that is active on the global stage, and with them we look forward to creating an event that is open to the world and that takes advantage of our port city’s role as a crossroads of people and culture.

About the Artistic Director

LIU Ding
Liu Ding is an artist and a curator. Born 1976 in Changzhou City, Jiangsu Province and now based in Beijing. He creates artworks using text, photography, installation, painting, performance and other media based on his research into the interplay between art, culture, and politics in modern and contemporary Chinese history. His recent solo exhibition includes “Reef: A prequel,” Bonnefanten, Maastricht (2015). He’s participated in biennales including Busan Biennale (2018), Yinchuan Biennale (2018), Istanbul Biennial (2015), Asia Pacific Triennial (2015), Prospect 3 New Orleans (2014), Shanghai Biennale (2014), Taipei Biennial (2012), Chinese Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennial (2009), Media City Seoul (2008) and Guangzhou Triennale (2005). He’s participated in major group shows including “Discordant Harmony,” Art Sonje Center, Seoul / Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art / Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei (2015-16); “By Artists: From the Home to the Museum, from the Museum to the Home. Homages to the Works of the Cerruti Collection,” Castello di Rivoli (2019) and “Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War,” HKW Berlin (2018). In 2015, he joined Tate’s online festival “BMW Performance Room” in London.

Carol Yinghua LU
Carol Yinghua Lu is an art historian and a curator. Born 1977 in Chaozhou City, Guangdong Province and now based in Beijing. She is Director of Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum, where she’s recently curated “Wang Youshen: Codes of Culture” (2022). She was Artistic Director and Chief Curator of OCAT, Shenzhen (2012-2015) and Co-Artistic Director of Gwangju Biennale (2012). She was a contributing editor for frieze magazine (2008-2018), a recipient of ARIAH East Asia Fellowship (2017) and visiting fellow in Asia-Pacific Fellowship Program at Tate Research Centre (2013). She has acted as a jury member for many art prizes, such as Tokyo Contemporary Art Award (2019-2022), Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative (2019), Hugo Boss Asia (2019), International Award for Art Criticism (2014), Future Generation Art Prize (2012), and Golden Lion Award at Venice Biennale (2011).

Joint Curatorial Activities
Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu commenced their joint curatorial activities in Beijing in 2007. Their recent co-curated exhibitions at art institutions across China, such as Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum, Art Museum of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, and Beijing 798 Creative, include, “Notes: Chinese Artistic and Intellectual Voices from the End of the Twentieth Century,” (2022); “Waves and Echoes: Postmodernism and the Global 1980s,” (2021); “Waves and Echoes: A Process of Re-contemporarization in Chinese Art Circa 1987 Revisited,” (2020), “Factories, Machines and the Poetʼs Words: Echoes of the Realities in Art,” (2019), “Salon Salon: Fine Art Practices from 1972 to 1982 in Profile – A Beijing Perspective,” (2017) toured to Art Museum of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, Guangzhou (2020). Other co-curated exhibitions include, Trans-Southeast Asia Triennial: “Sounds as Silence: The Academic Value of Life,” Guangzhou (2021), Anren Biennale: “Crossroads,” Anren (2017), Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale: “Accidental Message: Art Is Not A System, Not A World,” Shenzhen (2012), “Little Movements: Self-practice in Contemporary Art,” OCAT, Shenzhen, MUSEION, Bolzano and Asia Culture Center, Gwangju (2011-2015).

On the selection of the artistic director

ASADA Akira (Chair, 8th Yokohama Triennale Artistic Director Selection Committee)

For the selection of the artistic director of the 8th Yokohama Triennale, three candidates were short-listed for remote interviews based on a review of submitted documents. As a result of those interviews, the team of Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu was selected. Following on from Raqs Media Collective’s appointment for the 7th Yokohama Triennale, we once again have chosen for our artistic director a foreign team combining members of both sexes. It is also worth noting that the selection committee itself consisted of three women and two men, and, for the first time ever, two of those members were not of Japanese nationality (one each hailed from Lyon and Istanbul, both port cities like Yokohama). Deliberations took place over two highly productive sessions that, due to the pandemic, were held remotely with participants dialing in from all over the globe. At the same time, I would like to emphasize that our selection of a woman—and of people from other Asian countries besides Japan—was in no way lip service to “political correctness,” but instead was the direct result of the committee judging each candidate on the basis of their vision and ability to execute a triennale that will have both artistic and social significance.

With all of our shortlisted candidates being active on the front lines of the art world, our interview round was of a very high standard. Still, the committee believed that Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu’s proposal was particularly suitable for an art festival in Yokohama, a city that is open to the rest of Asia. Rather than repeating the fashionable themes often seen at international art festivals, it takes Lu Xun’s prose poetry collection Wild Grass, which is well known in Japan, as a starting point for a journey that goes deep and broadly into the imagination. The artist/curator duo already has experience in making and exhibiting art and organizing art festivals in various parts of the world, including Japan, and we are confident they will respond flexibly in order to realize their project. As we enter the post-corona era and rediscover the possibilities for face-to-face and other forms of communication, we are confident a fascinating triennale will come to life as an embodiment of their poetic vision. These are the reasons why the selection committee chose Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu. Nicolas Bourriaud has proposed “the radicant” (a plant that roots from its stems, like ivy) as a paradigm for a globalized art world. To rephrase in Bourriaud’s terms what we noted in the 7th Yokohama Triennale Artistic Director Selection Report, we hope that the adventure of the imagination starting from Wild Grass will spread like the ivy that covers redbrick buildings, putting down roots in the gaps it finds here and there, and ultimately manifesting as a truly international art festival that transcends superficial globalism.