ICM NEW CONVERSATIONS SERIES
SPRING 2026
C.J. WAN-LING WEE (Professor of English, School of Humanities, Nanyang Technical Institute, Singapore)
"SHANGHAI SPIRIT": THE SHANGHAI BIENNALE 2000 AND THE TRANSNATIONAL POSTCOLONIAL
Wednesday, April 8, 2026
A.D. White House, Guerlac Room
4:45 P.M. —6:15 P.M.
ABSTRACT
The 1990s witnessed a dramatic increase in cultural expression—biennial-style art exhibitions, discourses on modern and contemporary art, and the circulation of debordered popular culture (such as J–pop)—that, in relation to expanded capitalist energies, performatively projected a fictive but shared contemporary regional identity of “East Asia” onto disjunctive spatial zones in Northeast and Southeast Asia. Such phenomena supported a broadly postcolonial questioning of Western metropolitan modernity’s dominance and enhanced the capacity for intra-regional dialogue in the bid to overcome the legacies of colonial-era and Cold War modernity. What transpires culturally in China after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, as its regional economic presence increases and as the state “sought to turn the tables on imperialism by exploiting the global economy in the service of national ends” (Arif Dirlik)? This presentation reflects upon China’s first major global art show, the Shanghai Biennale 2000, and on the (inevitable) contradictions that that transformative moment manifested, just before China joins the World Trade Organization in 2001. The presentation also considers curator Gao Shiming’s Long March Project: Ho Chi Minh Trail (2008–2010) as an alternative response to what can be called the “transnational-postcolonial” by seeking solidarity with the region, including Southeast Asia.
BIO
C. J. Wan-ling Wee is Professor of English at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has been a visiting fellow at, among other institutions, the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi and Cornell’s Society for the Humanities. Wee is the author of Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern and The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore. He recently completed A Regional Contemporary: Art Exhibitions, Popular Culture, Asia (MIT Press, 2025).
