It is September 28, three days before the opening of the Shanghai Biennale, and the museum is definitely not ready for business. The Power Station of Art — Shanghai’s new contemporary art museum — is a hotbox of solvent fumes and dust. Sparks fly from welders soldering on the arms of Huang Yongping’s 20-meter-tall Boddhisattva sculpture (“Thousand-Armed Kuanyin,” 1997-2012). Meanwhile, workers carrying 5-meter-long bamboo poles dodge giant copper fragments of the statue of liberty (Danh Vo’s “We the People”).

Artist Chico MacMurtrie was donning an industrial gas mask in the early days of the installation and trying his best to prevent his robotic Transformers-like car sculpture (“Totemobile 2006) from being coated in dust from the wheel of a nearby skillsaw. Earlier, he told us, workers had damaged his work when, while cleaning the vertical concrete columns in the museum, a huge chunk of concrete fell and dented the roof of his car sculpture.

A state of such extreme chaos is nothing new to the Shanghai Biennale, but the scope of this year’s ambitions combined with the requirement that the biennale be held in a new and at the time unfinished space took the absurdity to a whole new level.

“The Shanghai Biennale is always finished at the very last minute,” says Li Xu, the Deputy Director of Planning at the Power Station of Art, “We had lots of problems because the building was not clean. It was so dusty some artists were unwilling to open their crates. Every year there are lots of difficulties — in fact, all biennales are in a state of chaos in the days leading up to the opening. It’s not like a solo show where everything is planned well in advance.”

The normal eleventh-hour state of affairs was compounded by the move to a new location, the PSA, which was formerly a “dirty coal plant” closed in 2007. It later became the Urban Best Practices pavilion during the 2010 Shanghai World Expo and was recently renovated into a bright, somewhat Pompidou-like space, with a high-ceilinged atrium, escalators and some original architectural features such as the smokestack and a crane mounted overhead.

The space was originally supposed to be finished by September 1, but according to the chief curator Qiu Zhjijie, it was only handed over to the team on September 21 to begin installing, with renovations continuing throughout the installation process. Huang’s “Thousand-Armed Kuanyin” (1997-2012), for instance, was installed over the space of several days. When we arrived on Sep 27, only a quarter of the arms were attached, but as quickly as the next afternoon about 80% of them were finished — as though a PLA-sized army of welders had been brought in overnight.

There was a scrum at the gate where artists and curators who were participating or involved in the project could not gain entry to the opening; meanwhile, hoards of students and senior citizens who had likely been given free tickets by their government work units streamed through the gate. Opening times for various events were changed and blurry site maps were few and far between. Post-opening visits are equally trying as guests are required first to book tickets online (through a Chinese-only website; link here), then pick them up at separate locations around the city before heading to the museum itself. It’s a plan so irrational that it could be construed as a deliberate attempt to thwart enthusiasm for contemporary art.

Over at the city pavilions, security was not as tight, but again the installation was poor and the building was in a very rough condition. The space which formerly housed such landmarks as the East Sea Coffee house and the German Grand Hotel — a hotspot for celebrities and dignitaries at the turn of the century — had been recently disemboweled and presented a patchwork of different floor and wall coverings, jagged openings, tiles and cement, criss-crossed with dark, dank staircases. In defense of his space, Qiu Zhijie mentioned the Venice Biennale and the Istanbul Biennale’s use of old warehouses, but this space was lacking the basic amenities of an art space — proper lighting, for example. One ground-floor space didn’t even have a glass door, but rather a metal gate which exposed art works to the elements.

Granted, the budget for the city pavilions wasn’t huge. 150,000 RMB (approx. 24077 USD) per pavilion had to cover everything from freight to flights to production budgets. More savvy teams found their own sponsorship and had people on the ground to fight for precious resources. Those who were less organized showed up during the week of installation and complained loudly about the space and the lack of support from the biennale team.

Online and offline the biennale was widely criticized for its lack of organization, Mian Mian, an author of racy, chick-lit novels (and very briefly the director of Bund 18 Gallery) being one of the most vocal critics, calling the biennale “a gigantic loss of face” on Weibo (China’s twitter equivalent).[1] Curators complained of having been  put up in the budget chain of Hanting Hotels with no English speaking staff, but Qiu Zhijie retorted in an informal press conference that he had bigger priorities:

“We are artists, not collectors. We don’t need to stay in five-star hotels. I want to spend the money on buying better lights. I don’t like to be criticized for this. And in this area you look around and what do you find? There are no hotels, just motels, so they had to stay at the Hanting.”

Qiu himself claimed a number of hardships; for instance, the Biennale Office asked him to share a room with co-curator Jens Hoffman while visiting this year’s ARTHK. He also claimed to have paid many of the Biennale’s expenses out of his own pocket due to the byzantine financial processes of the museum, which was not expedient enough to deal with the deadlines of the project. [2]

Though rumors were circulating that the biennale received over 50 million in funds, Qiu confirmed that it was in fact only 18 million, which was reduced to 16 million because of the costs of dismantling.[3]

“Even though the total amount of money given by the government was four or five times that of previous biennales, costs have drastically risen,” said Qiu at a Biennale press conference.

“Before, the Shanghai Art Museum’s exhibition area was 4,500 sq meters; now the exhibition area is 15,000 sq meters.  This means that work volume has more than doubled. In addition, because the exhibition period has been extended from two to six months, this means that whereas in the past we could rent projectors, now must buy them. When you use a projector for six months, the bulbs burn out.”

He compared this budget to the 2011 Chengdu Biennale which received 36 million RMB in funds for a show which was rumored to be both poorly organized and badly installed, or the Gwangju Biennale, which has a budget of over 56 million RMB and an endowment fund of 182 million RMB.[4] He also cited the Singapore Biennale (30 million RMB) and Yokohama Triennale (81 million) as examples of wealthier biennales.

Another hitch that impeded the organization of this year’s biennale was the 18th Party Congress, which made leaders hesitant about rubber-stamping initiatives because they didn’t know if the new leadership would approve of their decisions. This meant that many works had to be shipped by air rather than by sea, eating up precious funds.

In a sense, one has to feel sorry for Qiu Zhijie, who came to the job with grand ambitions, put together a very sophisticated set of themes and had very little institutional support; yet at the same time, he should have known the limits of his funds, his team and his space and scaled back the project accordingly. Perhaps what this shows us is that a biennale which is still wedged within the official system in China will always be plagued by these problems, as long as it is under the umbrella of the Power Station of Art or a government-funded museum. Perhaps a truly indepentently run biennale with decent financing would have a better shot at organizational success.