ANG Maoyuan，All Things Are Visible，2011

Summer is coming , and that means the publicity blitz for the year's biggest art event — the 54th Venice Biennale, set for June 4 to November 27 — is getting set in earnest.There are so many countries have announced details about their pavilion.Now here's the details for chinese pavilion.

With the title "Pervasion ",chinese pavilion will present five artists.As we know beauty is usually defined by light in western aesthetics. But Chinese aestheticians find closer relation between beauty and flavor. Beauty in Chinese literally means the big and fat sheep and, indirectly, the tasty mutton. The illumination of light in western tradition can be understood as the pervasion of flavor in the Chinese.

Five Flavors is one aspect of the Five Elements which was taken to explain the origin of all things in the world by ancient Chinese philosophers. Five Flavors means both the basic flavors and all flavors and implies, metaphorically, the reconciliation of university and diversity.

Five artists, CAI Zhisong, LIANG Yuanwei, PAN Gongkai, YANG Maoyuan, and YUAN Gong, take the flavor or smell of tea, liquor, lotus flower, herb medicine, and incense as the subject of their works respectively.

In the virgin garden, visitor can see the installation Cloud-Tea created by CAI Zhisong. Visitor can smell the flavor of tea in the floating clouds, and especially imagine the tea through the white color and light form of the clouds. Tea makes people waked and enlightened and so many Buddhist monks drink tea to keep a pure, fresh, and light mood. As CAI notes, “My aim is to create a dreamy, Chan-Buddhist atmosphere at the entrance to the Chinese pavilion.” As visitor get into the cistern, he or she can smell the flavor of Chinese liquor. In her installation I Plea: Rain, LIANG Yuanwei successfully manifests the flavor, the color, the fluidity, and the mystery of Chinese liquor. “The liquor as rain,” LIANG says, “can wash the soul.” When visitor reaches the main aisle of the cistern, he or she can see the installation Snow Melting into the Lotus created by PAN Gongkai. PAN is both ink-water painter and conceptual artist. He has been experiencing the contradictions between the traditional and the contemporary, the Chinese and the western. According to PAN’s interpretation, actually the both can co-exist and be “harmonious in difference.” When visitor go through the installation, he or she can experience the pleasantly cool and the smell of lotus. On the ground of the cistern, visitor can see thousands of medicine pots. They belong to the installation All Things Are Visible created by YANG Maoyuan. Nothing will be contained in the pots in addition to the smells of herb medicine. This installation can explain the theory of traditional Chinese medicine and its current situation. “According to the theory of traditional Chinese medicine, all things are visible including the acupuncture points, meridians and collaterals which do not exist at all to modern science,” YANG says, “however, the theory which makes all things visible is invisible to our common sense today.” Visitors can get, by chance, one small pot as a gift. What pervade in the space is the installation Empty Incense created by YUAN Gong. Visitor can watch the incense fog and listen to the music through MP4 and IPAD, but the incense component of the artwork is hidden to them. YUAN says, “I hope this installation can catch the Chan-Buddhist soul.”

The works based on the five flavors or smells as a whole can make a fantastic sensuous world. All five senses can be excited and affected and so a special feeling, emotion and mood can be uplifted in the visitors. The Chinese flavors or smells pervaded in the ethereal Venice, (which are almost the same with what Marco Polo, the citizen of Venice, brought home from China eight hundred years ago.) I hope, can create an intense experience lingering in the visitors, melt the national boundary, and make them closer to the remote Chinese culture.
 

（中文版）