Suzhou Documents

The summer of 2016 will see the inauguration of Suzhou Documents, a large-scale exhibition of contemporary art to be held at several venues within the city of Suzhou, and centred at the Suzhou Art Museum.

Jointly curated by Zhang Qing (Founding Director of the Shanghai Biennial, currently Curatorial Head of the National Palace Museum in Beijing) and Roger M. Buergel (Artistic Director of documenta 12 (2007) and current Director of the Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich), Suzhou Documents features 40 international artists and researchers over a period of two months.

The aim of Suzhou Documents is to both access China’s artistic legacy and to comprehend its environmental and technological challenges through the prism of the ancient city of Suzhou. Located in the Jiangsu province some 80 kilometres from Shanghai, Suzhou is part of China’s most densely populated area.

As a starting point for the Silk Road that once connected China with Persia, India and Europe, Suzhou flourished as the undisputed cultural capital of the Ming Dynasty (1400–1700). A harbour city on the Yangtze River, Suzhou saw off the fleet of Zhang He, a Chinese Muslim admiral whose early-15th century maritime expeditions brought Imperial China in contact with India and coastal East Africa (present-day Yemen and Sudan).

Suzhou Documents will address Suzhou as a centuries-old but also futurist global hub, exploring through artistic and other speculative means a largely unwritten history of trans-cultural encounters between East and West in all their vagaries, conflicting timelines and unforeseeable beauties.

After the first edition in the summer of 2016, Suzhou Documents will be developed into a series of exhibitions (or an institution in its own right) destined to move beyond the largely exhausted biennale-type exhibition model with its bouquet of arbitrary themes and emphasis on spectacle.

Instead, Suzhou Documents looks to Cultural Objects from Wuzhong—a highly popular exhibition from 1937 (shortly before the Japanese invasion) that displayed the intellectual and material resources of Suzhou’s luminaries in a conceptual manner.

For further inquiries, and press contact:
Eduardo Simantob (Johann Jacobs Museum, Zurich)
media [​at​] johannjacobs.com / T +41 79 318 2376

Jiang Ding (Suzhou Art Museum)
sz_artmuseum [​at​] 163.com / T +86 512 82280903, 138 6214 9027