Feature: Int'l visitors eye China's past-rooted future at Venice Biennale

For many international citizens who know China just as a world economic power, visiting the China Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia, or Venice international art exhibition, was an occasion to explore the soul of present and future China rooted in rural civilization.

Fragments of personal histories of farmers and migrant workers who are contributing to build the future of their home country on past knowledge and tradition is what has caught the eye of many art experts as well as common visitors.

Jacques Caton is a member of board of directors of the institut d'Art Contemporain (IAC) of Lyon, France. "I am very interested in Chinese contemporary art," he told Xinhua. Caton added that he has been collecting Chinese artworks for many years.

Caton started talking with Xinhua earlier this week while watching a documentary project showcased at the China Pavilion to reflect on China's countryside.

For the first time, Chinese villagers across the country were asked to take up a DV camera and shoot documentary footage of their own lives during the period of changing rural public life under the evolving democratic system known as "village self-governance."

"I feel that China's countryside is real China," Caton stressed. Not only the countryside is the place where China's ancient agricultural civilization has its roots, but also reflects the key challenges of modern society, he noted referring to the country's issues of urbanization and social reforms and transformations.

In fact China Pavilion's theme "Other Future" through the artworks of five artists very different for their art language, history and age, stresses on the concept of a "public sphere" which exists in every individual citizen and gives more space to his or her creativity to impact on the future.

"What I could experience today here was the present real life of a large number of Chinese people. I could feel how life is like in villages and what are the challenges faced by these citizens every day," Veronique Descamps, another visitor from France, told Xinhua.

"I have visited Beijing, Shanghai and other big cities of China, but I have never been to the countryside, where I feel there is so much to learn about today's China," she said while watching a visual music and performance about Nu Shu, an ancient language created by women for women in Hunan province and passed from mother to daughter secretly from generation to generation.

Another documentary project on display at the China Pavilion, "Dance with Farm Workers," besides professional actors and dancers, has also involved 30 farm laborers from the poorest areas of Sichuan province working on building sites around Beijing.

Both the rehearsals and performance took place in the production hall of a former textile factory that survived Beijing's modernization process. "As I entered the China Pavilion, I perceived that this is the art of today," a 74-year-old visitor who is passionate about contemporary art, Philippe Wilhelem, said when watching the documentary.

He told Xinhua that he particularly appreciated the choice made by China to entrust the curatorship of its pavilion to an NGO foundation, the Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation (BCAF), and select a group of independent artists.

Wilhelem said he could feel the continuous exchange between past and future at the center of China Pavilion's artworks. China, a vast and complex country in fast evolution with relevant effects on the rest of the planet, has mapped a past whose wealth is fundamental to get an interpretation of the future, he underlined. Endit