Navigating Regionality: Temporal Shifts and Spatial Realities in the Guangzhou Triennials (2002-2023)

Positioned as the experimental ground for testing capitalism by the governmental Reform and Opening-up movement from the 1970s, Guangdong province has witnessed unprecedentedly rapid modernization, urbanization, and globalization process. The establishment of the Guangdong Museum of Art in 1997, followed by the inception of the Guangzhou Triennial by the institution in 2002, can be viewed as one of the attempts to participate in the global world as a regional voice.

From 2002 to 2023, the Guangzhou Triennial has engaged in discussions ranging from modernity, postmodernity, contemporaneity, postcoloniality, and historicity. These temporal shifts in the curatorial reflections are dedicated to constructing a regional narrative of time against the Western hegemonic colonial universality. With the same dynamism, the triennial has also been trying to assert a regionality in relation to different spatial realities such as the Pearl River Delta Megalopolis, Greater Bay Area, Asia, and the Global South.

This paper delves into how the Guangzhou Triennial has articulated and navigated through different concepts of regionality by shifting its positionality in time and space from 2002 to 2023 in relation to the socio-political conditions of and beyond post-socialist China. Furthermore, within the postcolonial discourse, issues such as local, alternative, and cultural modernities have been plaguing academic discussions with the persistent colonial undertone of the West and the rest dichotomy and have shifted to the conceptualization of contemporaneity. This paper thus wants to contribute to this conceptualization by offering an analysis of the regional attempts in Guangdong, China.