Between Memory and Future: How Anren's Industrial Past Became China's Most Distinctive Biennial

As the autumn mists rise over Anren in October, hundreds of artists, curators, and art enthusiasts will once again converge on this unassuming historic town in China's Sichuan Province. They come not for the town's famed collection of historic mansions or its renowned Jianchuan Museum Complex—the largest private museum in China—but for what has become one of Asia's most conceptually ambitious contemporary art exhibitions: the Anren Biennale.

What makes the Anren Biennale unique is not merely its setting in a town that feels frozen in time, but how it has reimagined the very concept of a biennial by embracing its contradictions. Unlike Venice, São Paulo, or even Shanghai, Anren lacks the cosmopolitan infrastructure typically associated with major art events. Yet this perceived limitation has become its greatest strength. The biennale occupies a former industrial complex, rehabilitated Republican-era mansions, and various spaces throughout a town that proudly calls itself "China's Museum Town"—a place where history is preserved, interrogated, and sometimes commodified.

"The genius of Anren as a biennial site is precisely this tension between past and future," explains Lu Peng, the art historian who served as artistic director for the inaugural edition in 2017. "Here, contemporary art doesn't exist in a white cube divorced from context—it confronts history directly, creating dialogues across time that would be impossible in conventional exhibition spaces."

That first edition, titled "Today's Yesterday," set the intellectual framework that continues to define the biennale's approach. Divided into four thematic exhibitions, it explored how contemporary art might engage with historical memory, collective trauma, and utopian imagination. One of the most significant sections, "The Szechwan Tale: Theatre and History," curated by Italian curator Marco Scotini, took inspiration from Bertolt Brecht's play "The Good Person of Szechwan" and the controversial "Rent Collection Courtyard" sculptures housed in Liu Wencai's former manor in Anren—a propagandistic artwork from the Cultural Revolution era that depicted landlord exploitation.

The biennale's second edition in 2019, "A Confrontation of Ideals," continued this engagement with historical and ideological tensions, examining how utopian visions shape our understanding of both past and future. Co-curated by prominent Chinese scholars Lyu Peng and He Guiyan, along with Dutch curator Siebe Tettero, it expanded the biennale's international dialogue while maintaining strong connections to regional artistic practices.

What distinguishes the Anren Biennale from other similar events in China is its unusual location and organizational structure. While it benefits from state support and corporate sponsorship through the OCT Group (Overseas Chinese Town Enterprises), it operates in a space somewhat removed from the direct political spotlight that often falls on cultural events in Beijing or Shanghai. This relative freedom, combined with the town's complex history, creates fertile ground for nuanced artistic and curatorial experimentation.

The biennale's unique approach is perhaps best exemplified by how it has incorporated Anren's historical spaces into its conceptual framework. The Liu family mansions—once symbols of feudal power, later recast as monuments to revolutionary justice—become sites for exploring how historical narratives are constructed and contested. Similarly, the Jianchuan Museum Complex, with its sometimes provocative preservation of Cultural Revolution memorabilia and war artifacts, offers a counterpoint to the biennale's contemporary interventions.

"What happens in Anren is a kind of temporal collapse," says Beijing-based artist Wang Jianwei, who participated in the 2017 edition. "The past is never really past here—it's constantly being reframed, recontextualized. As artists, we're not just responding to a physical space but to these layers of meaning, to this compression of time."

The town itself has been transformed by the biennale's presence. Once a relatively obscure historical site primarily visited by domestic tourists, Anren has become an important node in China's expanding contemporary art geography. New galleries, residency programs, and cultural initiatives have emerged alongside the more traditional tourism infrastructure, creating an unusual ecosystem where art, history, and commerce coexist and sometimes collide.

As the Anren Biennale prepares for its fifth edition in 2025, it faces both opportunities and challenges. The continued development of the town as a cultural destination risks the commodification that has affected other historic sites in China. Yet the biennale's intellectual foundations—its commitment to engaging with history while imagining new futures, its bridging of local contexts with global conversations—remain as relevant as ever in a rapidly changing world.

In a global art landscape where biennials have often been criticized for their homogeneity and disconnection from local contexts, Anren offers a different model—one where contemporary art finds meaning not by transcending history but by diving deeply into its complexities. As autumn returns to this small town in western China, the convergence of past and future continues to generate new possibilities for art and thought.