Chinese art outside the art space

The notion of ‘exhibition’ originated from the West, in the context of our discussion, usually as an organized presentation and display of a selection of items in a space of art museum, gallery or institution that open to the public. Generally acknowledged, perhaps one of the earliest examples was first Paris Salon held in the Palais-Royal in 1667, and by 1699, the exhibition’s growth prompted a move to the Grand Galerie of the Louvre. Salon thus became the public space for art in the modern sense, inviting aesthetic judgments. Soon after, in the eighteenth century, art exhibitions proliferated throughout Europe and in Britain, most notably, there has been the annual summer show of London’s Royal Academy which was first unveiled in 1769. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, European cities and states began to sponsor large international art exhibitions to build up and secure their identities as cultural centres, including the Venice Biennale, founded in 1895, as one of the most famous and enduring examples (Altshuler 2008: 12-3). From the 1990s on, today, we have seen biennials and triennials established as instruments of economic and cultural development worldwide, whilst art has been exhibited mostly in the art museum and gallery spaces.