This weekend was the opening of the Shenzhen Biennale (also known by its ultra sleek ceremonial name The 2007 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture) - a three-month festival of city life, staged in an old industrial complex. The enormous show was curated by my friends Charlie Koolhaas & Qingyun Ma and featured the work of a bunch of other friends, so I went down on Saturday to support and check it out.

I’d planned to do a big, full-bodied post about the biennale, since there is almost no online evidence of its existence. But then I got there and realized my camera had no memory card, then I arrived at the site and things got all hectic with helping people move shoes and find extension chords, and reuniting with old friends, and everyone was drinking and delirious from not having slept properly for days, then it was the opening ceremony and I had to get my shit together to DJ at the after party, and, in the end, I left the place having taken five photos with my phone. For the record:

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The two other photos I mentioned were blurrier versions of those guys playing with the rubik’s cubes. So, that’s not much of a record. But even from these three I think you can sense the casual, participatory vibe that makes the biennale really fun and radically unlike the typical architectural affair.

But I don’t want to shortchange an event that my friends spent so much time and money and mental health points working on, so, like any good party crasher, I’m going to boast about what I took home in my gift bag and in the process name drop! Now then:

1. Biennale in a box

The biennale’s catalog is basically an enormous pink brick filled with black & white posters, one poster for each of the 200+ exhibits. I haven’t really looked in it yet but, like Mount Rushmore or Britney Spears’ pre-nup, I admire it for the sheer quantity of labor that went in.

2. Cool newspaper that the printer fucked up

The biennale organizers created a list of ten questions about cities, with the idea of urban regeneration and expiration in mind especially. They got a lot of interesting responses and painstakingly arranged fragments of the best ones into a series of meditations of cities and life itself. They formatted it as a newspaper with the intention of distributing them free throughout the biennale. Then the printer flaked out and somehow showed up with boxes of two separate pieces with non-sequential pages. China.

3. Rumpled print by Lok Jansen

My friend Lok is an architect and illustrator in Tokyo. A set of his pieces were printed on light boxes and hung up along a concrete wall, and everybody loves them. I don’t have a picture of that, of course. But I’m sure he will. Check his site out here.

4. Inflatable tower packaged to look like a condom

My roommate for a night Andre Schmidt has produced a blow-up version of the Berlin TV Tower. It’s cool and incredibly phallic. That doesn’t bother Andre one bit, as is evidenced by this promotional video he’s hooked up for it:

For more info on what it is and where to buy, go here.

5. You by Dynamic City Foundation

This is a very beautiful little book about, among other things, the dreams of everyday Chinese people. Truthfully speaking, I didn’t get this book at the biennale. But it was available at the biennale, so I want to bring it up because its creator Neville Mars produced one of the most beautiful exhibits and, of course, I don’t have any photos of that. But in this case, that doesn’t matter so much because Neville has painstakingly documented it all here. Neville was also rinsing it out on the dance floor at the after party so he gets extra props for that too.

6. With/Without

This is a book about Dubai edited by my friend Shumon. I haven’t had a chance to look through it yet, but need to because I really don’t know much about Dubai.

7. Reineke Otten’s business card

Reineke produced by all accounts a very beautiful and smart exhibit on her World Skin Colors project. But half of it was removed by the Shenzhen government, because it didn’t properly identify Taiwan as part of China. One of those cultural mistakes that’s very very easy to make when you’re not in China and impossible after you’ve been here for a while. Reineke’s also a gifted photographer. Check out some of her work here.

8. The new issue of Urban China magazine

My peeps Urban China also had an exhibit at the biennale and it also was censored. They seemed to take it in stride, and gave me their latest issue about Chinatowns and it’s excellent. If you can read Chinese or are feeling adventurous, check them out here.

9. The new issue of Too magazine

Too is a good new magazine made by a crew of people in different parts of China. They made a special issue for the biennale that focuses on Shenzhen and includes a bunch of funny and fascinating portraits of people there.

10. The new issue of Prophecy magazine.

Prophecy is a magazine based in New York with a very good sense of style and the type of international spirit that I always get behind. I was introduced to its publisher Kevin and he hit me off with this. Check out the Prophecy site for more info and some very good mixes.

Last and least I have a clip of part of my set at the after party. It was described by the biennale’s head curator Charlotte Koolhaas as “music for a 12 year old’s birthday party” and includes back-to-back-to-back hits from Michael Jackson, back-to-back Britney, Chris Brown, Usher, Nina Sky, Kevin Little and some more I forgot. It gets cut off abruptly because the authorities ended the party by shutting off all the power without warning. China.

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