Text by Francesca Girelli and DavideQuadrio with Chiara Bertola

When it comes to international relationships, being a cultural practitioner requires witnessing contemporary art's entanglement with prevailing political and economic tendencies. This is true not only for the commerciality of art, which has lately begun to improve for Chinese contemporary art, but also for those institutional and philanthropic spheres of culture, museums and foundations, and even the general public itself.

The Chinese economic boom came only a decade ago, promptly followed by a new image of China that had suddenly become the place to be and, most importantly, the place to be seen.

Shanghai, in particular, has become a free port for international visibility and networking, but how are these hordes of foreigners who are moving to Asia, or who are simply passing through, engaging with the locality and its culture?

Commonly referred to by the generic word foreigners , ﾀﾏﾍ â _ l ǎ owài in Mandarin, or in the past even ｹ暲ﾐ gweilo , meaning “ghost man” in Cantonese, regardless of the person's country of origin, Western professionals and individuals land in China, bringing with them their ideologies, political ideas, methodologies and fast foods.

In terms of artistic collaborations, presented to the public as unmistakable proof of harmonious international relationships, the Venice Biennale, with its national showcasing system, still stands at the apex of the models to be followed and revered. In these aesthetic and conceptual pageants, what needs to be highlighted is the specificity, the uniqueness and, of course, the brilliance of each one of the participants.

The main issue, though, is that an actual correspondence between culture and nation is quite sporadic, and may lead to factional results. Focusing on the differences between nations creates a mirror system by which the identity of the other is perceived as opposite of ours and is observed under the exoticising light of a kunstkammer or is simply adapted to fit our references, as in the case with the Western art market, whose attention is still drawn mainly to those Chinese artworks that reflect an occidental pop imaginary and propagate westernized political beliefs.

Travelling exhibitions of Chinese contemporary artists are being presented all over the globe, but very seldom is there an international, horizontal collabo­ration between institutions backing these shows. In our label-oriented world, countries are incessantly working to build up their own brand, and museums and institutions are, of course, doing the same. Big names like the Centre Pompidou have sent important pieces from their permanent collections to China to be displayed in local museums, although we almost never see Chinese institutions' collections displayed in foreign countries and generating the same expectations and respect. The smatterings of information that reach the main public can hardly be deemed collaborations, and the stereotypes they fuel will never help breach the wall that stands between cultures, preventing us from developing empathic and truly collaborative initiatives.

New roads: The Aurora Museum and QueriniStampalia in dialogue.

The New Roads Project is very unique, primarily because of the nature of the institutions involved. The Aurora Museum is exceptional not only because of the unquestionable quality of its permanent collection, which could be envied by the greatest international antiquities museums, but also because of its commitment to promoting education and research.

The collection of the Aurora Museum, built up over 40 years by the Chairman of the Aurora Group, Yung Tai Chen, is composed of ancient Chinese treasures of great historical significance, including pottery, porcelain, Buddhist statues and jade artifacts. The collection was originally located in Taiwan, but Mr. Yung decided to bring these important pieces back to Mainland China where, unfortunately, artifacts of similar quality are extremely rare due to the exportation or smuggling of antiquities that has plagued the country during recent decades. This reconnects us also with the previously-mentioned relationship between territory and culture as, in this case, an important part of the Chinese history has been brought back to its original place of provenance thanks to a Taiwanese collector. Through these relics from the past, we can now start to reconnect to and recollect a precious tradition, represented both by the collection itself - gathered from all over the world - and also by the desire of Mr. Yung to share it with the greater public of China.

Like the Aurora Museum, the FondazioneQueriniStampalia possesses a rich collection that was once private and whose contents include furniture, antiques, and important 18 th century Venetian paintings. According to the will of Count Giovanni QueriniStampalia, the last heir of this family who left his legacy to the city of Venice, the foundation was primarily conceived of as a library and a place devoted to the promotion of cultural studies, and it is still an important research point of reference for students and intellectuals in Venice.

It is an exceptional opportunity to put together these institutions. Arthub Asia, Aurora Museum to­gether with the QueriniStampalia Foundation, offer the possibility of building a long-standing relationship between Venice and Shanghai, two quintessential harbor cities characterized by their openness to the other. These three institutions share at the core of their missions the will of transmitting knowledge, apart from being placed in two exceptional places, Venice and Shanghai. As is common for almost all harbors overlooking the sea, the histories of these cities have always been marked by an infinite number of cultural contaminations, exchanges and influences. Venice and Shanghai, though, are not cities with only a trading tradition - for centuries Venice and within the last century Shanghai- have been acting as important gateways of “connection”. This fact can be easily seen just by looking at Ve­netian architecture and artworks and by listening to the language. The same is true for Shanghai, which at the beginning of the last century was a melting pot of cultures, a city to which thousands of people were migrating as refugees, drawn by the fact they did not need special visas to enter in the city. The New Roads Project will allow us to symbolically highlight the possibility of building unexpected, yet profound, connections between distant cultures, histories and people.

The QueriniStampalia and the Aurora Museum also share a particular aesthetic sensibility, exemplified by the buildings in which the collections are displayed. The Venetian institution is housed in a 16th century historical palace that features an area on the first floor exquisitely restored by Carlo Scarpa whilst Tadao Ando designed the Aurora Museum building. Despite the differences between the styles and period of construction of the two venues, the delicate Japanese minimalism that characterizes both Scarpa and Ando's interventions is a further example of the openness of the two institutions in embracing foreign forms and styles that are then perfectly integrated into the two museums, inspiring the artistic and cultural elements displayed along their walls.

The third institution involved, Arthub Asia, plays a crucial role in the realization of this project, since a cross-cultural mediation has proven essential in creating long-term collaborative bridges. Living in the globalized world of today does not guarantee transcendence of the fundamental differences still present between every culture. We are constantly lead to believe that eating the same food, reading the same books or watching the same movies will mean that we will all have the same references and behaviors, but this is precisely the first step towards misunderstanding. Building a continuous collaboration aimed at the development of an international production platform for new contemporary creations requires a deeper understanding of the background of the different players involved. With fifteen years of experience in the Asian cultural field, through ceaseless efforts to build connections and collaborations between artists, practitioners and institutions worldwide, Arthub Asia is able to determine the necessary means for establishing a new common methodology that eschews the mere import and export of cultural projects. Together with the QueriniStampalia and the Aurora Museum, we have agreed that the necessary tools to be employed in this task can be found in a critical re-reading of our cultures' past relationships. Contemporary art has the innate ability to unearth relationships once lost or concealed within our collective memory.

New Roads guides us into considering time as cyclic; the struggles and questions that prompt the artists and intellectuals to develop their creations are recurrent and appear throughout the centuries again and again in different forms. New manners of dialogue between the present and the past can help us identify themes and trends that transcend the subdivision of artistic movements and periods. The three institutions involved connect via New Roads to find possibilities for reading and interpreting their unshared pasts (collections) via the makers of contemporary culture (artists and practitioners).

Before New Roads: QueriniStampalia and Arthub Asia's example

A few years ago, Chiara Bertola started a contemporary exhibition program in the QueriniStampalia, inviting contemporary artists to create new works linked formally or conceptually to the artifacts and paintings within its permanent collection.

This method, titled by Bertola as Conservation of the Future, has precluded the artists from viewing the past exclusively as a source of nostalgic inspiration, and has encouraged them instead to have an open dialogue with it.

Through this contemporary intervention, the Querini has succeeded in becoming a dynamic educational institution, revealing to the visitors not only how a contemporary artist works or how the materials are chosen in artwork production, but, most importantly, how conceptual processes are linked to specific “archives” of cultural references.

Arthub Asia has been, similarly, working on multicultural projects that link collections and artists from Europe with the locality - particularly China, where the organization is most active - and vice versa. Artist residencies, productions and exhibitions have always sought to dispense with ‘exoticism' in order to achieve a more profound and sustainable effect, both for the artists and for the organizations involved. One example is the Double Infinity Project, realized in collaboration with the Van Abbemuseum of Eindhoven in 2010. This initiative, consisting of an exhibition, a series of performances, a lecture program and a publication, marked the first time that a European museum opened itself and its collection to the responses of artists living and working in China .

The opening of the Aurora Museum, slated for June 2013 to occur simultaneously with the first New Roads exhibition in Venice, is an incredible opportunity to build on QueriniStampalia and Arthub Asia's previous experiences and to shape the Aurora Museum's program in an innovative way. The Aurora Museum's collection will be a new archive that, like the Querini collection, will provide the raw material, to be enriched by artists' unexpected references, that will be used in the New Roads Project.

Starting with this exhibition of unedited works by Chinese artist QiuZhijie, the two collections will en­gage in a dialogue that will span time and space, from the past to the present and from the East, represented by the Aurora Museum, linked via Arthub Asia to the West, represented by QueriniStampalia and the city of Venice.

Since the time of the historical Silk Road, we have been adding layers to the significance of Orientalism and Occidentalism. The work of contemporary artists, focusing on historical collections both in Europe and in Asia, will be a wonderful tool for navigating instances of unexpected parallelism, and recurrent patterns, and, in doing so, will demythologize old stereotypes, revealing the unpredictability that contemporary creation poses for the future of artistic and cultural development.

The Unicorn and the Dragon

QiuZhijie draws his maps using a system of typological cells, which are all consolidated together in a manner similar to that of the places forming the urban texture of the Serenissima. The links between these conceptual blocks give life to extraordinary cartographies that, like large reversed tapestries, exhibit the importance of the many threads and knots that hold them together.

The title of the exhibition, “The Unicorn and the Dragon: A map of the collections of FondazioneQueriniStampalia and Aurora Museum”, was inspired by Umberto Eco's conference – “They were looking for unicorns” – held at Peking University in 1993. The renowned scholar, analyzing the mechanisms used when discovering and comparing different cultures, pointed out the tendency that has existed for centuries to classify symbols, ideas and concepts of foreign cultures by adapting them to our cultural system of reference.

The most significant case quoted by Eco is that of Marco Polo, who, when he saw a rhino during his travels in the East, immediately identified it as a unicorn, in keeping with the classification for creatures with a horn that was available to him at that time within the Western tradition.

The new series of maps by QiuZhijie, some of them produced on paper using an ancient Chinese technique of dab rubbing and others drawn directly with ink, will expose these very bizarre misunderstandings that stem from the relations of cultural exchange between Italy and China and ultimately between any two estranged cultural spheres. Using multiple historical, philosophical and figurative references, the artist will take us through the history and evolution of these mystifications and will help us discover how these misleading interpretations could be fundamental in the discovery of new and unexpected cross-cultural analogies.

Marco Polo's mistake is very obvious and emblematic, but through QiuZhijie's intervention, we can explore the overarching issue more deeply. He also teaches us that in traditional Chinese culture there did exist unicorns, although they were not horses with a horn, nor were they rhinoceroses. One of these Chinese unicorns is a particular creature called a Bixie or Tianlu, which, surprisingly, in some representations among the Aurora collection appears similar to the Saint Mark's lion.

The artist's works also focus on the transformation process of those cultural iconographies that, even if originally stemming from antique seeds, are then adulterated and transformed through the interaction and transmission of –and between– cultures.

If we try to look at the works featured in this exhibition in the same way as the past-minded, traditional Chinese scholars would have, we will find ourselves standing in front of a mirror, and the result of the artist's creation will be a new, enlightened and unforeseen portrait of our own modern societies.

For all these reasons and because of the great possibilities for what the two collections can explore and achieve, alone and together, Qiu's analytical work can give us an unexpected and multifaceted look at what New Roads can accomplish. Through the blueprints of Qiu's work, New Roads will be able to identify strategies for the future that, through other artists' works, will locate possible narratives that can bring us closer to each other in what will hopefully be an example of true cross-cultural exchange.

Shanghai, April 2013

Venice, April 2013

The collaboration between Arthub Asia and the Van Abbemuseum is still in progress, and the second part of the project that follows Double Infinity (2010) will be carried out through a new intervention by Chinese artist Li Mu. Li Mu will reproduce important artworks belonging to the Van Abbemuseum collection and will display the replicas in public spaces in his rural hometown of Qiuzhuang. The project is focused on fostering the villagers' engagement with contemporary art, not just through immediate interventions but also through longlasting connections. For this purpose, Li Mu will also create an art library that will remain in the village and will be open to everyone. The comprehensive format of this exhibition and project involves the active participation of the community and brings to the Qiuzhuang village artworks never before seen there that the residents would also unlikely ever have the chance to see otherwise

2 ‘They used to imagine that any forthcoming human condition wasonly repetition of what had happened and what was happening'.QiuZhijie, Do we really have a future?, Archaeology of the future: Thesecond triennial of Chinese Art , 2005, exhibition catalogue