Passage to the Orient (1993): Re-assessing the Role of the ‘Orient’ as ‘Avant-garde’ during the Rise of Globalisation

Abstract

Of the several exhibitions that composed the 1993 Venice Biennale, Passage to the Orient has received the most commentary. Its fame is doubtless linked to its display of works by fourteen Chinese painters, exhibited for the first time in Venice. However, the exhibition was not devoted solely to Chinese art. It was rather intended as the manifesto for a new, international approach by the Biennale, significantly announcing its commitment to East–West dialogue, with East intended as both geographical and symbolic. From the curator’s perspective, the concept of the Orient evoked the unknown and the new; in Said’s terms it was ‘Orientalist’. Moreover, the symbolic figure of Marco Polo, who inspired the exhibition’s title, recalled the idea of ‘trespassing’, of moving beyond personal, geographic, political, and historical boundaries. Through an investigation around the use of the concept of ‘Marco Polo Syndrome’, the layered meaning of the term avant-garde in Bonito Oliva’s jargon and his broader scope in rejuvenating the Biennale’s international vocation, this essay aims to redefine how the term Orient was used during the rise of globalisation at the beginning of the 1990s. Finally, such analysis proves helpful in framing continuity between the concepts of historical avant-garde and contemporaneity during the transitional period of the 1990s.