Venice Biennale's All the World's Futures and Hong Kong's Ha Bik Chuen Archive Exhibition Contrast Scale and Approach

The 2015 Venice Biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor and titled All the World's Futures, featured a massive exhibition at the Arsenale with artists from around the world, including Georg Baselitz, Elena Damiani, Naeem Mohaiemen, Ala Younis, and Massinissa Selmani. Its scale and maze-like layout made it overwhelming, with some visitors missing installations and feeling exhausted by the retrospective tone. Concurrently, the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong presented Excessive Enthusiasm, a focused exhibition on the late printmaker and sculptor Ha Bik Chuen's scrapbooks and documentation of Hong Kong's art scene from the 1960s to 2000s. This show displayed negatives, contact sheets, photo albums, and ephemera, including materials related to the 1967 leftist protests and Cultural Revolution, with digital versions on iPads and rotating vitrines. Ha's work drew comparisons to Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas and André Malraux's 'Le Musée Imaginaire'. The article, published in Summer 2015 by ArtReview, contrasts the Biennale's maximalist approach with the Archive's minimalist curation, highlighting funding disparities and geopolitical influences in Venice.