  n the coming weeks, Shanghai will be the locale for a series of shows set to coincide with the Shanghai Biennale.
The Shanghai Art Museum is once again hosting the Biennale. But there are others eager to exhibit for the wave of international collectors, curators and art lovers coming into town.
The Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened in 2005 and is otherwise known as the Shanghai MoCA, is hosting its own biennale like event.
From September 6 to October 22, the MoCA is hosting a show entitled, "Entry Gate: Chinese Aesthetics of Heterogeneity."
The curatorial team includes the former Swiss ambassador to China and major art collector, Uli Sigg, as well as Victoria Lu, the curator of the MoCA, the artist Ye Yongqing, and Sunhee Kim from Korea.
With the rise of contemporary art in China, the biennale has become one of the Chinese art world's biggest events.
The official Shanghai Biennale, which will run for two months beginning on September 5, is the main event, largely because of its 10 year history, its huge budget and its distinguished curatorial team.
Meanwhile Shanghai's MoCA, which for a time also called its show a biennale but dropped that name after criticism, is hosting its own major exhibition during the same period, attempting to steal some of the thunder from the official Shanghai Biennale -- or at least to demonstrate that the MoCA is an art space to be reckoned with.
 Victoria Lu, the museum's distinguished curator, is moving to put her own defining touch on the world of Chinese contemporary art. And she doesn't mind trying to create her own biennale show.
" 'Biennale' is a word, and it is not owned by anyone," she says in an recent interview. "In considering the convenience for visitors to see more good artworks, we chose September 6 as our opening day."
Lu says the MoCA has an entirely different system from the Shanghai Art Museum. First, the MoCA is a private, non-profit arts organization financed by Samuel Kung, a Hong Kong entrepreneur.
Second, she says that while the Shanghai Biennale has an international perspective in its show, the MoCA show will focus on the development of Chinese culture, something that has mostly been absent from earlier shows at the MoCA, which have been dominated by animation, video and international art movements.
Indeed, all the artworks in MoCA Biennale will relate to Chinese culture, and most of the participating artists are Chinese. The foreign artists in the show, she says, all live or work in China.
"During the last twenty years of Chinese contemporary art, Chinese artists and their works have been passively controlled by western collectors," she says. "Their limited knowledge and their taste for the exotic have hurt Chinese contemporary art. What we are doing is presenting an exhibition of Chinese aesthetics."
 Part of the inspiration for the show, Lu says, came from Uli Sigg. She says that over a year ago, she traveled to the Kunstmuseum in Bern, Switzerland for Uli Sigg's show, "Mah-Jong", a huge selection of art works from his massive collection of over 1,000 Chinese contemporary art works.
Her response was strong. She says she wrote a strong critique of the show, arguing that it failed to represent the panorama of Chinese contemporary works.
'Mr. Sigg seriously wrote back to me. And during our debate, an idea to hold an exhibition of our own came up," she says. "It is Chinese aesthetics. Mr. Sigg is a participant, not an authority dominating the selection of the pieces. Of course the four of us each recommended our favorite artists, and discussed the picks and then finally made a decision."
The result is a show that features 60 artists who have worked or lived in China. Victoria Lu says she decided that "neo aesthetics of Chinese intellectual" would be the theme of the show.
And what is the neo aesthetics of Chinese intellectual? She says that in this digital age, the neo Chinese intellectuals enjoy their lives and create life standards, a concentration and hybridization of aesthetic senses, ancient and contemporary, Chinese and international, all of which have composed a heterogeneous neo-aesthetics.
 Moreover, these standards reflect the establishment and implementation within daily life of the aesthetic tastes of China's new intellectual. In a country of 1.3 billion people, this common aesthetic taste has been gradually formed by a consonance of aesthetic views. The eclecticism is neither a identification of typical Chinese culture nor a form of opposition or revolutionary identity, she says. The neo- aesthetics of Chinese intellectual of the MoCA show breaks the traditional assumptions of the Chinese intellectual, and gets rid of the old introspection and responses to the unique phenomena of 20th Century Chinese politics and culture.
Generally, it is contemporary young intellectuals who have no revolutionary complex, no consciousness of the gap between the east and west. This is a generation that is enjoying its life during a time of globalization.
And the MoCA show is an attempt to address these issues.
And the force behind the show is Victoria Lu, who began her career as a curator in the United States. She says a curator is like a chauffeur who drives for artists. And Victoria Lu does so for little pay.
 She actually works as a volunteer at the MoCA, one who has promised to serve as the museum's first director and curator for about two years, to help the museum get its start. And even while working at MoCA, she regularly has to fly back to Taiwan to teach at Shin Chien University.
"Teaching is my full-time job, for making ends meet," she says. "But I hope MoCA can be better. I am a happy chauffeur."
Driving, however, is a sore topic for Lu. Just weeks before the Shanghai show was set to open, she was injured in an automobile accident in China's southwestern Yunnan Province. She fractured her collar bone. But she continued to work on preparations just days after the accident.
To achieve her goal of presenting the neo aesthetics of the Chinese intellectual is the most important thing to her, she says. And so preparations are under way, with a stunning lineup of artists, who include: Zhan Wang, Yang Fudong, Miao Xiaochun, Ai Wei Wei, Ding Yi, Yan Lei and Xiang Jing.
Opening day is September 6.
Translated by Wei Ying
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