The opening gala of the 2004 Shanghai Biennale went off seemingly seamlessly, as befitted a government-sponsored art event of its growing international stature. Except for the arrested performance artist. Hong Kong artist Ke Weizhen, not a participant in the official show, clomped into the Shanghai Art Museum with iron rice bowls, the kind still used in Chinese school and work unit cafeterias, tied to the soles of his shoes and his face painted white and red. The assembled crowd of international curators and Chinese officials looked on curiously as Mr. Ke clambered up the museum's staircase, occasionally blowing on a whistle around his neck. Curiosity turned to alarm as museum security guards began to close in on Mr. Ke, who at first held them at bay with staccato blasts on his whistle. Then, four or five guards jumped him, pushed him to the ground, and then hustled him into a back room.

     When interviewed, Zhang Qing, one of the exhibition's four curators, disavowed any knowledge of the incident, although a Beijing art publication, quoted him as saying, "It is the same as throwing out a crasher at a dinner party."

     The official reaction to Mr. Ke's innocuous performance art demonstrates the contradictions of establishing a biennale that is professional, international and provocative while adhering to a proscribed script of what sort of face it wants to present to the world. In that sense, Shanghai's most visible contemporary art event reflects the attitude in the art scene as well as the city at large. Shanghai's government and people alike are obsessed with making the city "international", conceived of as expensive, imported and name branded. Gallery shows and the Biennale have likewise shifted from nurturing promising young emerging local artists to featuring foreign works or big-ticket, internationally famous Chinese artists. Shanghai's young underground artists of a few years ago have since rocketed into the international spotlight, but the infrastructure that provided their launch pad is lacking for the new generation.

     The Shanghai Biennale was launched in 1994, and made a huge splash with its third incarnation in 2000, entitled "Shanghai Spirit". Featuring foreign artists for the first time, it attracted international critics and curators, many in Shanghai for the first time, and generated significant buzz. The rave reviews focused as much on the spate of edgy, ambitious satellite shows, of mostly then unknown Shanghainese artists, at private galleries, as on the official exhibition itself. The 2002 Biennale, "Urban Creation", consolidated the Shanghai Biennale's position as a major international art event, although many found it uninspiring, and again the underground exhibitions stole the show.

     "2004 was the biggest scale yet," enthused Mr. Zhang, who also curated the 2000 Biennale. The topic, "Techniques of the Visible", exploring but not limited to new media art, "was very timely, especially for artistic research, such as at our international symposium." He continued that the exhibition cost 11 million RMB this year, compared to 8.8 million in 2002 and 6.5 million in 2000. The rising budget went towards an outdoor official satellite show, new equipment, a media center and the symposium. Corporate sponsorship played an increased role, providing 10% of the funds, while 60% came from the government and 30% from the museum.

     "The Biennale has been important in making the average Shanghai people think of contemporary art as entertainment," Mr. Zhang continued. The 2004 exhibition, which ran from 28 September to 28 November, attracted roughly 130,000 visitors, up from 80,000 in 2002 and 40,000 in 2000. "The city's art scene benefits as it brings in international collectors, critics and curators. They see Chinese are here, then go buy them at the galleries."

     "The Shanghai Biennale has no role in the Shanghai art scene now," countered Biljana Ciric, a contributing critic for Chinese-language art publications Art China and Art Monthly, and Junior Director of the Academic Department of the Duolun Museum of Contemporary Art. The museum, open a year now, exhibits surprisingly cutting-edge, controversial art for a state-run art museum in China. "In the taxi, on the way to the Biennale, the driver didn't know where the museum was. I asked, 'Don't you ever take your kid to the museum on a weekend?' and he said, 'Never!' For the public, there's big media coverage, but not the real effect of bringing people in."

     The exhibition itself was impressive if sometimes inconsistent, carried by a number of strong works and a line-up of big international names like Bill Viola, Cindy Sherman and Yoko Ono. However, some of the smaller names made the biggest impressions. Liu Wei's "Landscape of City" photograph recreated a traditional Chinese ink landscape with naked human buttocks, and in their "Mt. Fuji" series, partners Rong Rong and Inri frolicked naked at the snowy mountain base.

     China's decay amidst modernization was expressed in Shao Yinong and Mu Chen's saturated-colored images of old ceremonial halls and in Chen Chieh-Jen's Spartan shots of abandoned factories. A more optimistic modernity infused Yu Hong's series "She", which combined photos of ordinary Chinese women and her paintings of their hopes and ambitions. Vivan Sundaran's retro-surrealist "Re-Take of Amrita" reimagined vintage images with incongruous additions. The interactive "Standards and Double Standards", by Rafael Lozano Hemmer, consisted of a room of suspended belts that turned so their buckles would face and follow entrants. Classical painting was spoofed in the contributions of Kerim Ragimov, with his traditionalist renderings of car wrecks, and of Yue Mingjun, whose "Void Landscape" series recreated famous paintings but without people. Liu Zheng's powerful portraits of ash-covered 9/11 survivors were the most reprinted of the show, and Xu Zhen's rapidly spinning hands of the clock in the museum's tower was the popular favorite.

     "Xu Zhen's spinning clock so represented Shanghai, the pace of life here, plus the hecticness of the Biennale opening," said Ms. Ciric. "It also represented the Biennale in that, by the second day, it was already broken. All the effort goes for the opening, to impress the visitors, and afterwards they don't bother." Much of the criticism directed at the Biennale stems from the organizing committee's tendency to elaborately fete visitors from overseas, while excluding Chinese and China-based press, critics, artists and galleryists. "It's just becoming more 'international', like the rest of the art scene," Ms. Ciric continued. "Like, their symposium included only one Chinese curator, which led to a lot of criticism in the Chinese press, that the Shanghai Biennale is just this huge party for foreigners." She explained that independent Chinese critics are much more openly critical, compared to softer international coverage. "Foreigners come once every two years, and can't get a real sense of what's happening from just one exhibition…It's hard for them to understand because they're not here, and get limited information."

     "2004 was also the first year without a major satellite show," observed Ms. Ciric. "The ones they had…were all a bit weak." The forces behind the headline-stealing, controversial shows of young local artists during the last two Biennales opted this time for more conventional fair. BizArt held an international art exchange and a French film festival. Eastlink, which hosted 2000's infamously shut down "Fuck Off" show, in 2004 organized "Matchmaking at Suzhou Creek", with a group of visiting foreign artists paired up with Chinese artists with studios in the Moganshan warehouse complex. A fun concept, but producing mostly unexciting art.

     The high-end Shanghai Gallery of Art's satellite offering was "Odysseys", curated by well-known Chinese art critic Martina Koppel-Yang. The show featured some exquisitely bold installation pieces, but entirely by overseas Chinese artists. The new, low key Endspace featured "Life in the Era of Deng Xiaoping," with simple but powerful 1980s photographs by An Ge. At Duolun, works by established Shanghai artists, mostly also participating in the official Biennale, were hung under pseudonyms. According to Ms. Ciric, "It was criticizing the Biennale atmosphere of foreign curators and collectors coming and chasing down artists to buy work."

     The disappointing 2004 satellite show line-up parallels a larger transition of Shanghai's private galleries towards being "international" – showing either foreign or internationally known artists – to the neglect of emerging young artists locally. ShanghArt, the city's oldest gallery, has always focused on the sort of big name artists who are invited to events like the Venice Biennale. BizArt, which initially cultivated the current crop of successful Shanghainese artists, has mostly shifted to showing European artists and organizing cultural exchanges. The ever edgy Eastlink rarely holds exhibitions now. Meanwhile, recently opened contemporary galleries focus of pretty, saleable works or international name-brand Chinese artists.

     "An art scene always has a place for newcomers, but Shanghai doesn't have that feeling," lamented Lise Yuen, a Norwegian artist who has lived in Shanghai for two and a half years. "In most galleries, you see the same artists' names over and over again…Maybe these galleries discovered them, and now they're famous, so it has to do with the age of the galleries. But we don't want to fight over those same names." Mrs. Yuen and her Chinese husband Simon will launch Shanghai's newest space, the Creek Art Center, on 18 January. Located in an atmospheric five floor warehouse along Suzhou Creek, the center will include a bar and restaurant, intended to subsidize the non-commercial, experimental art gallery. The Yuens hope to provide the venue that emerging young Shanghai artists currently lack, and have invited thirteen art academies to the opening.

     "Our first question, in conceiving this project, was, 'Does China have many young artists?' You see very few, but with so many schools, so many students, they must be there," explained Simon Yuen. "We can't say yet how the young generation will be, but someone needs to give them a chance, and nurture their expansion."

     However, people like the Yuens looking inward for Shanghai's future are a quiet minority in the noisy rush to "internationalize", regardless of its expense on local culture. "Shanghai simply is international," believes Biennale curator Zhang Qing. "What is meant by 'international'? Where is international? In art, particularly, China equals international, and there is no international without China. Girls in Paris, girls in Shanghai, all use the same lipstick, drink the same coffee."

     Ms. Movius is a Shanghai-based writer.