The theme of Chinese Pavilion for the 53rd Venice Biennale is See a World in Grain of Sand.

“Straw vs Direction” is a holistic representation of all social mechanisms in China. It is a symbol of a new value system made possible. The successive context will be broadened, depicting the Chinese society immersing into a pluralistic, shifting and co-existent international system. It demonstrates the dynamism China sustains in her modernity process, and represents the different charm China has in a new context.

Our age today is entirely different from that when socialist China was founded 60 years ago; it differs from the youthful state our country was in at the outset of the opening-up and reform, and from the accelerated development in our economy and culture 10 years ago. Development in the past ten years was carried out on the historic new base of the seamless combination of overseas-orientation and domestic-orientation, in the context of a multiplex environment, which corresponds to the continuation of the Chinese historical and contemporary inheritance