The other minor key

The longest line in the China Pavilion formed in front of a machine. A mechanical arm, trained on the wild cursive of the calligrapher Wang Dongling, dipped a brush, paused as if to gather itself, and laid down the two characters for “Dream Stream” with a confidence most of us in the room could not have managed by hand. Teenagers filmed it. An older Italian couple watched the full cycle twice. I watched it three times, and I will admit the thing the reviews had told me I was not supposed to feel — I was delighted. I had arrived in Venice with the verdict already written for me. The pavilion had been filed away weeks before anyone walked through it. In the Western art press it was a “tech showroom,” a glorified game demo, a show off. On Chinese social media the word was sharper: great power narrative (大国叙事), the charge that an exhibition has traded the texture of individual life for grandeur pitched at the scale of the state. For once, the critics at home and the critics in Venice agreed. They were both wrong, and the shape of their wrongness is the most interesting thing at this Biennale. The room China was standing in Start with the hall. This year’s Biennale, “In Minor Keys,” is the final work of Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroonian-Swiss curator who designed the entire exhibition and then died of cancer in May 2025, a year before it opened, never seeing a wall of it installed. Her theme is not the wave of doom that the pavilion’s defenders like to picture it bravely defying. It is tender, intimate, deliberately small. Kouoh wrote that minor keys refuse orchestral bombast in favor of the quiet tones, the lower frequencies, the hums. Her show privileges rest, repair, and the refusal of the monument, her two lodestar artists are honored precisely for working against scale. Her jury resigned over human rights. Whatever “In Minor Keys” is, it is not a cynical autopsy. It is the most sincere thing in the lagoon. That matters, because a national pavilion is under no obligation to play the curator’s score. The pavilions are commissioned separately. China’s is hosted by its Ministry of Culture and curated by Yu Xuhong of the China Academy of Art, and it owes Kouoh’s theme nothing at all. So when Dream Stream arrives loud, with a sweep of cursive wide enough to swallow a wall, a beam of light nearly the height of the hall, and the video game blockbuster Black Myth: Wukong mounted inside an art biennale, that volume is neither defiance nor obedience. It is a choice. Handed a free room and a year tuned to whispering, China chose to play fortissimo. The question worth asking is not whether that was permitted. It is what the choice was for. Minor in the other sense Here I want to borrow Kouoh’s phrase and turn it, because she has loaned this Biennale a sharper idea than its critics, at home or abroad, have managed to use. There are two ways to be in a minor key. One is the mood she meant: inward, low, melancholy shading toward solace. The other is what a musician means when the minor key is the one the room is not playing, the dissonant, minoritarian note that refuses the dominant tonality. And in 2026 the dominant tonality of contemporary art on the subject of technology is easy to name. It is dread. AI as surveillance, as alienation, as the algorithm turned prison; the deepfake, the death of the human hand. Walk the Arsenale and you can collect the variations like stamps. That gloom is the major key now: the consensus, the safe position, the register that reliably reads as serious. Against it, an exhibition that treats artificial intelligence as continuity rather than catastrophe is the genuinely dissident sound in the building. That is the minor key I heard in the China Pavilion. Minor not because it was quiet, but because it was outnumbered. What both camps were recoiling from The Western “tech showroom” complaint and the domestic great power narrative complaint are the same flinch in two accents. Both assume scale is the enemy of depth, that any work reaching for the civilizational or the cosmic must be hollow where a small, fractured, anxious work would be honest. The strongest version of this deserves stating plainly, because it is not foolish: monumental national spectacle can flatten the individual, and a flawlessly harmonious picture of the technological future can sound a great deal like a state that would prefer you not look too closely. I take that seriously. Having stood in the room, I think it is wrong here, for two reasons. It is wrong, first, because it imports a quarrel East Asian aesthetics never had. Western modernism stages the self against the universe, the person against the system; bigness reads as a threat to the individual. The tradition Dream Stream draws on inverts that. The unity of heaven and humanity (天人合一) treats the macro scale not as the place the self is crushed but as the place it is finally grounded. When the calligraphy opens across an entire wall, that is not a flag being waved. It is a worldview that looks up because looking up is where it has always found steadiness when the single life feels small. You may decline that worldview. You cannot call its scale empty without admitting you simply prefer your own. It is wrong, second, because the technology in this pavilion is not ornament laid over a poem. It is the argument. The “Liangzhu Light” anchoring the space is tied to the Three Body Computing Constellation, the satellite cluster China sent into orbit in 2025 carrying AI models and computing power into space, frontier engineering, real and recent, asked here to be felt as lineage rather than rupture. Wu Ziyang’s work writes a proposal to Leonardo da Vinci from inside a speculative Web 4.0 and invites Shen Kuo, the polymath of the 11th century whose Dream Pool Essays gives the pavilion its name, to help crack a problem neither man lived to see. Yang Fudong unrolls a “painting cinema” across 20 screens that you finish by walking. This is not a showroom renting prestige from old scrolls. The technical ambition is the content. The West’s allergy is not to technology in art. It is to technology that declines to be afraid of itself. The doubleness There is one reason the response was uneasy both at home and in Venice, and it is the same reason. At home, optimism about AI in this register is the establishment line, which is exactly why Chinese netizens hear “great power narrative” and reach for the phrase as an insult. They are hearing the official anthem. Carry that anthem into a hall the West dominates, where dread is the consensus, and it stops being an anthem and becomes a heresy. The pavilion is majoritarian in one room and minoritarian in the next, and it did not change a note between them. Both audiences flinched at the modulation. They simply stood on opposite sides of it. Nerve, not naivety I keep returning to the robot, and the people who would not leave the front of the line. The easiest thing an artist can do in 2026 is look at a broken world and draw one more broken line. It costs nothing and it always passes for intelligence. The harder thing, the thing that takes actual nerve, is to insist on continuity and beauty and a usable future while everyone fluent in the room's grammar is calling you naive for it. Optimism, performed in a hall that has forgotten the major key exists, is not the absence of critical thought. In Venice this year it was the rarest version of it. For the brands, institutions, and readers watching from a distance, that is the part to keep. The audience is not short of mirrors held up to what we have broken. What held the crowd in front of that machine was the opposite, a proposition about what might still be built, made by a culture confident enough to say it out loud in a room designed for whispering. Call it a great power narrative if you like. I would call it the only narrative at the Biennale willing to be caught hoping. This is an opinion piece by Richard Bao, a Milan-based brand strategist and Managing Director at ASAP+ Milan, specializing in luxury, digital strategy, and the Chinese market. A MAFED graduate from SDA Bocconi School of Management, he has spent nearly a decade bridging Western luxury brands with Chinese consumers. All opinions expressed in the column are his own and do not reflect the official position of Jing Daily.

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The other minor key

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