Catalogue of the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale held at the OCT Contemporary Art Terminal (OCAT) in Shenzhen, China from May to August 2012. The Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale was formerly known as the Shenzhen Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition, and prior to that, the Yearlong Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition, which was inaugurated in 1998. This year's curatorial team comprising Liu Ding, Carol Yinghua Lu and Su Wei invited 40 Chinese artists and 12 international artists to take part in the exhibition.

'Accidental Message: Art is Not a System, Not a World is an exhibition that hopes to raise once again the idea of individual systems. The exhibition is split into two segments that comprise our narrative: Unexpected Encounters and What You See is What I See.

Unexpected Encounters is an observation of our local history, focusing on the 1990s and researching the creative trajectories of individual artists as the creative foundation for an era. Art as an individual phenomenon is our embarkation point, research method and content for researching and narrating this era. Interviews with artists, critics and curators who experienced the 1990s and are still active today present a concrete and unprecedented view of the experiences, ideas, dilemmas, hesitations, anxieties and sources of self confidence in art during that period, and we have learned about the contexts, circumstances, interactions, encounters and clashes that they experienced. This is not a retrospective that tries to summarize the entire scene but an attempt to restore the art of that time to its individual spirit and personal thinking.

What You See is What I See presents the works of some of the artists we have encountered and learned about in our global travel and work over the past few years. This segments attempts to share a kind of connectedness that consists of individual spirit — the artists' creations — one that transcends regions, systems, mechanisms, norms and art history narratives, proposing not the magnification of the effectiveness of any existing system, universal order or experience of others but the emphasis of serendipity, organicness, stochasticity, internality, perceptivety and art's internal instinct for self-growth and reproduction.' — excerpt by Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu

With texts on individual works by various writers. Artist, author and curator biographies are provided. Please note only artists from Asia are indexed below. Other artists: Josef Dabernig, Laura Oldfield Ford, Darius Mikšys, Nástio Mosquito, Kelly Schacht, VERMEIR & HEIREMANS.