12TH SHANGHAI BIENNALE

n his 1989 essay “The End of History?,” published on the eve of communist collapse across Europe, international-relations scholar Francis Fukuyama argued that the political winds signaled “the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.” In the decades since, despite the dismantling of Europe’s Iron Curtain, the fall of the Soviet Union, and China’s paradoxical embrace of consumer-capitalism, the world now seems further away from any ideologically resolved endpoint. Europe is fracturing once more along national lines, ex-communist countries are reverting to authoritarianism, the United States government is mired in chaos, while the Chinese economic powerhouse has plateaued. In these troubled times, the 12th Shanghai Biennale, “Proregress: Art in an Age of Historical Ambivalence,” was a clear-eyed reminder