“Is it then never enough?” a woman exclaimed, visiting the exhibition The Return of the Shreds in Scheltema, the contemporary art venue of Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden in the summer of 2007, when facing the mountain of nine tons of textile shreds on display. The exhibition was the largest in a series of projects organized by the Chinese-born, Amsterdam-based artist Ni Haifeng and me during our 18-month collaboration. We called our alliance Laboratory on the Move, indicating the dynamics of our research that was performed in the context of the experimental artist/scholar collaborations (the “CO-OPs”) within the TKC research programme. Other exhibitions and presentations we realized (to which I will come back later) were Gift in BAK, Basis voor Actuele Kunst in Utrecht (2006) and Forms of Exchange in Museum Het Domein in Sittard (2007), where we also invited the Chinese contemporary artist Wang Jianwei to participate.

Haifeng's and my interest as an art historian working on art of the contemporary world is the way in which art and subsequently art history reflects upon processes of globalization, today as well as in a historical perspective, but we also have a common interest in the way art opens up a social space, sets people in motion – hence the title “Laboratory on the Move”. In The Return of the Shreds exhibition a specific aspect of globalization, that of the global – yet in terms of labour unequal – interconnectedness of the production of material goods (in this case, textiles), was visualized by means of – literally – a mountain of shreds, which represented the weekly waste product of a small textile factory in China. Other installations included “typical” Chinese products such as tea, porcelain and spices, or cast bronze shoes alluding to the protectionism of the European trade market, but also turned-in old passports resulting from a newspaper announcement requesting Dutch citizens to participate in our project by responding. All works of art dealt with specific themes ruling our contemporary world (labour division, logistics, trade agreements, protectionism, money flows, travel of people, bureaucracy, power relations) as well as issues of representation: what is represented and what does it stand for?