The Ninth Shanghai Biennale will kick off at the brand-new Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, formerly the Pavilion of the Future at World Expo 2010, on Oct 1 this year.

The museum on the west bank of the Yangtze River will celebrate its inauguration with the biennale opening. On the opposite side of the river, the China Art Palace will be launched at the same time, at what used to be the China Pavilion.

The Pavilion of the Future sits on the remains of a power plant that used to supply electricity to Jiangnan Shipyard, one of China's earliest.

"By moving from the historic Horse Racing Club to the power supplier of China's industrialization, the Shanghai Biennale will turn a new page," says Xu Jiang, president of the China Academy of Art, and director of the academic board of Shanghai Biennale.

The upcoming festival will be "a visual feast after the World Expo," Xu promises. The grand opening evening will turn the open square in front of the museum into a fair of performing arts and video projections.

The biennale 2012 will be named "Re-Source/form/new/public", addressing problems about "energy" in modern civilization.

Qiu Zhijie, curator of Shanghai Biennale 2012, says humans have been searching exhaustively for energy. Although there have been concerns of environmental protection in the exploration of new energies, the original model has survived, Qiu says.

Asian philosophy has a different approach, and the search in internalized for strength and energy. "This biennale will focus on those artists who generate energy," he says.

The curatorial group also includes Boris Efimovich Groys, Jens Hoffman and Johnson Chang Tsong-zung.

Shanghai Biennale, as the highest-profile contemporary art event in the city, was started in 1996.

The new venue will be three times the area of the Jockey Club, with a total space of 18,000 square meters. The expanded space allows Qiu to start a new program, a "cities" collection.

"There will be cities relevant to Shanghai, such as Bombay, the equivalent of Shanghai in India, and cities relevant to the theme, for example, Yumen, an obsolete mining town in the northwestern Gansu province."

A special exhibition at the biennale, called "Shanghai Arc", will feature the historical record of Jewish refugees pouring into Shanghai, and how they survived and prospered.

Another satellite program will be an artistic study of Zhongshan Parks all over China. Parks that were opened to the public was a new idea in the early 1900s in China, and since the death of Sun Yat-sen in 1925, many parks all over the country were named after him.