Biennials are inherently messy. Gathering hundreds of pieces by international artists working in different mediums creates an exponential number of echoes and dissonances. Their messiness differs, though, in kind and degree, as exemplified in recent Shanghai Biennales.

Over the past two years, Beijing-based artist Liu Ding has been developing a form of art that he terms “soft performance.” The three artworks— I Simply Appear in the Company of… (2012), The Un-erasable (2012), and Almost Avant-Garde (2013)—employ three different ways of examining the relationship between artistic...