It has taken place since 2003, with a schedule that was pushed back one year in 2008 to coincide with the Beijing Olympics.
The biannual schedule was offset by one year to coincide with the Beijing Olympic Games, and borrowed from its theme.
According to the curator Wang Yong, this showed both recent trends in Chinese art, and the reawakened global interest in painting.
Internationally, this Biennale was not widely noted; in Art in America it was criticized as a "lackluster overview exhibition" that featured "hastily commissioned paintings of heroic Chinese soldiers", while contemporary, avant-garde art from China was only seen in exhibitions of private galleries.
A prize was awarded for an Olympic Sport image, Die Springer, by Sandra Ackermann.