Tower of Babel by Chinese Ding Hao.[Photo provided to China Daily]

"Sanfo said he and his wife were the only foreigners on a flight to Beijing. They were among the very few guests staying at Beijing Hotel," Liu tells China Daily. "Cafes in the hotel and outside were closed, so we drank coffee from a thermos that I brought from my office."

As the virus began to spread, the launch of the biennale looked increasingly tough, he says. The artists' body had prepared for the event for two years.

Their persistence paid off as SARS receded from China, and the first edition of the biennale was held, with some 400 paintings and sculptures of artists from more than 40 countries.

The Beijing biennale came at a time, when there were just a handful such events in the country: Shanghai Biennial, Chengdu Biennial and Guangzhou Triennial, among the major ones. But in the past decade, China witnessed a boom in its art market and an increase in art fairs and expos.

Liu says the trend is such that many art events in China today lack distinguishing features and "have fallen into a rut" as mere copies of overseas fairs, obsessed with so-called avant-garde and conceptual art that the organizers don't seem to truly understand much.

"They are repeating each other. Sometimes they even copy the curatorial ideas of the world's major exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale," he adds.