After the West: Contemporary Art in Shanghai

If a trip to Shanghai used to be associated primarily with a metropolis of the future, architecture, shopping, and more affordable luxury, today contemporary art has become a reason to come here in its own right. It quickly becomes clear, however, that speaking of a single “Shanghai art scene” is not entirely appropriate. Over several days, I saw museums that answer the question of what it means to show contemporary art in China in completely different ways. Some try to speak from within their own historical and cultural context. Others deliberately bring Chinese and Western artistic traditions into contact. Still others operate much as they might in Paris, London, or New York.

Asia as Its Own Artistic Frame of Reference

Of all the venues I visited, the Rockbund Art Museum offered a perspective most clearly rooted in an Asian context. It is housed in the former Royal Asiatic Society building, once one of the important scholarly and museum centres of colonial Shanghai, in the area of the former International Settlement.

During the summer, the museum hosted the group exhibition Youth Palace: or, some small acts of self-making. Its starting point was the Chinese Children’s Palace — a form of state-run extracurricular education familiar to several generations and reminiscent of Soviet Pioneers’ Palaces and art clubs. But instead of a nostalgic reconstruction, the museum turned this model into a way of speaking not only about discipline and growing up, but also about a person’s ability to construct their own identity. More than thirty artists and collectives from different countries took part in the exhibition, but the framework for the conversation itself was shaped specifically by the Chinese experience.

What stayed with me in particular was how naturally, alongside very local subjects, feminist self-defence appeared, for example: a video instruction created by an artist and suspended pink-and-blue punching bags. On one of the floors, it was possible to experience the exhibition physically: to climb, interact with the objects, and stop behaving like a disciplined museum visitor.

A completely different Shanghai is 1933 Old Millfun, the former municipal slaughterhouse that today houses an art district with studios and galleries. Compared with the giant institutions of the West Bund, there is less of a sense here that contemporary art is embedded in the city’s larger cultural economy. You can enter small spaces, encounter works of very different levels, and see painting, photography, design, and things that exist somewhere between a commercial gallery and an artist’s studio.

The space makes it possible to see the infrastructure of Shanghai’s artistic life, as well as a particular approach to temporarily turning an urban area into an art cluster before the next stage of construction begins. The district is gradually emptying out while the city decides how to revitalise it. The same thing happened, for example, with part of the West Bund, which largely grew out of the logic of temporarily using former industrial land: artists and galleries occupied the spaces before the next stage of development, and later some of them were forced to close or relocate when construction resumed in the area.

After several days among Rockbund’s enormous installations and the immersive spaces of 1933 Old Millfun, metaphor disappeared in the next museum. In its place were documents, photographs, maps, testimonies, and the names of women. The Museum of Chinese “Comfort Women” History at Shanghai Normal University resembles an open research archive rather than a spectacular exhibition machine. For me, it was here that Shanghai stopped being simply a travel destination and became a space for research: the history of the Japanese military’s system of sexual slavery, concealed behind the euphemism “comfort women,” unexpectedly connected with the Franco-Chinese archives I work with in Lyon, and more broadly with the question of how memory moves between countries.

What remains particularly memorable in the museum itself is the memorial section, where two female figures and an empty chair left beside them create a place for the woman who can no longer be represented or named.

Nearby are other ways of speaking about trauma without directly depicting violence: the silhouette of a butterfly, referring to Korean memory culture, and imprints of women’s feet.

The map of the network of “comfort stations” in Shanghai works in a completely different way; even photographing it is prohibited. Here, the scale of the system becomes visible not through an individual fate but through the geography of the city, where violence appears inscribed into the space of the contemporary metropolis.

Some documents show particularly clearly that this history is not limited to China, Korea, or Japan. The exhibition links early forms of the system to the Japanese military’s organisation of controlled sexual exploitation during the Siberian Intervention, which began in 1918. It also shows separately how bureaucratised the system itself was, and how servicemen’s access was regulated according to rank and military merit. Such details matter precisely because behind the euphemism “comfort women” we begin to see not a series of isolated episodes, but an organised military infrastructure that existed across different territories and left behind an equally transnational memory.

And against the background of contemporary art, this small university museum raises an important question: is it really necessary today to immerse, dazzle, and surround the viewer with an object in order to make them feel something?

Asia in Dialogue with the Global Art Scene

The West Bund Museum is itself built around international exchange: the museum has collaborated with the Centre Pompidou for years, and in 2023 the institutions renewed their partnership for a second five-year phase. But what I liked most was not yet another opportunity to encounter familiar European names in China, but the exhibition Material Matters, which brought together Sheila Hicks and the Chinese artist Shi Hui.

I was afraid that this encounter would be reduced to an opposition between East and West, a “dialogue between two cultures,” and colonial formulas. But the exhibition worked more subtly. The artists were not presented as evidence of one culture influencing another. Both came to fibre, textiles, repetitive manual labour, and the transformation of craft material into a language of contemporary art through their own routes. For Hicks, this is the history of international fiber art from the second half of the twentieth century onward; for Shi Hui, it is a practice that has been developing in China since the 1980s. So a dialogue did emerge, but not around nationality — around material. In this way, the exhibition managed to show two independent artistic systems and allow them to resonate with one another.

With Wallace Chan’s exhibition at the Long Museum, the opposite happened. Wallace Chan: Vessels of Other Worlds unfolded simultaneously in Venice and Shanghai: the European part opened during the Venice Biennale, while the Shanghai presentation opened at the Long Museum. The three central sculptures were enlarged to an architectural scale; one of them literally allowed visitors to step inside the object. It was an incredible shift in scale.

I remember standing inside one of these structures, simultaneously admiring its technical complexity and feeling slightly irritated. Nearby was an even larger object that quite clearly promised the same experience of entering it, but its entrance was closed.

And then something completely different began to occupy my attention. On one of the objects, small childlike figures with unmistakably European faces were moving. Elsewhere, fragments of noses, lips, and eyes appeared — human body parts presented as universal. And this is where a question arose for me: why does the universal human being once again look like someone from the European visual tradition?

For me, the problem is not that a Chinese artist turns to European culture. On the contrary: the exhibition itself was literally constructed between Venice and Shanghai and included Christian symbolism and references to Bosch. Artistic exchange is entirely natural. What is more interesting is something else: what happens to a visual code when it moves into another culture and becomes detached from the discussions that have surrounded it in Europe and the United States for several decades?

Global Art Without an Obligatory Asian Framework

Continuing to think about international dialogue, I went to Fotografiska Shanghai. The main exhibition during my trip was the large retrospective Vivian Maier: Unseen Work: more than two hundred black-and-white and colour photographs, footage shot on 8mm film, and the photographer’s personal belongings. The Shanghai version also included lesser-known images from her travels through Asia, including Hong Kong and Macao.

But alongside the canonical history of American street photography were projects working with Chinese visual archives — including anonymous family photographs rescued from destruction. This constant movement between the well-known global history of photography and local visual material made me look at the medium not through Henri Cartier-Bresson’s idea of the “decisive moment,” with its “universal” perfect image, but as a medium that does not necessarily have to strive for visual polish.

Perhaps the most important discovery was that some Shanghai museums do not need to justify their presence in China every single time. For some reason, when we go to see an American artist in Paris, we are much less likely to ask whether “this exhibition enters into a dialogue with Europe.” And yet we still quite easily expect an Asian museum to somehow display its Asianness.

The Museum of Art Pudong (MAP) was, for me, the clearest example of a large international museum that could exist in practically any major cultural capital.

I happened to see several very different exhibitions at once. Giorgio Morandi. Solo told the hermetic story of an artist who returned for decades to the same bottles, vases, and studio space. In front of me was simply a well-made exhibition of Italian modernism.

On another floor was the enormous retrospective Jean Nouvel: Without the Artist, Architecture Disappears, the first solo exhibition by Nouvel in a building he himself designed. The exhibition covered more than fifty years of his practice, from the Fondation Cartier and the Philharmonie de Paris to projects in China. I found it especially interesting to compare his Shanghai projects with those I know well in Lyon. For Nouvel, the colour red repeatedly becomes a way of intervening in the existing urban environment. At the Lyon Opera, it is a red glow above the historic façade; at Shanghai’s Henderson Cifi Tiandi – The Roof, the culture is completely different and so is the urban context, but the same sharp red remains.

The Power Station of Art, a vast former power station, in turn gives artworks an industrial scale. And yet it was here that I felt Shanghai most strongly not as an “Asian art centre,” but as a city integrated into the same mechanism of major international exhibitions as other global metropolises. There is an important normality in this. Not everything seen in Shanghai has to explain China. Sometimes you simply want to go to a museum and see a major international exhibition without an obligatory cultural framework.

And finally, Fosun Foundation (Shanghai) exists almost on the boundary between art, architecture, and spectacle. The building itself, designed by Foster + Partners and Heatherwick Studio, with its moving façade, is so active that the exhibition inside can easily risk becoming secondary. In terms of its programme, Fosun has long been oriented towards international contemporary art: it has previously hosted exhibitions by Cindy Sherman and Yayoi Kusama.

This is one of Shanghai’s models of an art institution: contemporary art is embedded in new, expensive urban architecture just as naturally as the restaurants, shops, and offices around it.

After this trip, the last thing I want to write is that Shanghai is “the new capital of contemporary art.” The very formulation already contains the idea that there is some Western centre that is now generously prepared to share the status of capital with others. Something else is much more interesting. In Shanghai today, several completely different models of the contemporary museum exist simultaneously. One begins its conversation with the Chinese Children’s Palace. Another places Sheila Hicks and Shi Hui side by side and builds an exhibition around material rather than passports. A third brings in Morandi. A fourth turns the jewellery techniques of a Hong Kong master into ten-metre architecture and connects Shanghai with Venice. A fifth preserves documents about wartime sexual violence and looks more like an archive than a museum.

Perhaps this is precisely why Shanghai is genuinely worth travelling to for contemporary art. The value of such a trip cannot be reduced to searching for “its own version” of what we are used to seeing in Paris or London. Here, it becomes especially clear just how much the very idea of a single centre of contemporary art has ceased to work.