Shanghai, long known as mainland China’s most cosmopolitan city, is today a global cultural capital. This book offers the first in-depth examination of contemporary Shanghai-based art and design – from state-sponsored exhibitions to fashionable cultural complexes to cutting edge films and installations. Informed by years of in-situ research, the book looks beyond contemporary art’s global hype to reveal the socio-political tensions accompanying Shanghai’s transitions from semi-colonial capitalism to Maoist socialism to Communist Party-sponsored capitalism. Case studies reveal how Shanghai’s global aesthetic constructs glamorising artifices that mask the conflicts between vying notions of foreign-influenced modernity and anti-colonialist nationalism, as well as the city’s repressed socialist past and its consumerist present.
Table of Content
Introduction: Locating global contemporary art in global China
1 From the ruins of heaven on earth
2 Shanghai’s art in fashion
3 Biennialization-as-banalization, promotion and resistance
4 Installing a world city
From Shanghai to New York by way of conclusion
Epilogue: forgotten corners
Index
About the author
Jenny Lin is Associate Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Southern California
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