Catching a glimpse of the contemporary Chinese art

ShanghART was founded by a Swiss national Lorenz Helbling, who happened to move to the city in 1995. Mr. Helbling launched his first gallery in 1996 when the inaugural biennale was held. His first halt was at the Shanghai Centre. He recounts in an interview:

“When we opened, anything more than a painting in a hotel gift shop was considered exotic. There was only one art museum, and only one art show every few months. It was a totally different world. It was a totally different city. The ring road had just opened and Pudong didn’t exist. It was only in the ’90s that Shanghai really started building highways and skyscrapers.”

Every other autumn, at around this time of the year, visitors flock to Shanghai city to catch a glimpse of the Chinese contemporary art. They are keen to gape at the strange, large sized installations so much in vogue. The tradition started with the 1996 state-run biennale, and took shape with an explosion of private galleries, studios, museums, and now an art fair.

Both the Zendai MOMA and the MOCA Shanghai, followed by the city’s prime art fair, ShContemporary, in the year 2007. Two more private museums were opened in Shanghai this year. The Minsheng Art Museum had its first official show earlier this year. It was a retrospective encompassing three decades of modern & contemporary Chinese art. Just about a month later the Rockbund Art Museum was thrown open to people. It’s housed in a quaint 19th-century building just along Suzhou Creek, in a stretch of historic structures off the Bund district’s northern end.

The ShanghART gallery opened in October what it termed a ‘warehouse-style museum’ in a large 3,000-square-meter space in Taopu, just northwest of Shanghai. Technically, it’s not a museum - everything here is for sale - but its scope and size give it the feel of one.