Between market, censorship, and mega city, a vibrant art scene has developed in Shanghai. Schirn Magazine takes a look at it.

Art is flourishing in Shanghai. Since the initiation of meanwhile five art fairs and the Shanghai Biennale in the mid-1990s, the port city has quickly advanced to become one of the most important art metropolises in the world. For two years now, it has been home to China's first national institution of contemporary art, the Power Station of Art. It regularly mounts exhibitions of works by Chinese and international artists; the 10th Shanghai Biennale has just opened there.

The boom is a symptom of a more liberal China since its opening up in the late 1970s. Places at its art academies are no longer strictly regulated. Young artists draw inspiration from Western art and from a Chinese avant-garde that since the 1980s has discovered forms of artistic expression such as photography, video, and installation. However, this triumphal march is primarily a symptom of an economically prosperous China, where art has become a major market.

Shanghai can already boast several art districts. The oldest one is M50. In the course of the economic boom, skyscrapers and postmodern glass palaces shot up in Shanghai--with more than twenty-three million inhabitants, it is one of the most populous cities in the world. Yet in this district, small buildings and storehouses still line the winding alleyways. Some of China's most important galleries, artists' studios, art bookstores, and cozy cafés are located behind the back-alley walls.

One of the first artists to settle in the M50 art district was Ding Yi (*1962), one of the most successful painters in the People's Republic. The old settlements along Wusong River were nearly completely destroyed as modernization progressed, he says; the buildings here were only preserved because artists had rented or bought them. Ding Yi is one of the few artists in China to have consistently pursued concrete, abstract painting since the 1980s. Strict compositions with vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines cover his canvases. Small crosses form patterns that are also reminiscent of the mega city's skyline. In a series in which he employed fluorescent paints, he says that he made conscious reference to the illuminated façades and the climbing stock market prices in the new Shanghai.

One of the most prominent galleries in the M50 art district is ShangART. It is currently presenting the exhibition "Blissful as Gods" with works by Xu Zhen (*1977), including wall objects and sculptures assembled out of leather fetish products that recall paintings, such as an alabaster-white Classicist figure of a woman swaying in the countless arms of a gold-colored Far Eastern deity--the artist allegorizes not only how China is moving more into line economically with the Western world but is also dealing with it in cultural terms. Several years ago, Xu Zhen, in Germany probably the most well known Chinese artist, had a studio built in Shanghai. The authorities had it torn down shortly before he went to prison for several months for alleged tax fraud. His works are still systematically removed from Chinese exhibitions.

Besides galleries, private museums in particular are fueling the art boom in Shanghai. For example, the Minsheng Art Museum, financed by a bank, opened its doors just this last November. Its first exhibition is a group show with a hundred works by more than fifty artists from over ten different countries: superlatives have long since found their way into China's art world. The Himalayas Art Museum, situated in the middle of a shopping mall, is currently presenting a retrospective with abstract works by the Irish painter Sean Scully.

Works produced by the new Chinese avant-garde since the 1980s are also on view in Shanghai in survey exhibitions, for example at the Yuz Museum, where the Indonesian-Chinese patron of the arts Budi Tak is presenting his notable collection. Especially worth seeing are several extensive installations, for instance Huang Yongping's "Tower Snake" from 2009, a walk-through python skeleton made half out of bamboo, a traditional Chinese building material, and half out of steel, a material that is associated with the West and modernity.

The work "Freedom" by the artist couple Sun Yuan and Peng Yu also leaves behind an impression. The installation from 2009 consists of a meters high, rusty steel container. The viewer looks through windows at a hose inside rearing up like a cobra. Jerking wildly, it spits out an extremely high-pressure jet of water that unnervingly lashes against the walls and the windows of the container. "Freedom" communicates the conditions of art production in modern China in an oppressive way. Here, a hungry generation of new artists spurred by the market encounters governmental control and censorship.