When ShanghArt Gallery opened its doors in Shanghai in 1996, it was one of the first contemporary art galleries in China. Today, the gallery operates from two spaces in the city (West Bund and Putuo District), with additional locations in Beijing and Singapore.
Read MoreCommitted to furthering the practice of contemporary art both at home and abroad, ShanghART Gallery encourages dialogue and research through its vast library at ShanghART West Bund and ShanghART Videotheque, a collection of nearly 600 contemporary video works that was founded in 2008.
ShanghART Gallery represents contemporary Chinese and Chinese-born artists across generations. Senior artists include David Diao, a New York based painter recognised for his abstract works; Geng Jianyi, a pioneer of the 85 New Wave Movement—an avantgarde art movement that swept across China between 1985 and 1989, with a drive for new themes, media, and subject matter; and key players of Political Pop—which emerged in the 1990s and gained attention for combining western pop art with Chinese traditional iconography as a way of extending social critique—such as Li Shan, Wang Guangyi, and Yu Youhan.
Many of the younger Chinese artists represented by ShanghART Gallery work with the photographic or video medium, among them Toronto-based Liang Yue, who employs easily accessible materials; Yang Fudong, renowned for his dreamlike, often fragmented films that explore the social-political conditions of contemporary China; and Sun Xun, whose animated films—consisting of hand-drawn monochrome ink paintings and drawings—engage with alternative narratives.
Among the international artists on the gallery roster are the Indonesian-born Melati Suryodarmo, whose research of the body manifests as photography, performance, and video; Thai artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose films explore personal and collective memories; and Arin Rungjang, also hailing from Thailand, who often works with video and installation to consider unknown histories and the relationship between personal and public recollections of the past.
An active player at international art fairs, ShanghART Gallery participates in ART021 Shanghai; The Armory Show; Art Basel; Art Basel Hong Kong; Art Taipei; Art Yangtze; Photofairs Shanghai; and West Bund Art & Design, among others.
The winning film, Memoria, was inspired by the filmmaker's experience of Exploding Head Syndrome.
Since Beijing-based UCCA Center for Contemporary Art announced a new satellite museum in 2019, the opening of UCCA Edge in Shanghai has been hotly anticipated.
The Julia Stoschek Collection and the online platform Daata are collaborating to present 112 time-based works by leading contemporary artists online, open to the public and free for all.
The list remains overwhelmingly dominated by people, institutions and movements in the Western world.
Who was Lynn Hershman Leeson between 1965 and 1994? The Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M) in Móstoles, a city just southwest of Madrid, is showing First Person Plural, focusing on three decades of Hershman Leeson's oeuvre. The exhibition pivots on questions of identity, technology, and the female, or rather woman-identified, body.
Indie Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul has won the £40,000 Artes Mundi contemporary art prize. The judges said his film Invisibility was 'a powerful weapon in these turbulent times'. The 48-year-old gave a UK premiere to his dream-like work, projected over two screens and showing two figures rising from their beds in separate rooms....
Apichatpong Weerasethakul's house in northern Thailand is a luscious jungle paradise full of polished concrete and teak, palm trees and bamboo. Even the air smells zen. The house's three gatekeepers, Dracula, King Kong and Vampire, do little to disturb the peace. They are pugs – named because Weerasethakul loves horror movies – who have a...
Melati Suryodarmo's greatest asset is her Javanese dance- and butoh-trained body, the limits of which she explores in durational performances. The latter range from full-sprint displays of power (as in her best-known work, Exegie - Butter Dance, 2000, in which she dances and skids on blocks of butter), to periods of deep meditative surrender (in...
'Huihua dianying' or 'Painting as a film', a concept that Yang Fudong has been developing for years, evolves in this exhibition as the main way to investigate the spiritual landscape of people. Works on display span painting, photography to video installation, and intend to reconstruct the narrative structure of viewing. The title of the...
The search for identity in socially and politically evolving China characterizes Zeng Fanzhi's work. Often compared to the German Expressionists, his vivid brushstrokes have made him the most high-valued Asian artist working today ( The Last Supper, inspired by Leonardo da Vinci's 15th-century mural of the same name, sold for $23.3 million at a...
