You won’t be sidestepping spray-can-toting graffiti artists, wayfaring buskers, street-side performers or wild-haired poets handing out flyers but there's enough creativity in Shanghai to keep you fired up and traditional Chinese arts are well covered.
Even if the city’s artistic output remains limited, a growing gallery and art-museum scene makes Shanghai a vibrant place to join the learning curve for contemporary Chinese art. For political and cultural reasons, Shanghai is creatively rather straight-laced and it’s rare to see art – such as such as graffiti or street art – that lives beyond the well-defined, clinical gallery environment.
Notable contemporary Shanghainese artists working across a large spectrum of styles include Pu Jie, with his colourful pop-art depictions of Shanghai, video-installation artists Shi Yong and Hu Jieming, and Hangzhou-born Sun Liang. Wu Yiming creates calmer, more impressionistic works, while Ding Yi is a significant abstract artist whose works employ a repetitive use of crosses. Also look out for works by graphic-design artist Guan Chun, and the diverse works of Chen Hangfeng and Yang Yongliang, which draw inspiration from the techniques and imagery of traditional Chinese painting.
After sizing up contemporary directions in art at the Bund-side Rockbund Art Museum – itself a definitive art deco gem – your next stop should be eclectic M50, Shanghai’s most cutting-edge and left-field art zone, housed in warehouses near Suzhou Creek. It's the city's equivalent of Beijing's path-breaking 798 Art District. Standout innovative galleries at M50 include island6 and ShanghART. In People’s Park, the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA Shanghai) is a stimulating venue for art-watching. The collection at the now defunct China Art Museum – formerly housed in the Shanghai Race Club building next to People's Park – has moved to the China Art Palace in the former World Expo Site, in Pudong. Its brazen new home is colossal, but the permanent collection is largely anodyne, although international exhibitions have been a success. The Shanghai Gallery of Art, at well-heeled Three on the Bund, is a spacious venue for cerebral and frequently enticing art works.
A stroll around the quaint alleys of Tianzifang rewards with a smattering of galleries, including the excellent photographic gallery Beaugeste, and a host of small art galleries.
The huge art-centre complex known as Red Town, near Jiaotong University, focuses on contemporary sculpture, and the thought-provoking displays at the Minsheng Art Museum are a standout. The Shanghai Chinese Painting Institute at 197 Yueyang Rd also occasionally hosts major exhibitions.
Further afield, check to see what’s on at the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art in Hongkou and earmark a trip to the Gallery Magda Danysz.
In Pudong, the Himalayas Museum, in the organically designed Himalayas Center, is a neat environment for showcasing contemporary art trends.
The hulking yet forward-thinking Power Station of Art (in the 41,000-sq-metre former Nanshi Power Plant) near the Huangpu River is the new venue for the Shanghai Biennale, held in November every two years since 1996. Related fringe shows spring up around the same time, and are often of more interest. Outside Biennale years, the China International Arts Festival is an event held in November that brings traditional and modern (Western and Chinese) art, artists and galleries together.
The Shanghai Museum puts traditional Chinese art under one roof, with a rare and extensive collection of ancient bronzes, Buddhist sculpture, ceramics, paintings, calligraphy, furniture, ancient jade and ethnic culture. For enthusiasts, an entire day here will only scratch the surface. The Shanghai Arts & Crafts Museum is an entertaining and informative choice, with displays of embroidery, paper cutting, lacquer work and jade cutting, with skilled craftsmen and women creating pieces on the spot. For iridescent glassware, the Liuli China Museum has an exquisite collection. Brash propaganda art from the Mao era is the focus of the riveting Propaganda Poster Art Centre, while the foyer of the Jumeirah Himalayas Hotel in Pudong is a virtual art gallery of traditional Chinese paintings.
More traditional art comes from the southern suburb of Jinshan, which has its own school of untrained ‘peasant’ painters who have been producing colourful and vibrant paintings for years. Their works have roots in local embroidery designs and contain no perspective; the themes are mostly rural and domestic scenes full of details of everyday life. You can see a selection of paintings from the Jinshan area in several shops in the Old Town’s Old Street, or you can head out to Jinshan itself. The Suzhou Museum in Suzhou also has a magnificent collection of traditional Chinese art and is one of the highlights of the town. The new Suzhou Art Museum is another impressive space for landscapes, calligraphy and (some modern) Chinese art.
Although calligraphy (shufa) has a place among most languages that employ alphabets, the art of calligraphy in China is taken to unusual heights of intricacy and beauty. Although Chinese calligraphy is beautiful in its own right, the complex infatuation Chinese people have for their written language helps elucidate their great respect for the art.
Chinese calligraphy is the trickiest of China’s arts to comprehend for Western visitors, unless they have a sound understanding of written Chinese. The beauty of a Chinese character may be partially appreciated by a Western audience, but for a full understanding it is also essential to understand the meaning of the character in context.
There are five main calligraphic scripts – seal script, clerical script, semicursive script, cursive script and standard script – each of which reflects the style of writing of a specific era. Seal script, the oldest and most complex, was the official writing system during the Qin dynasty and has been employed ever since in the carving of the seals and name chops (stamps carved from stone) that are used to stamp documents. Expert calligraphers have a preference for using full-form characters (fantizi) rather than their simplified variants (jiantizi).
Aesthetics & Politics
In reflection of the Chinese character, Chinese aesthetics have traditionally been marked by restraint and understatement, a preference for oblique references over direct explanation, vagueness in place of specificity and an avoidance of the obvious in place of a fondness for the veiled and subtle. Traditional Chinese aesthetics sought to cultivate a reserved artistic impulse, principles that compellingly find their way into virtually every Chinese art form, from painting to sculpture, ceramics, calligraphy, film, poetry, literature and beyond.
As one of the central strands of the world’s oldest civilisation, China’s aesthetic tradition is tightly embroidered within Chinese cultural identity. For millennia, Chinese aesthetics were highly traditionalist and, despite coming under the influence of occupiers from the Mongols to the Europeans, defiantly conservative. It was not until the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the genesis of the New Culture Movement that China’s great artistic traditions began to rapidly transform. In literature the stranglehold of classical Chinese loosened to allow breathing space for baihua (colloquial Chinese) and a progressive new aesthetic began to flower, ultimately leading to revolutions in all of the arts, from poetry to painting, theatre and music.
It is hard to square China’s great aesthetic traditions with the devastation inflicted upon them since 1949. Confucius advocated the edifying role of music and poetry in shaping human lives, but 5th-century philosopher Mozi was less enamoured with them, seeing music and other arts as extravagant and wasteful. The communists took this a stage further, enlisting the arts as props in their propaganda campaigns and permitting the vandalism and destruction of much traditional architecture and heritage. Many of China’s traditional skills (such as martial-arts lineages) and crafts either died out or went into decline during the Cultural Revolution. Many of these arts have yet to recover fully from this deterioration, even though ‘opening up’ and reform prompted a vast influx of foreign artistic concepts.
Energised by a vibrant literary scene, Shanghai in the 1920s and '30s cast itself as a veritable publishing-industry hub. Sheltered from the censorship of Nationalists and warlords by the foreign settlements, and stimulated by the city’s new-fangled modernity and flood of foreign ideas, Shanghai hosted a golden era in modern Chinese literature.
Shanghai Fiction
ACandy, Mian Mian (2003) – A hip take on modern Shanghai life, penned by a former heroin addict musing on complicated sexual affairs, suicide and drug addiction in Shenzhen and Shanghai. Applauded for its urban underground tone, but sensational more for its framing of postadolescent themes in contemporary China.
AYears of Red Dust: Stories of Shanghai, Qiu Xiaolong (2010) – Twenty three short stories set against a backdrop of Shanghai through the decades and in the context of momentous historic events affecting the city and the inhabitants of Red Dust Lane.
AEmpire of the Sun, JG Ballard (1984) – An astonishingly well-written and poignant tale based on the author’s internment as a child in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Shanghai, and subsequently made into a film by Steven Spielberg.
ARules for Virgins, Amy Tan (2013) This 42-page e-novella sensuously explores the life of an apprentice courtesan in 1912 Shanghai.
AMaster of Rain, Tom Bradby (2003) – Atmospheric, noir-ish detective story set in the swinging Shanghai of the '20s. ‘Pockmarked’ Huang, a brutally murdered Russian prostitute, and a naive British investigator come together for a real page-turner.
AMidnight, Mao Dun (1933) – In the opening scene of Midnight, conservative Confucian Old Man Wu visits his son’s home in Shanghai. The sight of modern women in high-slit skirts and revealing blouses literally shocks him to death. A famed presentation of the social mores of 1920s Shanghai.
AShanghai: Electric and Lurid City, Barbara Baker (1998) – An excellent anthology of more than 50 passages of writing about Shanghai, from its pre-treaty port days to the eve of the 21st century.
AShanghai Girls, Lisa Lee (2010) – A moving novel about two beautiful sisters whose lives as high-flying models in 1930s Shanghai are transformed when their father decides to repay his gambling debts by selling the pair to a family in Los Angeles. The book's acclaimed sequel is Dreams of Joy (2012).
AFive Star Billionaire, Tash Aw (2013) Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Malaysian author Tash Aw's third novel explores the fortunes of four ambitious Malaysian new arrivals to Shanghai.
AThe Distant Land of My Father, Bo Caldwell (2002) – A moving portrayal of the relationship between a daughter and father, and of betrayal and reconciliation, commencing in 1930s Shanghai.
AThe Painter from Shanghai, Jennifer Cody Epstein (2008) – Highly acclaimed debut novel based on the remarkable life of child-prostitute-turned-painter Pan Yuliang.
AThe Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai, Han Bangqing (1892) – Delving deeply into the lives of courtesans and prostitutes in fin-de-siecle Shanghai, this absorbing novel was first published in 1892 but only recently translated into English.
AWhen Red is Black, Qiu Xiaolong (2004) – A realistic detective story that packs plenty of literary muscle. This is a follow-up Inspector Chen novel (see Death of a Red Heroine) and a great snapshot of the changing city seen through Chinese eyes.
AWhen We Were Orphans, Kazuo Ishiguro (2000) – Subtle and absorbing portrayal of an English detective who sets out to solve the case of his parents’ disappearance in Shanghai, climaxing in war-shattered Hongkou.
Although born in Shaoxing, Lu Xun (1881-1936), China’s greatest modern writer, lived in Shanghai from 1927 until his death of tuberculosis. One of the first founders of the Shanghai-based League of Left-Wing Writers, the highly influential modernist author dragged Chinese literature into the modern era.
Until Lu Xun’s radical Diary of a Madman in 1918, literary Chinese had been conceived in classical Chinese, a language that represented not Chinese as it was spoken or thought, but as it was communicated by the educated scholarly class. Classical Chinese was a terse, dry and inflexible language that bore little relevance to the real lives of Chinese people. Lu Xun’s decision to write his story in vernacular Chinese was a revolutionary act that instantly transformed the literary paradigms of the day, and helped underpin the New Culture Movement (Xin Wenhua Yundong) which sought to challenge traditional Chinese culture.
Lu Xun’s most famous work, the 1921 novella The True Story of Ah Q (Q, A Q Zhengzhuan) – a satirical look at early 20th-century China – is considered a modern masterpiece and was the first piece of literature to entirely utilise vernacular Chinese. Admirers of Lu Xun can visit his Shanghai residence.
Writers were not immune to political dangers; Lu Xun’s friend Rou Shi was murdered by the Kuomintang in February 1931.
Mao Dun (real name Shen Yanbing; 1896-1981), an active leftist writer in the 1930s, penned Midnight (Ziye), one of the most famous novels about Shanghai. Rainbow (1929), by the same author, tells the tale of a young girl from a traditional family background who travels to Shanghai on a journey of political awakening.
Ding Ling, whose most famous work is The Diary of Miss Sophie, lived in Shanghai, as did for a time the writers Yu Dafu and Ba Jin.
Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing; 1920–95) is one of the writers most closely connected to Shanghai, certainly among overseas Chinese. Born in Shanghai, she lived in the city only from 1942 to 1948 before moving to Hong Kong and then the USA. Seeped in the city’s details and moods, her books capture the essence of Shanghai. Chang’s most famous books include The Rouge of the North, The Faded Flower, Red Rose and White Rose, The Golden Lock and Love in a Fallen City. Her 1979 novella Lust, Caution was made into an award-winning film directed by Ang Lee (director of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain) in 2007.
Contemporary voices are more sparse. The most respected Shanghai writer today is Wang Anyi (b 1954), whose bestselling novels (in China) include Love on a Barren Mountain, Baotown and Song of Everlasting Sorrow, the latter following a Shanghainese beauty-pageant winner through four decades from the 1940s. Wang also co-wrote the script for Chen Kaige’s film Temptress Moon.
More recently, several high school drop-outs gained notoriety, beginning with Mian Mian (b 1970), who vividly described the marginalised underbelly of China in Candy. To date this remains her only novel translated into English.
Increasingly known in the West is writer/rally driver/musician/blogger Han Han (b 1982), who skyrocketed to fame before his 18th birthday with his novel The Third Gate, a searing critique of China’s educational system. He inspired awe and disgust simultaneously by turning down a scholarship to the prestigious Fudan University in order to race cars in Beijing. Today, Han Han’s highly influential blogs are among the most widely read in China.
Sprinkled with snippets from the Shanghai dialect (but as yet untranslated), Wang Xiaoying’s Song of a Long Street (2010) is a vivid portrait of the textures and grain of everyday life in a Shanghai backstreet.
Translated into English, Vicissitudes of Life (2010) is a collection of stories from contemporary Shanghai writers, including Wang Xiaoying, Qiu Maoru and Wang Jiren.
As with Chinese film, fiction dealing with contemporary Shanghai is far less successful at filling bookstore shelves than historically set novels. Historical fiction is a safer and far more popular publishing choice, meaning voices on contemporary issues are more marginalised.
Shanghai writers today share a common despair about the loss of the Shanghai dialect while having to compose in Mandarin (Shanghainese is not written down).
Shanghai had a buzzing live-music scene in the 1930s, featuring everything from jazz divas to emigre Russian troubadours, but the contemporary scene has been long dominated by Filipino cover bands and saccharine-sweet Canto-pop. Things are changing, though, and while Shanghai’s live-music scene still lags behind Beijing’s, there are some cracking venues in town where you can catch local bands, the best of which are Yuyintang and MAO Livehouse. The sci-fi styled Mercedes Benz Arena in Pudong is the venue for big-name international and Chinese solo artists and bands, including Taylor Swift, The Rolling Stones, Jennifer Lopez, Jessie J, Bruno Mars and Jacky Cheung. Look out for the JUE Festival, a music and art festival held in Beijing and Shanghai in March. Held in Pudong in April, the Shanghai Midi Festival is three days of live music and DJs.
Singing and writing in Shanghainese, Top Floor Circus, who play anything from folk to punk, are legendary on the Shanghai music scene. If they’re playing while you’re in town, do your best to get a ticket. Others worth checking out include Pinkberry (rock), rockers Da Bei, all-girl band Bigger Xifu, blues band Joker, indie band FAF (Forget & Forgive) and rock band Nomad's Land. Torturing Nurse, meanwhile, who make unusual and extremely loud sounds rather than music as such, are China’s leading ‘noise’ band.
Shanghai’s once world-famous jazz scene isn’t quite as snappy as it was, but there are still a number of places around town where you can sample the sounds of the 1930s. Cotton Club and JZ Club are the best choices; the latter has a popular branch in Hangzhou.
The erhu is a two-stringed fiddle that is tuned to a low register, providing a soft, melancholy tone. The huqin is a higher-pitched two-stringed viola. The yueqin, a sort of moon-shaped four-stringed guitar, has a soft tone and is used to support the erhu. Other instruments you may come across are the sheng (reed flute), pipa (lute), guzheng (zither) and xiao (vertical flute). A good place to hear free traditional music performances is the Shanghai Guqin Cultural Foundation or at a performance of Chinese opera.
The Shanghai Conservatory of Music is a prestigious clearing house of Chinese talent. One of its most famous former students is Liao Changyong, a world-class baritone who has performed with Placido Domingo, among others. Other famous classical-music venues include the Shanghai Concert Hall and the Oriental Art Center.
Chinese opera, best known for Beijing opera (Jingju), has a rich and continuous history of some 900 years. Evolving from a convergence of comic and ballad traditions in the Northern Song period, the art brought together a disparate range of forms: acrobatics, martial arts, poetic arias and stylised dance.
Operas were usually performed by travelling troupes, who had a low social status in traditional Chinese society. Chinese law forbade mixed-sex performances, forcing actors to act out roles of the opposite sex. Opera troupes were frequently associated with homosexuality in the public imagination, contributing further to their lowly status.
Formerly, opera was performed mostly on open-air stages in markets, streets, teahouses or temple courtyards.
More than 100 varieties of opera coexist in China today, including Shanghainese opera (Huju), sometimes called flower-drum opera, which is sung in the local dialect and has its origins in the folk songs of Pudong. Yueju opera (Yueju) was born in and around Shaoxing County in neighbouring Zhejiang (the ancient state of Yue) province in the early 20th century. Yueju roles are normally played by women. Kunju opera (Kunju) or Kunqu opera (Kunqu) originates from Kunshan, near Suzhou in neighbouring Jiangsu.
Actors portray stylised stock characters who are instantly recognisable to the audience. Most stories are derived from classical literature and Chinese mythology and tell of disasters, natural calamities, intrigues or rebellions. The musicians usually sit on the stage in plain clothes and play without written scores.
China’s most legendary 20th-century opera star was Mei Lanfang, who allegedly performed privately for several of Shanghai’s gangland bosses in the 1930s. The most central venue for appreciating Chinese opera in Shanghai is the Yifu Theatre on Fuzhou Rd.
The lower Yangzi region has a long tradition of storytelling, farce, comic talk and mimicking, all of which were traditionally performed in teahouses. Hangzhou and Suzhou have their own variants. Pingtan balladry is a mix of pinghua (Suzhou-style storytelling) and tanci (ballad singing), accompanied by the pipa (lute) and sanxian (banjo). You can hear samples of various Chinese operas and pingtan at the Shanghai History Museum in Pudong, or at the Pingtan Museum in Suzhou.
The first screening of any film in China illuminated the garden of a Shanghai teahouse in 1896, when Spanish entrepreneur Galen Bocca showed a series of one-reel films to astonished audiences. The city’s first cinema opened up in 1908, but before films could reach their glamorous peak in the 1930s, film-makers had to convince the distrustful Shanghainese that it was worth their hard-earned cash. Soon hooked, the city boasted more than 35 cinemas and more than 140 film companies by 1930. Shanghai’s teahouse culture began to feel the pinch, along with a host of traditional performing arts.
The 1932 Japanese bombing of the Shanghai district of Hongkou had a big effect on the industry, prompting a patriotic fervour epitomised by films coming out of the Lianhua Studio, with its close connections to Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalist Party.
Shanghai’s golden age of film-making reached its peak in 1937 with the release of Street Angel, a powerful drama about two sisters who flee the Japanese in northeast China and end up as prostitutes in Shanghai, and Crossroads, a clever comedy about four unemployed graduates. There was still time, however, after WWII and before the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took over in 1949, for a final flowering. A Spring River Flows East, dubbed the Gone with the Wind of Chinese cinema, and Springtime in a Small Town, another wartime tear jerker, remain popular films today.
China’s film industry was stymied after the Communist Revolution, which sent film-makers scurrying to Hong Kong and Taiwan, where they played key roles in building up the local film industries that flourished there. Chinese film-makers need to work against a system of censorship that famous director Feng Xiaogang has termed 'ridiculous'. Today’s movie-goers are scarce, as DVD piracy and internet downloads upset the economics of domestic film-making.
More innovative film studios in Xi’an and Beijing have captured much of the international acclaim of contemporary Chinese film. Co-productions have been more successful for the Shanghai Film Studios, which in 2001 moved from its central location in Xujiahui to the far-western city district of Songjiang.
One critical success was The Red Violin, a coproduction between Canada and Shanghai. Shanghai-born Vivian Wu (Wu Junmei; The Last Emperor, The Pillow Book) returned to her native city with her husband, director Oscar L Costo, in order to focus on their production company, MARdeORO Films. It produced the well-received Shanghai Red, starring Wu and Ge You (Farewell My Concubine, To Live), in 2006. Another actress hailing from Shanghai is Joan Chen (Chen Chong), who started her career at the Shanghai Film Studios in the late 1970s.
Shanghai’s independent films are scarce. Look out for Ye Lou’s Suzhou River (Suzhou He) and Andrew Chen’s Shanghai Panic (Women Haipa). Both were shot with digital cameras and are notable for showing a decidedly unglamorous and more realistic side of the city.
Chen Yifei’s 1920s period drama The Barber (aka The Music Box) was released posthumously in 2006, while Taiwanese-born Oscar-winning director Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain) released Lust, Caution in 2007. A controversial tale of sex and espionage set in WWII Shanghai, based on the 1979 novella by Eileen Chang, the award-winning film was heavily censored for its mainland China release. Wayne Wang's 2011 release Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is partly set in contemporary Shanghai, with scenes set in the Peninsula Hotel, among other locations.
The Shanghainese have the reputation of being the most fashionable people in China. ‘There’s nothing the Cantonese won’t eat', one version of a popular Chinese saying goes, ‘and nothing the Shanghainese won’t wear.’ The generation gap is perhaps starker here, though, than anywhere else: you’re still quite likely to see locals wandering around their neighbourhood dressed in very comfortable (but extremely uncool) pyjamas and slippers, but Shanghai has breathtaking, voguish pockets and young Shanghai women ooze glamour in even the cheapest skirts and blouses.
On the street, Chinese-language lifestyle magazines such as Shanghai Tatler, Elle, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Marie Claire crowd every corner newsstand. Christian Dior, Gucci and Louis Vuitton shops glut Shanghai’s top-end malls, while trendy boutiques line French Concession streets such as Changle Rd, Xinle Rd and Nanchang Rd.
Shanghai still has a long way to go just to catch up with its own 1930s fashion scene, however, when images of Chinese women clad in figure-hugging qipao (cheongsam) gave rise to its epithet as the ‘Paris of the East’.
Shanghai Fashion Week (www.shanghaifashionweek.com) is a biannual event showcasing the work of local, national and international designers. There is also the city-sponsored, month-long International Fashion Culture Festival in March or April.
China lays claim to a bewildering range of martial-arts styles, from the flamboyant and showy, inspired by the movements of animals or insects (such as Praying Mantis Boxing), to schools empirically built upon the science of human movement (eg Wing Chun). Some pugilists stress a mentalist approach while others put their money on physical power. On the outer fringes are the esoteric arts, abounding with metaphysical feats, arcane practices and closely guarded techniques.
Many fighting styles were once secretively handed down for generations within families and it is only relatively recently that outsiders have been accepted as students. Some schools, especially the more obscure styles, have been driven to extinction partly due to their exclusivity.
Unlike Western fighting arts – such as Savate, kickboxing, boxing, wrestling etc – Chinese martial arts are deeply impregnated with religious and philosophical values. Closely linked to martial arts is the practice of qigong, a technique for cultivating and circulating qi around the body. Qi can be developed for use in fighting to protect the body, as a source of power, or for curative and health-giving purposes.
Shanghai’s parks are good places to go to look for teachers of taichi and wushu (martial arts), although language may be a barrier. Check the listings of entertainment magazines such as That’s Shanghai, City Weekend or Time Out Shanghai for classes, or check for courses at the Longwu Kung Fu Center, the Wuyi Chinese Kungfu Centre or the Mingwu International Kungfu Club.