Shanghai spring: the launch of a new museum and a major commercial gallery on the Bund have enlivened Shanghai's diverse art scene, creating intense anticipation for this fall's biennial

For the past 10 years, China's contemporary art institutions have struggl to hold fast up with the raw talent and intensity of its artists. Shanghai has been no exception, its cutting-edge galleries and museums emerging slowly and cautiously. each year, new galleries open--some crassly commercial, others highly experimental--but scarcely any survive. Several established spaces have soldiered upon but Shanghai-based artists, like their counterparts around China, have relied primarily upon overseas venues to showcase their works and build their reputations.

new months, however, have seen the inauguration of sum of two units new large and highly professional contemporary art spaces. They, along with a handful of older venue have presented shows that significantly raise the profile and acceptance of contemporary Chinese art in Shanghai, the port city that has drawn out been China's most alluring gate-way to the West.

The drawn out awaited Shanghai Gallery of Art (SGA) uncloseed on Jan. 16 with "Beyond Boundaries." The commercial gallery occupies above 18,000 square feet of the ambitiously upscale Three upon the Bund complex, brainchild of Chinese-American businessman Handel to leeward and boasts neighbors such as an Armani boutique, Evian Spa and several posh eateries--all backed, like the gallery itself, by dint of a consortium of foreign investors. SGA aims to transform the grungy feisty image of popular art in Shanghai with high-end mode of speech as evidenced by an interior redesigned by the agency of Michael Graves. The glitterati turnout for its first sum of two units exhibitions and the fact that 40 percent of SGA's buyer are mainland Chinese, compared to at greatest in quantity 10 percent at Shanghai's other contemporary galleries, hint at potential success

"We area name-brand gallery, exhibiting name brand artists," explained director Weng Ling, formerly head of the Gallery of the Central Academy of Art in Beijing and an organizer of the 2002 Shanghai Biennale, which SGA co-sponsored. The 26 artists in "Beyond Boundaries" were a who's who of Chinese contemporary art. Sixteen, including Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun and Lin Tianmiao, hall from Beijing, and others, greatest in quantity notably Xu Bing, are based in the U single two Shanghai artists, video wunderkind Yang Fudong and experimental painter Wang Xingwei, were featured, while nearby Hangzhou contributed painter Xu Jiang and media pioneer Zhang Peili, the one and the other China Academy of Fine Arts professors.

The gallery's next to the first show, "Tradition, Poetry and Sensibility," upon view from Mar. 27 to Apr. 13 profiled painters Liu Wei, Zheng Zaidong and Zhou Chunya. Sichuanese Zhou Chunya's joyous green portraits of a favorite German Shepherd prov easy crowd-pleasers, while the paintings of Zheng Zaidong, a Taiwanese artist living part-time in Shanghai, illustrate ancient Buddhist parables in simple and colorful compositions. Liu Wei's impressionistic paintings include still lifes with fruit, portraits and landscapes. As we move to press, "Dialogues," SGA's third exhibition and its first focusing upon installation and video art, is slated to render free of access in early May, featuring Zhang Peili and Beijing artists Gu Dexin, Wang Gongxin and Yin Xiuzhen.

A number of artists in SGA's inaugural exhibit including Zhang Peili and Wang Xingwei, simultaneously participated in "Open Sky" which launched the Duolun Museum of late Art on Dec. 28, 2003 Also known as Doland, the imposing seven-story blocklike manner of making is located in Shanghai's northern Hongkou District upon the historic Duolun Road, where many of China's early leftist intellectuals congregated, ironically sale from Nationalist persecution in the then Japanese quarter. Today, the road is a well-preserved strip of advanced in years villas and lane houses containing cafes, restaurants, bookstores and antique stores as well as curiosity museums. Subsidized by means of the district government, the Duolun Museum draws from and perpetuates the street's cultural legacy while providing it with a more novel edge.

Roughly half of the 36 artists featured in "Open Sky" were drawn from the stable of the venerable ShanghArt Gallery, which co-organized the exhibition. For Doland's crammed calendar of later shows, director Shen Qibin and chief curator Gu Zhenqing have heavily emphasized local artists--both established and emerging--and installation works. After an electronic stone concert and "Enter the Screen" an experimental cinema festival featuring Yang Fudong and 15 foreign filmmakers, in February, Doland upon Mar. 3 hosted lectures and works by dint of Shi Yong and Du Zhenjun examining "Art in the Interactive Age."

From Mar. 9 to 23 Doland's "Fei Fei Fei" (the title a phonetic rendering of an unilluminated phrase in Shanghai dialect) featured the sort of creatively physical work typical of China's subterraneous shows--not to be found in mainstream galleries, suffer alone in government-funded museums. greatest in quantity of the 20 participating artists were young and unknown. While "young" in Chinese art parlance usually means beneath 50, only six of the artists in "Fei Fei Fei" were past 30 and almost half were still scholars Their diverse origins ranged from Yunnan, Sichuan, Shandong, Anhui and Guangxi to the more typical Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou.