Shanghai Art and Creativity

Once a center of industry, Shanghai now produces the finer things of life

By Patricia Mohr@

If you look for beauty and art, you will find it. That is just as true in Shanghai as it is in other vibrant cities.

The place to go is the Art Scene Warehouse on Moganshan Road in Northwest Shanghai, near the Jade Budda Temple. It is where you can find grand paintings and sculptures by emerging and established contemporary artists. It is a large space that offers plenty of room to roam and admire good art.

Once an industrial factory, the collection of galleries represents Shanghai’s progression from a 20th Century industrial center to an aesthetic, trade, services and business center. Once covered with grease and ash, the walls now shine bright white. Original structural features, such as the huge pipes that hang overhead, provide a sense of historical integrity. The past is not hidden; it is embraced as truth. Beauty rises up from it and in it.

Art arises from industry

It was Abraham Maslow, the mid-20th Century humanistic psychologist who said that human motivation is based on a hierarchy of needs, beginning with survival instincts and progressing to self-actualization.

Maslow suggests that a person must first master his need for physical survival, safety, love and esteem before pursuing creative goals. The highest goal of self-actualization is striving to become everything you are capable of becoming. Maslow’s theory does not seem to square with the concept of starving artists or with prehistoric cave depictions, but there is something about it that rings true.

China is often referred in the global context as an industrial power. As a major manufacturer and exporter, China does more for less. (Hence, the “China price” defined.) The criticism against it is that it is often said that China’s economy power comes on the backs of other countries’ innovations. As a society, it does not value individualism and creativity. But that generalization does not take into account China’s progression.

Walking through the Art Scene Warehouse, it becomes clear that many Chinese have mastered the art of surviving and are well established in the art of creating. The warehouse is a story of renewal, and it offers hope to all who might ask whether China can offer more to the world than economic growth. It is more than the world’s largest labor factory. It includes not only people who know how to copy, but people who know how to create. This, too, is the new China.

Art and truth

The “China price” is not present here. The quality of the art work is high, and the prices reflect that quality.

The atmosphere inside the galleries is quiet and calm. The only predominant sound is that of a symphony broadcasted softly in parts of the warehouse. Photos inside the galleries are prohibited, and it is easy to understand why. The artists need to protect their work.

The art itself embraces truth—even truth that much of China would rather ignore. For example, Yu Lin’s “Red Guard” series deals directly with the Cultural Revolution—a sensitive topic considered taboo. The series is particularly striking.

Artist Yu Lin faced the truth about that difficult period in China’s history head on. It’s a story about a violent class struggle, a lost innocence of youth and an annihilation of all cultural and intellectual. Yu Lin’s Red Guard series is painted in bright reds and yellows with bold brush strokes. The depictions are of young soldiers with guns, crowds of people fleeing violence, and bones inside army boots. In truth, the artist finds beauty. In truth, he releases the country from the effect of the Cultural Revolution. In truth, he allows the country to heal.

It seems fitting that that artist approach the topic of the Cultural Revolution, because it was at the end of that era in 1979 that Chinese contemporary art began.

Much of the work at the Art Scene Warehouse is avant-guard, meaning that it is cutting edge and it pushes the boundaries of the cultural norm. The work shows artistic integrity. Creativity and originality are valued. What’s more, the artists have the courage to create what has not yet been created.

Visiting these galleries ensures me that China is capable of inventing its own visions and its own future. It is not a world of smog and noise; it is a world of vibrancy and color. It is a world I want to embrace.