Catalogue
The Shanghai World Expo, opening in 2010, is expected to draw the largest attendance of any world’s fair in history. But, as the theme of the expo— “Better City, Better Life”—suggests, the host city is as much of an attraction as the fair itself.
Shanghai: Art of the City traces, through its art, the development of what is incontestably one of the world’s most intriguing cities, from its mudbank Treaty Port origins to the dynamic, cosmopolitan metropolis of today. Along the way it considers the works of mid and late nineteenth-century artists, Shanghai as a center for creative thinking in the early 1900s, and as an international center for a distinctive style known as Shanghai Deco in the 1930s. It charts the reactions, accommodations, and resistance of artists to the tightly controlled state-sponsored Socialist agitprop of the Cultural Revolution, and the rebound from those restrictions in the late 1970s and 1980s. Finally, it surveys the innovative conceptual and installation artists who are making Shanghai a center for bold new directions in contemporary art today.
Featuring more than a hundred oil paintings, Shanghai Deco furniture and rugs, revolutionary posters, works of fashion, movie clips, and contemporary installations—drawn mainly from the collections of the Shanghai Museum, the Shanghai Art Museum, the Shanghai History Museum, the Lu Xun Memorial Hall, and the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Centre—Shanghai explores the tumultuous history that has resulted in the progressive and stylish city of today, through the mirror of its art. The American poet Ezra Pound once wrote that “The artist is the antenna of the race.” For more than a century and half Shanghai artists have not only been documenting the city's many changes but also leading its way into the future. It is impossible to understand the city without an awareness of its artists, or to understand its art without an awareness of the city’s history. Lavishly illustrated, this volume, for the first time in English, presents an accessible and comprehensive approach to such an understanding.
The catalogue will be available February 2010. Hardcover price is $49, softcover price is $35. It may be ordered from the Asian Art Museum store. To order, call (415) 581-3602 or email shop@asianart.org
