Gallery 1
Ken and Aili, friends of a friend of my Aunt Anne’s, introduced me to the budding art community in Shanghai. Formerly an industrial area, the district is home to several art galleries and workshops. The artist featured above created his red and gray paintings out of tessellations of women and babies to glorify the purest forms of life.
Gallery 1
Some of the art was political. Mao’s distinctive outline can be seen in red at the far end.
Gallery 1
Most of the paintings had Chinese themes and were aimed at capturing peaceful laughter. This European one stuck out from the rest enough that you could feel her expression, as if a live human were hidden among the paintings.
Gallery 2
Aside from a very graphic gay-lesbian gallery that we briefly entered, this gallery was the most nude. Pictured above are naked coal workers whose figures are meant to disturb the viewer.
Gallery 2
Almost all the paintings featured men either being dehumanized by their labor or injured by their machines.
Gallery 3
Upon seeing this piece of artwork, the friend we were traveling with exclaimed in Mandarin, “when you buy this expensive painting, you pay for just this, this, and this,” while leaping and pointing to the two blotches of ink and one strand of real hair adhered to the canvas.
Gallery 4
The style of this gallery utilized steel and small mechanical parts to make creatures. Large metal insects clung like real ones to the windows.
Front Doorstep of the Art District
Just outside of the gallery, a man was trying to pull a tree down with his foot braced against a wooden pole and a fellow worker hacking at the tree base with a pick axe. Even in the removed art district, it was impossible to escape the ongoing construction.
Roots?
This large stump was leaning against one of the studios. If you looked closely …
Roots + Art
you could make out the carving at the center.
Graffiti
Even the graffiti outside was beautiful and fit well into the artistic setting and old industrial buildings.
Gallery 5
This gallery consisted of an open space with hanging transparencies of randomly placed English and Chinese news web shots.
Gallery 6
Lastly, we hit up the one Japanese gallery.
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Very nice painting (and a little unusual). Could you put up some more images of art?
Glad you got to meet my son, Ken, and his wife, AiLi. We visited that arts district a few years ago. It is much more avant guard now then it was back then. Enjoy your stay in China.
Why don’t you have the address for Moganshan Art District (and other places of interest that you write about) printed in Chinese characters so we can print it off or save it to our PDA’s or phones to show the taxi drivers? That would seem to make sense given that your pages are devoted to foreign visitors and tourists, wouldn’t it?
Cheers…
Craig, that’s a great idea. Thank you for the suggestion.
I don’t know Chinese, but I believe this is the address for Moganshan Art District:
Address: Putuo District, 50 Moganshan Road (Mo Gan Shan Lu)
Address (Chinese): 普陀区莫干山路50号
Best Regards,
Simmy