Contemporary Art, Urban Culture, and the Fashioning of Global Shanghai
Shanghai, long known as mainland Chinas most cosmopolitan city, is today a global cultural capital. This book offers the first in-depth examination of contemporary Shanghai-based art and design from state-sponsored exhibitions to fashionable cultural complexes to cutting edge films and installations. Informed by years of in-situ research, the book looks beyond contemporary arts global hype to reveal the socio-political tensions accompanying Shanghais transitions from semi-colonial capitalism to Maoist socialism to Communist Party-sponsored capitalism. Case studies reveal how Shanghais global aesthetic constructs glamorising artifices that mask the conflicts between vying notions of foreign-influenced modernity and anti-colonialist nationalism, as well as the citys repressed socialist past and its consumerist present.
Contemporary Art, Urban Culture, and the Fashioning of Global Shanghai
Shanghai, long known as mainland Chinas most cosmopolitan city, is today a global cultural capital. This book offers the first in-depth examination of contemporary Shanghai-based art and design from state-sponsored exhibitions to fashionable cultural complexes to cutting edge films and installations. Informed by years of in-situ research, the book looks beyond contemporary arts global hype to reveal the socio-political tensions accompanying Shanghais transitions from semi-colonial capitalism to Maoist socialism to Communist Party-sponsored capitalism. Case studies reveal how Shanghais global aesthetic constructs glamorising artifices that mask the conflicts between vying notions of foreign-influenced modernity and anti-colonialist nationalism, as well as the citys repressed socialist past and its consumerist present.