This book explores the author's ten-year ethnographic journey in different locations in Shanghai. His immersion in China’s art world is grounded in a topology of places and new ways of writing and deploying history today. The ethnographic approaches to experiencing, analysing and representing space offer a critical tool to explore a different version of realism invisible in the nominal art and art history paradigms. As the market and institutional norms are still being defined, this book also documents and analyses how individuals have strived to negotiate boundaries in the art world and thus create unique selfhood. Instead of conventional methods of periodisation and stylistic analysis, this book presents a historiographic strategy emphasising the philosophical significance of spatial realism to offer insights into history, subjectivities and political institutions.