ABSTRACT
Many contemporary Chinese artists have proposed and created projects in Shanghai that imagine – in both celebratory and critical ways – the city’s historically rooted “East-meets-West” mythology. This chapter analyzes key case studies by three of China’s most internationally known artists: Gu Wenda’s art proposal Heavenly Lantern Project for Shanghai (2003–ongoing), which utilizes cross-cultural content, aesthetic motifs, and conceptual tropes to celebrate East-meets-West Shanghai; Liu Jianhua’s photographic series The Virtual Scene (2005) and exhibition Export – Cargo Transit (2007), which question Shanghai’s urbanization and highlight the negative impacts of globalization and uneven East–West relations; and Yang Fudong’s photographic triptych The First Intellectual (2000) and film installation Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest (2003–2007), which critique Shanghai’s romanticized mythology and expose current conflicts facing the city’s artists and intellectuals. My analyses aim to disrupt common assumptions underlying recent discussions of urban Shanghai and contemporary Chinese art: that both city and category effortlessly transcend national borders and cultural divides, operating through harmonious East-meets-West encounters. I argue that Gu’s celebratory proposal and critical projects by Liu and Yang construct urban imaginaries that speak less to Shanghai’s East-meets-West status or the seamless integration of diverse cultures and fluid insertion of Chinese art into the Euro-American-dominated canon of contemporary art, and more to the mistranslations, social alienations, and merging of fine art and commodity culture that belie contemporary Chinese art and everyday life in Shanghai.
