THIS YEAR’S ART WEEK, NOW THE CITY’S SOLE period of competitive, multi-venue programming, started off on a surprising note. As I tried to determine my own schedule, I noticed that nearly half of Shanghai’s perennial art venues had delayed releasing their exhibition information until the last minute. Even once the dates were announced, coordinating visits remained a challenge, as exhibitions in the same area didn’t bother to align their openings. Meanwhile, just an hour’s train ride away, Hangzhou’s inaugural “Make a Swing” art week, organized by By Art Matters—the city’s new contemporary art museum helmed by Francesco Bonami—offered a seamlessly orchestrated program across thirty-two venues, tempting visitors to escape the scheduling chaos of Shanghai altogether.
So off I went to Hangzhou, also known as Marco Polo’s “City of Heaven.” Upon arrival, I made a quick stop at independent spaces ScheinSpace and Verre Liquide near West Lake before heading to By Art Matters. Over the past three years, more than a dozen art venues have emerged throughout Hangzhou, transforming the city from a wasteland of artistic opportunities—until recently, emerging artists tended to leave town upon graduating from its art academy—into what now appears to be a hub for exhibition-making. At ScheinSpace, Netherlands-based artist duo Miyoung Chang and Dakota Guo transformed the venue’s unassuming storefront into a twenty-four-hour horror film rental store, a nod to the late ’90s when the DV medium was all the rage among Chinese artists—the Hangzhou art scene being at the epicenter of this movement. In the dim light of the rental shop, Guo shared a revelation: Their unmanned store continued to draw unsuspecting midnight visitors. It seems that despite the disappearance of low-budget B-movie aesthetics, the era’s eerie spell can be brought back to life when the proper setting is provided.
At Verre Liquide, a garage-style art space run by video artist Cheng Ran’s punk art brand “Martin Goya Business,” I encountered the production team in local artist Papapepia’s exhibition. They too operate without on-site attendants, I was told. Interestingly, several local art spaces now use online-generated entry codes to allow visitor access, a trend that mirrors the city’s reputation as a “smart city” backed by tech tycoon Alipay.
As I arrived at By Art Matters, artist Peter Fischli was midway through giving a guided tour of his solo show “Tuesday Till Sunday,” which spans the entirety of the museum’s main ground-floor gallery. The show plays with contrasts, using humble materials like paper sculptures mimicking metal objects—some were accidentally knocked over during the tour, reinforcing the artist’s intent to blur art and the ordinary. Less a deliberate artistic statement and more a modest reflection on his transient role as an observer, Fischli’s rumination on intercity travel is captured in daily snapshots placed on the floor as vinyl. Upstairs, a group exhibition titled “Prosodic Grains” was overrun by a crowd rushing to Oliver Beer’s Cat Orchestra (2024) performance, where the instrument’s keys triggered cries from surrounding cat sculptures, each arranged according to the pitch of their voices.
At the tail end of the crowd, near the museum’s full-height glass facade overlooking the surrounding compound, artist Chang Yuchen pointed to workers laboring in a nearby glass building—it turned out to be a garment-processing workshop belonging to fashion brand JNBY, the museum’s main sponsor, housed in its high-rise headquarters adjacent to the museum. This juxtaposition of physical labor and sleek design unexpectedly echoed Chang’s own handmade garment brand, Use Value (2016–), which features stitched patches of translucent overlays designed to transform underlying outfits. Yet this high-rise workshop, polished but unintentionally public, felt less like a tribute to craftsmanship and more like an aspirational narrative, where high tech could somehow exist without the shadow of labor struggles.
Next door, nonprofit Imago Kinetics was opening a group show titled “Doors Open, Windows Locked,” commemorating the late artists and educators Huang Xiaopeng and Geng Jianyi with works by twenty-two artists. Among these, a flatscreen display of Huang’s video work was accompanied by a floral tribute: Artist Feng Chen shared that, during degree shows, placing flowers next to artworks by cherished peers was a long-standing tradition among Hangzhou art academy students. Creatively repurposing this tradition here felt like a thoughtful nod to art education.
At night, Halloween revelers emerged while local authorities, Minority Report–style, attempted to contain the crowds to preempt a repeat of last year’s events in Shanghai, when politically charged costumes turned the celebration into a site of public critique.
I took an early train back to Shanghai, hoping to catch a special screening of Beijing-based artist Luka Yuanyuan Yang’s feature-length documentary Chinatown Cha-Cha at Shanghai Film Art Center. In an increasingly restrictive political climate, this film is a rare example of an artist managing to secure a license for theatrical release in China. Its story line around the Chinese diaspora in the United States, a sensitive topic here, makes this license all the more surprising: The film follows the late burlesque dancer Coby Yee as she joins the senior Chinese American dance troupe Grant Avenue Follies at the age of ninety-two, embarking on a performance tour through Cuba and China. During the post-screening Q&A (taking place concurrently with Gabriel Lester’s opening at Vanguard, which I had hoped to catch alongside other nearby events), members of the troupe surprised the audience with unsolicited advice: Study hard and let art remain a passion, not a profession (I really should have left by then).
The next day, I came across artist Xie Fan chatting with Minerva Cuevas at the opening of her solo show at Cc Foundation. The two had met during Cuevas’s trip to Sanxingdui, in southwest China, where the Mexican artist was exploring parallels between Mesoamerican and Chinese mythological iconographies. This moment triggered a flashback to a scene from Chinatown Cha-Cha, where Chinese American performers encounter Cuban diva Caridad Amaran dancing with a Cantonese opera troupe. Xie, who runs a restaurant near Fuxing Park in Shanghai, is experimenting with a fusion of Latin American and southwest Chinese cuisine, so the two promptly booked a dinner reservation to continue their exchange.
This year’s art week highlight was undoubtedly Shuang Li’s homecoming solo exhibition at Prada Rong Zhai. While the meticulously refurbished space—paired with Li’s shifting-light chandeliers and DJ Hyph11E’s audio contribution—evoked the spectral elegance of The Shining’s iconic ballroom, it was the opening party itself that carried the eeriest undertones: It felt as though Shanghai’s art-week prime time remained frozen in suspended animation since its 2016 heyday. (At the party, the unspoken rule for sustaining this experiment in hauntology was to avoid mentioning the names of those institutions that have since withdrawn from the scene—UCCA Edge and many others.) Without explicitly addressing it, the exhibition presents a sonic reflection on the city’s club melancholy—a poignant homage to the bygone 2010s, during which Li’s music peers contributed to the city’s club scene and propelled it to international renown. This golden era was abruptly cut short by stringent Covid lockdowns, scattering the scene’s key figures and leaving behind mere echoes of a once-vibrant cultural movement.
On a less somber note, ART021 offered a surprising discovery: Micki Meng’s solo booth featuring Miljohn Ruperto stood out from the fair’s chaotic energy with a historically resonant presentation. Showcasing Ruperto’s research on (and tribute to) Filipino film actress Isabel Rosario Cooper through 35-mm film projections, the booth felt refreshingly out of place—a quiet, contemplative counterpoint to the surrounding spectacle.
While this bustling energy once sufficed to drive sales, genuine collectors now favor more space—a reflection of lean-year priorities. This sentiment seemed to resonate with the relative success of the West Bund Art & Design Fair, which is known for its museum-quality presentations, at least in its main building. Venturing farther away to a satellite venue of the fair, however, I stumbled upon the booth of artist-run 33ml offspace, where founding members Xia Han and Dai Zhankun looked visibly disheartened. It was their second time at the fair, and they found themselves surrounded by seemingly random booths, which they felt diluted their identity.
The gravitational pull of the region’s art market appears to be gradually shifting toward Seoul, leaving Shanghai to recalibrate its position. Yes, new developments are still emerging. For instance, Suhe Haus recently opened as a venue for private foundations or galleries to stage pop-up exhibitions, particularly necessary after the sudden demolition of gallery buildings in the West Bund this past June. However, in a time where grand gestures are no longer de rigueur, pop-ups have proved to be merely a pragmatic strategy for survival.
Part of ShanghART’s group show “All the Images Will Disappear,” cocurated by Philippe Pirotte, this year’s performance highlight was Melati Suryodarmo’s three-hour piece Fracture. Moving slowly, Suryodarmo led two other performers (their faces obscured by fibrous material resembling dried marine plants) as they sang ethereally and crawled like sea creatures in a repeating cycle, with each iteration intensifying over the course of this marathon. Coinciding with Rockbund Art Museum’s “Breaking the Waves” performance series—featuring Bhenji Ra and Taloi Havini, among others—Fracture attracted a small group of dedicated viewers who traveled a long way from Rockbund and stayed around long after the performance concluded, affirming this event as a true moment of redemption for an otherwise lackluster edition of art week.
