Above sea: Contemporary art, urban culture, and the fashioning of global Shanghai
Jenny Lin, "Above sea: Contemporary art, urban culture, and the fashioning of global Shanghai "
English | ISBN: 152615157X | 2020 | 200 pages | PDF | 49 MB
English | ISBN: 152615157X | 2020 | 200 pages | PDF | 49 MB
Shanghai, long known as mainland China’s 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 art’s global hype to reveal the socio-political tensions accompanying Shanghai’s transitions from semi-colonial capitalism to Maoist socialism to Communist Party-sponsored capitalism. Case studies reveal how Shanghai’s global aesthetic constructs glamorising artifices that mask the conflicts between vying notions of foreign-influenced modernity and anti-colonialist nationalism, as well as the city’s repressed socialist past and its consumerist present.