The Shanghai Show

The City That’s Always Reinventing Itself Has a New Claim: the Place to Be for Contemporary Art.

- Jiayang Fan

MY UBER pulled up to a hulking gray factory building with a towering chimney. “This is a museum?” my driver asked wryly, articulating my own unspoken curiosity. The choice of the Power Station of Art, China’s first state-run contemporary art museum, for Shanghai’s eleventh Biennale—with 92 international artists, 26 of Chinese origin—seemed fitting, though. The converted plant, which opened five years ago in a spot on the Huangpu River that had previously been kitted out for the 2010 World Expo, says a lot about the growing importance of art in China—and of Chinese art to the world.

On this rainy day last November, the museum was filled with smartly turned-out Chinese and foreigners, many of them in snaking lines for one of the most talked-about installations, The Great Chain of Being—Planet Trilogy. Visitors enter through a fuselage of an abandoned space shuttle and walk through a series of moonscape-like chambers that narrate a story about extraterrestrial discovery. One might say that this elaborate space odyssey, devised by theater director MouSen and inspired by the Chinese sci-fi writer Liu Cixin’s cult classic The Three-Body Problem, is all about the new freedoms in artistic exploration. But dwelling too long on the metaphor would distract from an experience so wildly transporting that a young boy visiting with his mother actually asked whether we had landed on a new planet.