Posted inArt

Eastern Glamour Meets Western Couture

With Chinese Fashion Week rapidly becoming a formidable competitor to Paris and Milan, and figures like Peng Liyuan reaching Carla Bruni levels of icondom (minus the fur bikini), Eastern fashion is dominating conversations of style and commerce. To capitalize on this emerging popularity, The Museum of Chinese in America has focused two of its spring exhibitions towards sino-sartorial oeuvres: Front Row, which takes a look at the exponential growth of Asian-American fashion designers such as Vera Wang and Jason Wu, and Shanghai Glamour, an examination of early twentieth century clothing and culture from the “Paris of the East.”

Posted inOpinion

Shanghai’s Skyscrapers in Mist

LOS ANGELES — I’m a sucker for skyscraper photos. Ever since I first set foot in downtown Los Angeles and then Manhattan, I’ve loved looking up at buildings. Tall ones, fancy ones — almost every major city has at least one interesting one, and in a place like China, there are more tall buildings than you can shake a level at.

Posted inArt

Adrift in Shanghai’s Sin City

(Liu Dao) or island6, a Shanghai-based international collective of “multimedia artists, performers, writers, curators and tech-geeks” personify the aspirations of contemporary China by skirting verboten political flashpoints and keeping their content short, sweet, flirtatious, erotic and electronic.

Posted inArt

The Father of 视频艺术

Zhang Peili (张培力), frequently dubbed the father of Chinese video art, has a retrospective ongoing at Shanghai’s Minsheng Art Museum (民生现代美术馆). Dubbed Certain Pleasures (确切的快感), the show extends over two floors and three main gallery spaces, showing Zhang’s videos and high conceptual work.

Posted inArt

Where Art, Design & Tech Naturally Mingle, Xindanwei in Shanghai

It’s just a typical day at Xindanwei (新单位), a coworking space with a name that means “New Work Unit” in Chinese. Downstairs, Patrick Jost of vvvv.org is giving a talk … On the second floor, the EF Life Club are leading a workshop on self actualization through art, … On the roof is a meeting of marketing gurus enjoying the summer air. And in between can be found mini-meetings in corners, in hallways, on the stairs. Founded by Liu Yan, Aaajiao (aka Xu Wenkai) and Chen Xu in 2009 as a coworking space, Xindanwei has quickly become the center of Shanghai’s burgeoning technology and art community.