Going West
ONCE AN INDUSTRIAL barrens blighted by aircraft manufacturers and factories, the 6-mile stretch of Xuhui waterfront known as the West Bund (westbund.com) has recently been rebranded as Shanghai’s contemporary-art core. In the last few years alone, the row has seen the arrival of major institutions like the Long Museum West Bund (thelongmuseum.org) — the private museum of billionaire investor and collector Liu Yiqian—and the Yuz Museum (yuzmshanghai.org), which counts among its recent exhibitions a show of Andy Warhol’s Shadows series and a retrospective for the pop artist Kaws. A number of firsts have landed here as well, from the Shanghai Center of Photography (scop.org.cn), China’s only museum dedicated solely to photography, to the Power Station of Art (powerstation ofart.org), mainland China’s first state-run contemporaryart museum. An influx of galleries has also helped to transform the district: SHANGHART (shanghartgallery.com) — one of the city’s most influential galleries, known for catapulting the careers of artists like Zeng Fanzhi—relocated to the West Bund in late 2016, while MADEIN Gallery (madein gallery.com) represents the country’s newest clique of cutting-edge creatives, among them the digital disrupter
Ying Miao.