In multimedia exhibition, Asian Art Museum captures Shanghai's vibrancy, present and past

SAN FRANCISCO — After an esteemed tradition of showcasing collections of ancient masterpieces, the Asian Art Museum steps boldly into the 20th and 21st centuries with "Shanghai," a vast new show tracing the visual culture of this ultramodern, forward-looking Chinese city, from 1850 to the present.

Today, Shanghai is a teeming center of commerce, a cosmopolitan city on the vanguard of art and design, with skyscrapers, 19 million people and big ambitions on the international stage. But, even when the British arrived in the 1800s, it was a thriving concern with a population of 400,000, rather than the backwater of Western myth.
Since it was designated a treaty port in 1842 by England and China, Shanghai has beckoned to the world, rapidly evolving into a mecca for finance and a haven for Chinese fleeing rebellion and immigrant communities seeking economic opportunity. A hotbed of political tumult and artistic debate, the city, as the show amply demonstrates, has been and remains attuned to the new, embracing Western influences while retaining its distinctly Chinese character.
An eclectic overview encompassing 160 years and multiple art movements, the exhibition is short on historical context or depth and without a linear chronology to firmly anchor it; nonetheless, it's crammed with cool stuff. Loosely organized into a four-chapter format (Beginnings, High Times, Revolution and Shanghai Today) with intersecting subplots (if this sounds
a bit confusing, it is), the show's some 130 works include richly expressive oil and ink paintings, dramatic, sometimes politically charged woodblock prints, fabulous art deco furnishings, vibrantly colorful propaganda posters, watercolors, contemporary art installations and edgy videos laced with social commentary, as well as film clips from the city's heyday as the cinema capital of China. "The show has the ability to transport you to a distant place that also feels familiar in a strange way," observes Dr. Michael Knight, the museum's senior curator of Chinese art. "I hope people experience some of Shanghai's complexity and that they'll come away with an interest in learning more. We're just scratching the surface here and want this to be a point of entry for further exploration. There are a lot of little tidbits that will get people's attention and get them curious."
Any mention of attention-grabbing works must include oil and ink paintings rarely, if ever, seen outside of China, by great masters, such as Liu Haisu, a leading innovator of Western-influenced art partial to Cézanne, Van Gogh and Picasso, and his competitor, the more conservative, Xu Beihong, who studied in France. (Most Shanghai artists studied Western techniques in Japan.) Tao Lengyue's delicate ink painting "Plum Blossoms Under the Moon, 1934," a moody depiction of a gnarled blossoming tree bathed in blue-gray twilight, is magical.
One of the exhibit's more dynamic sections chronicles the so-called High Times of the 1920s and '30s. The period represented an apex of sophistication, glamour, fashion, graphic art, Western-style oil painting and progressive thought. Women enjoyed a level of independence in Shanghai unknown in the rest of China at the time, and images of seductive, chic, smartly dressed young models grace the covers of magazines like The Movie World, which features Zhou Manhua, a popular screen actress, or are laid out in front of the city's shimmering nighttime skyline as in Yuan Xiutang's "A Prosperous City That Never Sleeps, 1930s," enticing visitors with a promise of exoticism and excitement.
However, in keeping with its legacy of duality, Shanghai was also a notorious open city. Known as the Paris of the East, it was home to a thriving sex trade, gun-toting gangsters, glittery nightclubs and opium dens. Two prominent underworld bosses of the infamous Green Gang are immortalized in Yu Ming's disconcertingly dignified painting "Huang Jinrong and Du Yuesheng, 1924," the only surviving portrait of the pair, who, here, are seated in a serene garden, their faces so realistic they appear to be photographs superimposed on painted bodies.
"To paraphrase from Dickens, this period of Shanghai history represented the best of times and the worst of times," Knight says. "The use and abuse of people was prevalent. In many ways, life was cheap."
Exploitation, decadence and the chasm between lavish displays of wealth and crushing poverty triggered a backlash as early as the 1930s, and full-scale repression following Mao's takeover in 1949.
Mao singled out Shanghai as the embodiment of bourgeois excess, and the crackdown there was especially draconian. Despite severe restrictions imposed by the communist regime, the city's artists continued to create works of aesthetic beauty. Shen Roujian's "Evening Glow on the Huangpu River, 1955," a dreamy woodblock, ink and watercolor rendition of the city's main shipping artery at sunset, couldn't be lovelier; brilliantly colored, propaganda posters such as "Parade on Huangpu River, 1950" are as eye-catching as Mao intended; and, painter Zhang Longji humanizes, rather than exalts, a common laborer softly lit by the glow of a furnace in "Power Distribution Worker, 1957-59."
In the last galleries, devoted to Shanghai today, the convergence of East and West, tradition and modernity, that have defined the city throughout its history, assumes tangible form in two large, horizontal ink paintings. Exhibited side by side, both Li Huayi's "Forest, 2004" and "The Dimension of Ink No. 1, 2008" by Zheng Chongbin are enigmatic, theatrical and fuse past and present in their own distinct ways. (Both artists divide their time between Shanghai and the Bay Area.)
Inspired by the Surrealists' use of shadow for visual and psychological effect, monumental Chinese landscape and Francis Bacon's dramatic manipulation of space, Zheng Chongbin ventures into pure abstraction in this painting, which resembles a giant Rorschach test with velvety blacks, hollow X-ray tones and splashes of white acrylic and fixer that lend a sense of depth and mystery. Li Huayi, rooted in Abstract Expressionism and a tension between formal structure and chance, recalls the lineage of Chinese landscape in his ink wash of an enchanted wood haunted by the unconscious mind.
"Today, artists utilize ink in a postmodern, theoretical, abstract sense," Knight says, "tradition in postmodern terms, that brings us back to the old artistic debate: Can you do ink on paper or paint with traditional materials and still be contemporary? It's a long-standing question that goes back to the very beginnings of Shanghai."