Art and Shanghai at the Turn of the Millennium

In and around the year 2000, amidst emerging markets, reforming institutions, and artist-led organizations, a slate of exhibitions occurred that would expand the range of possibilities for experimental art in a city on the verge of a new international centrality. New art took root everywhere, from industrial warehouses to municipal museums, from retail space in unopened shopping malls to the opening ceremony of a major international summit. Two decades later, “City on the Edge” situates itself in the city’s multiplicitous cosmopolitan history, reflecting on the rapidly transforming urban fabric and the generative development in contemporary art by assembling important works that have brought this flourishing formation and provocative scene into being (as chronicled in the TV documentary series Arts and Artists, produced by Fang Fang (b. 1977, Beijing, lives and works in Beijing)), in dialogue with works that refract the city’s globalizing present. This exhibition follows in a tradition of UCCA opening exhibitions, begun by Fei Dawei’s “’85 New Wave: The Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art” (2007), that position a new museum in relation to the art historical context in which it will function. Seen today, these artists and their contributions allow us to reflect on how far the city and its cultural ecology have come and to understand the experimental ethos that underlies Shanghai’s current position at the forefront of China’s global art scene.