Rethinking Art s Histories: Above Sea: Contemporary Art Urban Culture and the Fashioning of Global Shanghai (Hardcover) for $135.34

Description: Shanghai long known as mainland China s most cosmopolitan city is today a global cultural capital. This book offers the first in-depth examination of contemporary Shanghai-based art and design - from state-sponsored exhibitions to fashionable cultural complexes to cutting edge films and installations. Informed by years of in-situ research the book looks beyond contemporary art s global hype to reveal the socio-political tensions accompanying Shanghai s transitions from semi-colonial capitalism to Maoist socialism to Communist Party-sponsored capitalism. Case studies reveal how Shanghai s global aesthetic constructs glamorising artifices that mask the conflicts between vying notions of foreign-influenced modernity and anti-colonialist nationalism as well as the city s repressed socialist past and its consumerist present.