Shanghai's must-see museums: Rockbund Art Museum

Near Shanghai's fabled Bund, you can find Thomas Ou's Rockbund Art Museum housed in a beautifully restored 1933 Art Deco building that was at one time home to the Royal Asiatic Society. The Rockbund is a comparatively small, but innovative space with a impressive record of shows with artists and curators such as Cai Guo-Qiang, Zheng Fanshi, Paola Pivi, Hou Hanru and Fumio Nanjo among others.

The Rockbund is currently showing Ugo Rondinone's Breathe, Walk, Die, an installation staged over five of the gallery's floors. The walls are painted floor to ceiling with colours that move from cool to warm in tandem with the coloured filters on the windows. Each floor has circular canvases of blurred concentric colours, all combining to form a backdrop for 40 impassive clowns doing nothing. It's a beautiful, but disturbing piece -  the best show in town, in the smallest museum space, and proof (in a ciiy known for its massive museums) that bigger isn't always better.
Images: Ugo Rondinone's Breathe, Walk, Die at Shanghai's Rockbund Art Museum

Art museums to watch out for in Shanghai

Over the past few years private art institutions, like the Minsheng Art Museum and the Rockbund Art Museum, have been leading the way in Shanghai, building their institutional profiles at home and abroad on the back of first-rate, curatorially-driven programming. However with the arrival of new state institutions in 2012 the landscape is shifting, providing even greater scope for contemporary art in the city. According the ARTINFO the contenders for 2013 are: Power Station of Art, Rockbund Museum, Minsheng Art Museum, China Art Palace and OCT Contemporary Art Terminal. Read more...
Image: Shanghai's Power Station of Art