New Hybrid Architectural Types for Contemporary Art: Cases from Shanghai

Abstract

In the proliferation of new art spaces and institutions in Shanghai in the last decades, new hybrid architectural types that have emerged visually and structurally challenge the etiquettes of the classic white box spaces, detached and uniquely created for the exhibition of contemporary art works. Attachments to existing commercial spaces, insertions into the former underground parking structures and leftover underground podium spaces not only physically manifest the localized realities of spatial production for contemporary visual art, including localized institutional frameworks and land rights. They also contrast with the trendy adaptive reuse of historic industrial or civic structures. Spaces such as the OCAT Shanghai, the K11 Chi Art space, and the How Museum are unabashedly linked to larger commercial developments, physically connected to malls, hotels and commercial podia, and materially confound expectations of the elite spheres of the high art scene. Nevertheless, they institutionally represent very different models of public as that presumed since Western modernity. In their spatial productions and institutional formations, they also show the diverse ways through which developmentalism carve out new kinds of publicness. This presentation will use the architecture type as framework to examine these parts of the rapidly growing arts ecology in the particular city of Shanghai.