Our destination today was the Shanghai Art Museum. We were excited to be in the big city and see a famous art museum; so I put the location into the Didi, the driver picked us up, and away we went. Well, sometimes Didi cuts off the full name of the destination, or maybe I picked the wrong one; but when he let us out, we didn’t see any museum, all we saw was a park.
I checked the map; in the park was an art museum, but we figured it would be bigger, insofar as we could see it towering over the park. We did not see it from afar, but it was a pretty park, to be sure, so we walked through it, following the map directions to the art museum.
We came upon the museum, much smaller than we had expected.
Once inside we realized, it was the wrong museum, and we were at the Shanghai Art Collection Museum, which is, of course, not the Shanghai Art Museum (silly us). We were already here, so we went inside, and admission was free, so bonus there. There was one exhibit, called “A Universe in Miniature; The Art of Brushstrokes in Miniature Painting and Gongbi Painting.” The Gongi Painting is Chinese in origin, and was in contrast to the Miniature Paintings from Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran, and Turkiye. The Miniature Paintings stole the show, as it were, for us. Most of the paintings were smaller than 8.5 by 11 inches in size, and were so detailed and delicate that we were amazed. Here are just a few from the collection:
They might have inspired us to go ahead and make plans to visit Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan, as the gallery showed a video of how the paintings are still produced today. We even walked through the exhibition again, since it was so interesting. The back area with the sinks was cool at the museum too.
We walked through the park a bit more after we left, then took the train to the Shanghai Art Museum. This is a huge museum, and we were dropped off at the exit; so we had to walk around to the entrance; on the way there are cool art benches to see (and not sit).
It is designed similarly to the Chongqing Opera House, with big, red, chopsticks crossed. It was a quiet day and we walked right in, up the many stairs, past the large, odd, sculptures, and we realized it is a modern art museum.
Once inside, there is a lot of interesting, some of it pretty cool, modern art, though not all of it was for us. There were artistic dresses, pottery, some paintings, and many sculptures, here are just a few:
There was even a fake toy store, that Jessica was very excited to see.
It was odd, however, that all these exhibits were on the first two levels; and then the final exhibit was 12 floors up. We could not access, and were not sure there was anything to see, on the other 10 floors. However, the star of the show was the massive “moving painting.”
Based on the original “Along the River during the Qing Ming Festival,” a very famous Chinese painting, done by Song dynasty painter Zhang Zeduan, which has been interpreted by many artists since it was created in the 11th Century (above are just two snippets). This interpretation is huge, as big as 10+ movie theater screens put side-by-side, and shows the people of the painting in action, as day turns to night, and back again. The pictures do not convey its awesomeness, and we spent a lot of time walking and looking and pointing out what was going on in the painting.
We were lucky as we think there was an extra cost to see it; but as it was late in the day and ticket taker didn’t appear to want to deal with us as non-Chinese speakers, and he simply waved us in. Afterward, we headed back down and saw a few more exhibits which had some more interesting pieces.
We left the art museum, heading past even more weird statures, and out into the courtyard.
We hopped in a Didi, and were off to one more art museum, the Pudong Gallery of Art. We first had coffee and took in the radio tower and globe on our side of the river, and the Bund on the other, under cloudy skies.
There were a few exhibitions on display, and even one including paintings by Picasso, so we decided to pay the entrance fee and go inside.
We first saw the huge whales, which spanned multiple floors and changed colors depending on which floor we saw them from.
Then we visited the Picasso Exhibition, which was curated by British designer Paul Smith, and was very popular.
There was another exhibit called “The Wonder of Patterns” which had a lot of art from Turkiye and Persia, and we recognized many of the patterns from art we had seen when we visited Istanbul years before. There was a good selection of peacock inspired plates and tiles too.
Our feet now very tired, and with the museum closing soon, we left and went looking for dinner. It was getting dark, and we snapped some cool Shanghai night shots of what we had seen before we entered the museum.
And cool pictures on the museum that we didn’t even know we were a part of when we were inside; we couldn’t tell what was on the screens when we walked on the colorful rainbow carpet inside.
We wound up at an Italian restaurant where we shared pizza and prosecco (as this is a very touristy area for westerners), and once full, took a car back to the hotel. A packed day of Art in Shanghai!
Phil's WayPastCool 