Shanghai Galleries
Here is a list of just a few galleries that we like in Shanghai, plus one ‘virtual’ one. We have talked with the curator or owner of each gallery (except for the online one!) but have no commercial involvement with any of them. Please contact them directly.
OFOTO GALLERY
We have been a few times to Ofoto Gallery and the associated Anart space. They are based in the M50 art complex at 50 Moganshan Road in Shanghai.
We had an A1 giclee print made of one of Lois Brothwell‘s paintings of Suki. 
The quality is excellent and the price was also very good – much cheaper than one would pay in the UK. You can read full details of their printing and framing services here.
We dealt with Huang Yunhe who speaks very good English. He told us that he has customers from the UK because of the quality and competitive price. We received excellent service ensuring the print was produced exactly as we wanted it. If you are thinking of having any giclee prints done we would highly recommend that you contact him for quotes and examples to compare with local printers.
He can be contacted via email: ofotogallery@163.com
or by telephone: +86 21 6298 5416.
SUNNY STUDIO
Sunny Studio is the gallery of Wei Ping (English name Sunny) in the M50 art complex at 50 Moganshan Road
Born in 1971, Wei Ping is a printmaker teaching in one of the Shanghai art colleges as well as having her own studio at Mo Gan Shan. Her works stem from initial photographs blown up to more than life-size. The scale of completed works can be more than 3 metres. Her subject-matter is autobiographical, personal, intimate and psychological, for example there are pictures of children, her family members, her youthful self, and some female nudes. The theme of one substantial body of work is ‘stop thinking’, repeated as though a mantra for life. This “advice” is repeated thousands of times in tiny (Western script) hand-writing which functionally adds shading and texture to the initial prints-from-photos. From a distance the hand-writing looks like cross-hatching , softening the image’s outliines until it is no longer immediately apparent that a photograph was the first stage. Sue met Wei Ping and bought three glossy-paper A3 copies of her prints at a total cost of £7.50 (-:
Contact: weiping969@qq.com
BLACK SIGHT GALLERY
Black Sight (another M50 gallery) is the gallery of Yang Xiao Jian 1F no.2, Bldg 7, 50 Mo Gan Shan Lu, Shanghai 200060,
Yang Xiao Jian (b. 1960 in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province) had a classical training in Chinese calligraphy before transforming into a fine artist who uses ink and whose works, on massive canvases, are shaped by his calligraphic mark-making along with reflecting his love of abstract expressionists such as Franz Kline, Soulages, Robert Motherwell.
We walked into the gallery where his ‘Black Sight’ exhibition was hung and were completely bowled over. Sue is personally a bit prejudiced against ink, because she associates it with water and translucence and therefore half-expect insipidness. But Yang Xiao Jian’s works, predominantly thought not solely using black ink, are massive, bold, power-fuelled, ambitious, dramatic blocks – many on canvases of a size which would not fit into your apartment. Fantastic. Sue bought the postcards. He sells internationally with mega price tags but there were some original unique prints in a little pile that you could sift through, starting at £300. He describes himself as ‘The Ink Beast’. Check out his website.
CONTACT: Email black@yangxiaojian.com
Tel 86-21 6298 8843
Mobile 137 6456 9555
MICHAEL GOEDHUIS GALLERY
No – it’s not a Shanghai gallery, in fact it’s a ‘real’ gallery in London, but the online gallery gives a comprehensive overview of the kind of fantastic contemporary art you can now find in China. About 40 Chinese artists are represented. Browse the full list here, or see my personal pick, as below:
Gao Xingjian
Note – in 2000 this artist also won the Nobel Prize for Literature!Li Xiaoxuan
See our ‘Shanghai artists‘ page
M97 GALLERY
We have been to three exhibitions now at M97 Gallery and found all of them to be good. It is a photography gallery and each of the exhibitions we have seen have a real feeling of being fine art rather than photography. The gallery was established in 2006 and seems to have established itself very successfully as a major Shanghai gallery. It is on Moganshan Lu, just a hundred yards from the M50 gallery complex. On the website they write …
Consistently exhibiting contemporary and fine art photography that spans all genres of the medium, M97 represents an eclectic range of important emerging and established artists working with photography.
Read more here
Contact them at info(at)m97gallery.com
Telephone (+8621) 6266.1597