THE LIFE-SIZE STATUE of Lu Xun, the writer and cultural critic that many Chinese consider China's greatest 20th-century artist, is appropriately located across from the new Duolun Museum of Modern Art in downtown Shanghai. In the 1930s, Lu Xun and a group of fellow writers and artists gathered on the street - now lined with cafes and shops and closed to traffic - to support the New Culture Movement, an attempt to make art matter to the masses. Within a decade, his novels and short stories had been distributed across the country.
Duolun director Shen Qibin, a former maths teacher, says he has similar ambitions. 'The New Culture Movement influenced the entire direction of Chinese culture,' says Shen, who has a wiry beard and a crew cut. 'That's what we want to do.'
His plans mirror those of the Shanghai government. The Duolun - the first government-funded avant-garde art museum in China - is part of a scheme to turn Shanghai into a centre of world culture on par with New York and London. When the museum opened in December, it added momentum to a resurgence of Shanghai's avant-garde art spaces.
For Shen, it's all good news. Shanghai has been a centre of Chinese business and culture since it became a British port more than a century ago. But amid the tumult of commerce, Beijing took the lead in promoting the arts. Shanghai's Eastlink Gallery director Li Liang says the capital now 'has 10 times as many artists'.
Shanghai is trying hard to shake its reputation as a city of bankers and traders. Besides building the Duolun, the ministry of culture has taken a relaxed attitude towards exhibitions. Officials have attended each of the 12 shows the Duolun has so far hosted, but they haven't interfered with the art Shen chose to include. 'The government doesn't understand what art has value,' Shen says. 'They accept that we're the professionals.'
The thaw has allowed the Duolun to exhibit cutting-edge works. Its first show, Open Sky, featured works by 36 artists. These included 31-year-old Shanghai artist Xiang Liqing's installation Highlight, a small clay man crawling below a stack of 19 massive floodlights. Chinese-born Australian sculptor Shen Shaomin's Unknown Creature series combines animal parts - the proboscis of a mosquito, the body of a fish and chicken claws - to create a feeling of a world gone haywire. 'He's saying that cloning technology is changing too fast,' says Duolun curator Gu Zhenqing.
