 owards evening on September 4, it began to drizzle in Shanghai. At 6:45 PM in the ShanghART Gallery at No.50 Moganshan Road, a roaring installation work came to a sudden stop and fell silent abruptly. In a split second, darkness reigned – it was a blackout. Then, it was pitch-dark in all the art area. Strangely, people became more excited and cheerful, like reliving a power failure moment in their college dormitories. Unexpectedly, it was the brief interlude of the peripheral exhibition that heralded the international contemporary art exhibition of the Shanghai Art Fair or SH Contemporary 2007. The excitement might have burst out of the over-exercised disciplines, repetitions and rules at other times. Contemporary art should make a special effort to escape conventions and follow subversions; conventions and repetitions may exhaust creativity and destroy the artistic spirit. From this perspective, the Shanghai contemporary art fair has added an impulse to the busy but dull art scenes in Shanghai, and it will perhaps bring some inspirations to the vigorous Chinese contemporary art market that tends to develop blindly.
 In memory, there were two occasions when Shanghai caught so much attention from art circles.
One was the Shanghai Biennale in 2000, when China first adopted the practice of domestic and foreign curators jointly planning a large contemporary art exhibition in the way that Chinese curators select Chinese artists and foreign curators choose foreign artists. Then, Chinese contemporary art had finally secured a place for its public show. Previously, after the 1989 “No U-Turn” exhibition in Beijing, Chinese contemporary art activities went on secretly or half secretly. Official exhibitions featured exclusively traditional calligraphy, wash painting, oil painting and sculpture; art forms like installation, video and conceptual works were rarely exhibited in art museums. Then, the semi-official Shanghai Biennale acquired an epoch-making significance for its admission of contemporary art; further, it initiated a unique mode in which domestic and foreign curators jointly plan an exhibition. Meanwhile, a series of peripheral exhibitions of Shanghai Biennale were actively conducted, some of them could be described as provocative. Artists posed challenges to moral ethics and artists who formally participated in the Biennale; some even used dead bodies as media in their creations. Soon, criticisms and controversies flooded in, and it became a hot topic at home and abroad. Even we art students at that time would greet each other by asking: “Have you been to Shanghai?” We felt as if there were nothing in Beijing art scenes.
The other was the Exhibition of National Treasures from Jin, Tang, Song and Yuan Dynasties in the autumn of 2002. Several dozen selected ancient Chinese paintings and calligraphy works collected in the Beijing Palace Museum, the Liaoning Provincial Museum and the Shanghai Museum were collectively exhibited at the Shanghai Museum. There, people waited in a queue winding from the first floor to the fourth floor just for a glimpse of a famous ancient Chinese painting – the Upper River during Qing Ming Festival. Meanwhile, the Shanghai Biennale came again, with a theme of “building a metropolis” that concerned with construction problems and metropolitan rebuilding in the process of a rapid urbanization.
 The SH Contemporary 2007 comes at a time when Chinese economy catches most global attentions and stock markets constantly rise to record highs; but it comes more directly as a result of the uninterrupted hot contemporary art market. After over a decade of hard struggle, Chinese contemporary art not only ushered in its era of profit in 2004, but also reached an unprecedented height in the spring of 2007. In the first half of this year, easel works that were each sold at over $1 million reached a record-breaking number of 22 and secured a total sale volume of over $40 million, far exceeding the volume (about $32 million) of oil painting auctions in the 11 years from 1994 to 2004 in Mainland China. A $12,000 price for a work by Chinese artists such as Zhang Xiaogang, Liu Xiaodong and Zeng Fanzhi had been considered desirable in 2004; now the price has shot up to over $1 million. In a short period of 3 years, prices of the works by many artists had soared up by several dozen times. No wonder the argument of “Chinese contemporary art market bubble” was raised repeatedly. Obviously, they reflected in an indirect way the hot art market. Nevertheless, over 90% of Chinese contemporary art buyers buy only Chinese contemporary art works. Even Asian arts like Japanese, Korean and Indian ones that are culturally tied more to Chinese art failed to catch their attentions, let alone European and American arts. However, walking into Shanghai Exhibition Hall, a Soviet-style building located in the center of the city, everywhere we saw European, American, Indian and Japanese galleries. Actually, it was one of the most striking features of the contemporary art exhibition in the Shanghai art expo: an international horizon and the building of a platform for Asian contemporary art trade. Of all participants in the expo, Chinese galleries accounted for 20 percent; galleries from other Asian countries took up 30 percent; European and American galleries 50 percent. In terms of the effect, the exhibition has created successfully in Shanghai an international atmosphere of contemporary art. Quite a few domestic collectors have become aware of the necessity to learn from western art. Much as Chinese contemporary art focused world’s attentions, it seized only a small share of the market. Chinese participant galleries secured 20 percent of the market share, and, plus market share of overseas galleries representing Chinese art, the total market share could reach 30 percent, far exceeding the percentage of Chinese contemporary art sale volume to the world total volume. Given the fact that the fair was held in China, that percentage was reasonable.
 By rights, the fair was successful. In a mini party after the VIP wine reception, some participant art dealers said it was the best fair they had seen this year – they had participated in almost all the fair, including Basel; everything, from service to advertisement, was satisfactory; only they would wait to see how the sale volume could come out. For with business activities, sale volumes should end up the most practical and basic criteria.
There were still some problems the fair had to face. One of the directors of the fair, the artist Zhou Tiehai, admitted that the greatest difficulty they met was the 33 percent tariff, which was almost five times higher than that for fair in Europe and America. Why should European and American collectors be expected to pay one third extra for works that are not necessarily the firs-class? Actually, many observers, though speaking highly of the fair, have noticed the fact that European and American leading collectors did not show up at the fair. Most probably, they did not come because the fair lacked first-rate and inviting works, though some brilliant works by Lucian Freud, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and other masters were exhibited there.
The second problem arose from the inadequate in-depth service. The exhibition layout was not carefully worked out; the exhibition scenes were scattered and many poorly located participant galleries were all too easy to be missed. Take my own experience as an example: when visiting the special VIP scenes, I was never able to cover one third of the exhibition area though I believed I had viewed the whole exhibition several times. Not until I studied the map catalogue in the evening til 2 AM next morning did I begin to have some rough idea, and next day it took me the whole afternoon – almost six hours to have a general view of the whole exhibition, and it was until the third day when I spent another three hours accompanying friends around the exhibition that I was able to cover basically all the scenes. Unfortunately, there was not a good visiting guidance system on the exhibition spot, so even if we had wandered around several times and enquired quite a few friends, it was still hard for us to find the works by Yan Peiming. In fact, only a dozen computers were needed in a corner of the hall to provide visitors with index information of artists and galleries to help locate their positions.
 Thirdly, the fair did not provide participant art dealers and collectors with better negotiation rooms, and it did not take secrecy and decency of their negotiations into consideration.
In addition to the above problems, the sponsors of the fair did not impose higher requirements for several Shanghai galleries, so, regardless of lack of themes and inconsistency of styles, their paintings hung all over the exhibition boards, making them look like grocery stores; surprisingly, several local Shanghai galleries were strikingly uniform in those respects.
Centering on Shanghai contemporary art expo there were still many peripheral exhibitions, which had contributed to the vitality of the faire. But apparently they acquired far less strength and were hardly exciting; it seemed they were intended for sale or for supporting sale. Take as an example the No.50 Moganshan Road that is customarily dubbed the “798” of Shanghai: of several dozen galleries from there, only three galleries’ exhibitions left some impressions on visitors. One was Zhang Ding’s solo exhibition “Tool,” by the ShanghArt Gallery, mentioned at the beginning of this narration. In an undecorated old space, the artist was wrecking the enduring cactus with a sharp knife and now and then pouring onto the plant huge amount of water it feared most; in a deserted refrigerator was placed an old-style tweeter, which, in the red-hot lamplight, suddenly sent out loud sounds, bringing visitors delight comfort while scaring them. Then there was the new media art that kept abreast of the essentials of contemporary art: works by the young artists from China Academy of Art were exhibited, and they were privately supported by Pierre Huber, Chief Director of Initiation from SH Contemporary. Finally, the exhibited “Seven Crimes” by ArtNow Gallery were actually video records of the seven performing arts from the 1989 Modern Art Exhibition, and shown at the same time were two replicas of the works in the 1989 exhibition, including the installation work that had incurred the concluding gunshots for the 1980s’ New Wave Art.
 Shanghai of this September has focused public attentions due to her art fair. Following the opening-up of an international horizon in academic areas by Shanghai Biennale 2000, the international contemporary art exhibition of SH Contemporary 2007 might have served as a true beginning for Chinese collector and market endeavors to stride across national boundaries. While the previous “art exhibition” system at national, provincial, township and other levels gradually weakens and decays, nongovernmental exhibitions of various sizes including art expos are playing an increasingly important role in our art scenes today. The folk world is full of vitality; victory of market means victory of democracy; and democratic forces are profoundly shaping Chinese new cultures.
Top image : Chen Zhen, Purification Room, courtesy Gallery Continua
 Li Feng, art critic. He worked at an auction house for many years. He now pursuing a master's degree at the Centre Academy of Fine Arts. He is also helping an organization to build a museum in Beijing.
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