Such is Shanghai: A Century of Surrealism in China's Cosmopolitan Metropolis

Surrealism gained a foothold in Shanghai's former French concession during the early 1930s through Chinese artists who encountered the movement whilst studying abroad in France and Japan. Extant literature argues for Surrealism's tenuous, short-lived presence in the city confined to ‘liberal’ eras of the 1930s and 1980s. Conversely, I demonstrate that, over the course of a century, Surrealism's dialectical reconciliation of opposing forces (Breton 1929) has been projected onto visual representations of Shanghai. Here, Communism and Capitalism, East and West, traditional and modern create a marvellous form of reality, piercing the banality of everyday existence. Through mixed methods incorporating artist interviews, periodicals, archival research and secondary literature, this paper couches Shanghai as a ‘Surrealist city' throughout the vicissitudes of semi- colonialism, occupation, Maoism, and present day neo-liberal economics. This article argues that the raison d’être of Shanghainese Surrealism, from the culturally hybrid Republican era works of Pang Xunqin (1906–1985) to the present-day parodies of Zhou Tiehai (b.1966), has been to instrumentalise an internationalist anti-colonial movement to both critique and subsume western influence in Shanghai. Rather than ‘copy from the west', Surrealism’s penchant for incongruous juxtapositions enabled Chinese artists to exert ownership over western cultural impositions amidst an idiosyncratically Shanghainese context.