Above sea: Contemporary art, urban culture, and the fashioning of global Shanghai (Rethinking Arts Histories)

Shanghai, long known as mainland China's most cosmopolitan city, has recently emerged as a global capital. Above sea offers the first in-depth examination of Shanghai-based art and design in the 1990s and 2000s, the decades of the city's most rapid post-socialist development. Through analyses of design projects such as Xintiandi and Shanghai Tang, and work by artists including Pang Xunqin, Zhou Tiehai, Yang Fudong, and Cai Guo-Qiang, the book shows how global aesthetics conceal historically rooted cross-cultural conflicts.