Text and photos by Ekaterina Vinogradova
The exhibition kept shifting my sense of scale. Jewellery expanded into sculpture; miniature forms became architectural; the language of gemstones and engraving was translated into titanium, iron and monumental volume.
This shift in scale was one of the most convincing aspects of Vessels of Other Worlds. Chan has spent decades carving gemstones under magnification, working inside surfaces that most viewers encounter only from the outside. His sculptures seem to extend that experience into physical space, as if the imagined worlds contained within jewellery could finally become large enough to enter.
And yet, while walking through these spaces, I kept being distracted by something else.
Around one spherical form, a procession of small children moved in a circle. Their faces belonged unmistakably to a European visual tradition. Elsewhere, fragmented noses, ears and faces appeared as supposedly universal signs of perception and humanity. When I asked why these figures had been chosen, the explanation returned to universality: the child as a universal child, the face as a universal face. That was the moment the exhibition really began for me.
Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai, 2026
As a European art historian, I travelled with an unavoidable intellectual baggage. I expected difference. I hoped to encounter artistic strategies shaped by philosophical traditions unfamiliar to me rather than by the visual conventions I had studied for years. What surprised me was not the persistence of European culture in Shanghai, that history is well known, but the ways in which European visual codes continue to operate within contemporary artistic production, often detached from the debates that originally surrounded them.
My first morning began in Tianzifang before the cafés opened and before tourists filled the narrow streets. Without the crowds, the neighbourhood revealed itself as lived architecture. A faded poster of a young woman in traditional dress caught my attention.
Unable to read the Chinese text, I immediately imagined a Wong Kar-wai story around her. Hours later I found the same image on a biscuit tin in a supermarket. It was a small reminder of how easily we project familiar narratives onto places we barely know. That tension accompanied me throughout the week.
At the Pudong Museum the Morandi exhibition traced the quiet evolution of a painter whose world rarely extended beyond his studio. Photographs of his working space, together with paintings from different periods, constructed a portrait of artistic solitude rather than artistic isolation. One exhibition poster unexpectedly brought Moscow into the story, a reminder that artistic biographies rarely follow national borders as neatly as museum narratives suggest.
In the same museum, Jean Nouvel’s retrospective raised a different question. The exhibition celebrated the architect’s iconic projects from the Fondation Cartier to the Louvre Abu Dhabi yet what interested me most was not the mythology surrounding the “starchitect” but his sustained attention to context. Having spent years studying Nouvel’s work in Lyon, I could not help noticing a recurring sensitivity to colour and historical atmosphere. In Lyon, red light animates the Opera as a contemporary intervention within a historic structure. In Shanghai, the luminous red skin of The Roof operates within an entirely different symbolic register, yet again colour becomes a way of activating the city’s historical layers rather than concealing them. The projects belong to different cultural worlds while sharing an architectural belief that cities should be read rather than overwritten.
Nearby, Carolina Caycedo’s monumental installation transformed the museum into an underwater landscape inhabited by whales. Unlike many spectacular immersive installations, its changing light never felt decorative for its own sake. The shifting atmosphere continuously altered our perception of scale, movement and vulnerability. It was one of several moments during the week when architecture itself became an active participant in the exhibition rather than a neutral container.
Against this backdrop, Wallace Chan’s Vessels of Other Worlds became particularly intriguing. The exhibition is ambitious in scale and remarkable in craftsmanship. Chan’s mastery of materials, especially titanium, and his lifelong practice as a jeweller remain extraordinary achievements. Yet what fascinated me was not the technical innovation but the visual language through which the exhibition imagined universality.
Again and again, recognisably European symbols emerged as if they required no explanation. Facial features presented as neutral repeatedly echoed white Western physiognomies. During the press visit I asked whether these references consciously engaged with European art history. The answer returned instead to spirituality, beauty and universality. This is precisely where my questions began.
For decades, European artists and art historians have challenged the assumption that white bodies can function as universal human figures. Contemporary debates around representation have fundamentally reshaped the ways museums, artists and institutions understand visual authority. Seeing these same conventions reappear in Shanghai felt unexpectedly disorienting. The issue was not that Chan borrowed from Europe. Artistic exchange has always been productive. Rather, the references seemed detached from the intellectual conversations that have transformed their meaning.
Interestingly, this pattern extended beyond the artworks themselves. Discussions with both the artist and curator John Tain frequently returned to beauty, energy, spirituality and cosmic imagination while remaining surprisingly silent about the specific historical traditions informing the exhibition’s imagery. The language surrounding the exhibition often became more universal than analytical.
The following day, the Museum of the Chinese “Comfort Women” abruptly shifted the terms of the conversation. Here, metaphor disappeared. Instead of immersive environments and philosophical vocabulary, there were documents, maps, archival photographs and names. The museum, developed within Shanghai Normal University, resembles a research laboratory made visible. Every document feels like a fragment waiting to be connected to a larger investigation.
For me, this was also the moment when Shanghai ceased to be a destination and became a future archive.
My own research on sexual violence, colonial histories and the circulation of memory suddenly intersected with places I had long known only through publications. The French–Chinese Institute in Lyon, Japanese colonial expansion in East Asia, and the history of the so-called comfort women no longer belonged to separate intellectual projects. They formed part of the same geography of memory stretching across continents.
The remaining museums continued to complicate this picture. Rockbund Art Museum juxtaposed emerging artists from different cultural backgrounds while unexpectedly placing feminist self-defence at the centre of one installation. Fotografiska combined industrial architecture with exhibitions ranging from Vivian Meyer’s photography to the preservation of anonymous Chinese family archives rescued from destruction. At West Bund Museum, works by Sheila Hicks and Chinese artist Shi Hui entered into dialogue not because one influenced the other but because each approached textile, labour and materiality through distinct artistic traditions that nevertheless resonated deeply when exhibited together.
Looking back, what I encountered in Shanghai was a city negotiating multiple histories simultaneously: French concessions, Italian modernism, Japanese colonial violence, global contemporary art, Chinese artistic experimentation and rapidly expanding cultural institutions. These histories rarely merge into a coherent narrative. They coexist, overlap and occasionally contradict one another.
Perhaps that is why I left with more questions than answers.
I travelled to Shanghai hoping to discover another artistic worldview. Instead, I found myself repeatedly recognising fragments of my own. The most valuable part of the journey was understanding how familiar visual languages acquire entirely different meanings when they travel across cultural and historical contexts.
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