A futuristic wonderland of a museum, by Japanese digital art collective teamLab. Inside, it's a fantasy world spread across many rooms, with endlessly changing and interactive projections creating a disorienting trip akin to that bit in 2001: A Space Odyssey where... Read more
Tank Shanghai is the brainchild of Chinese collector Qiao Zhibing, opened in March 2019. The 60,000 square meter complex, the size of 11 American football fields, turns the former oil storage tanks for the Longhua Airport into galleries, bookstores, restaurants and... Read more
Until 2025, Centre Pompidou is collaborating with the West Bund Group to establish the most significant artistic exchange between France and China to date. The exterior of the building, designed by David Chipperfield, is nothing compared to its Parisian original, but... Read more
A historical compound that used to house, among other things, the old Navy Club, the Columbia Country Club--a popular hangout for Americans in the 20s and 40s--and a mansion built for Sun Ke, the son of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, by Hungarian architect Lazlo Hudec. After the... Read more
As of 2016, this is one of the nicest and most futuristic places to see a movie in Shanghai. It's big: 6 halls and 1046 seats total. Facilities are great, with comfortable theater areas, and clean and comfortable 3D glasses. They've got RealD technology, if you're... Read more
This is the new location for this slightly secretive museum. During December 2019, it moved out of its old basement and into this old-fashioned office building. Propaganda Poster Art Center has a collection of hundreds of original posters from the Mao years as well... Read more
A vast art museum, housed in the former Chinese Expo pavilion over in Pudong. Works on display span modern and contemporary periods, and there's also a steady rotation of temporary exhibitions, including lots from abroad. Good to know: it's free to get in, but you... Read more
The 16th edition of the Croatian Museum of Illusions. The popular international attraction features puzzles, holograms and general optical trickery that will leave you well and truly bamboozled. Read more
One of Shanghai's best and most visited museums, the Urban Planning Exhibition Hall at People's Square documents the changing face of Shanghai and is an essential vising point for those interested in the evolution of the city. A perfect scale model of the entire city... Read more
A former coal storage facility known as the Lao Bai Du Coal Warehouse (老白渡煤仓), it was transformed by Atelier Deshaus (who also did the West Bund’s Long Museum) into a museum. It has retained many of its original structures, like a long, elevated channel that runs... Read more
The PSA is an impressive but cumbersome space, a huge building likened by curator Qui Zhijie to London’s Tate Modern. The PSA may have similar hardware to that legendary institution but it doesn’t have the software — the staffing, budgets, etc — to match.... Read more
50 Moganshan Lu, better known as M50, is Shanghai's most famous "gallery district," home to over 50 gallery spaces in Shanghai, and offers a cross-section of emerging Shanghainese and Chinese artists, working in a wide range of styles and mediums. Great for a day's... Read more
The best part of the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai (MOCA) is the prime location smack dab in a lovely green portion of People's Square. Sunlight and panoramic views pour in through the museum's floor to ceiling glass walls. International exhibitions are the... Read more
Opened in 2014, the Long Museum West Bund is the second of Chinese billionaire collectors Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei's expanding empire. The architecture is stunning - right on the waterfront, it was designed by Liu Yichun of Atelier Deshaus. Inside is a veritable who's... Read more
Powerlong is a real estate company and this museum is the show-and-tell space for its chairman, Xu Jiankang. Xu is a high-profile rich AF art collector and this is his non-profit space. The 23,000 square meter museum is anchored by a stunning minimalist ramp that... Read more
Built in 1934 as the Shanghai Race Club and known for its iconic bell tower, the most recent two-year renovation of this space gave us one of Shanghai's best museums. It sports 9,800-square-meters (that's 2.42 acres) of exhibition area, with around 1,100 artifacts on... Read more
Established in 2017 and dubbed Shanghai’s first 'night museum,' for its later opening hours, HOW is a 7,000sqm, 3-story building, adjacent to a five-star art hotel. It also... Read more
Opened in Spring 2011, the Shanghai Museum of Glass is a welcome addition to the city's cultural scene. Housed in a renovated former factory, the beautifully displayed exhibits guide visitors through the history of glass, some of its lesser known applications and a... Read more
Opened in May 2014, YUZ Museum Shanghai is the second major private institution to grace the city's West Bund area. This one is the brainchild of Chinese-Indonesian collector, Budi Tek and will host rotating exhibitions sourced from his own massive collection of... Read more
Once the residence of Rong Zongjing, a late Qing Dynasty industrialist dubbed "The King of Flour," this western-style garden mansion has worn a couple of different hats over the subsequent decades. In 1949, it was rented to the China Economic Research Institute, in... Read more
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