After a Spring Festival hiatus, Shanghai’s art scene is back, with a bevy of exhibitions freshly opened and awaiting your serious perusal. Here’s three: ***

'Beyond Contemporary Art' @ Shanghai Art Museum

Currently on display at the Shanghai Art Museum, Beyond Contemporary Art spans both before and after Jian Guo Xu’s move across the Pacific to the US, with works from the past 40 years on display. The many twists and turns the artist’s approach has taken are, frankly, bewildering: seemingly incongruous finger paintings from the 1970s sit alongside somewhat lackluster watercolours, all unfortunately having the effect of diluting the other, greater works on show. And great works there are -- in particular two enormous hand painted scrolls depicting Xu’s native Shanghai. Fourteen years in the making, the New Vista paintings measure 6m and 8m in length respectively and depict some fourteen thousand of the city’s buildings, from Pudong’s looming skyscrapers to the pleasant tradition of Jingan Temple, with cranes galore poised to further fill the panorama. A contemporary take on a classical art form, the scrolls, identical apart from the supersaturated color of the later work, are utterly absorbing and really quite astonishing: although suggestive of the frenetic pace of the city and its apparently boundless growth, there’s also a certain tranquility about Xu’s deft brushwork.

'Elegant and Empty' -- Ren Zhitian Solo Exhibition @ Art Labor 2.0

If you haven’t already read about Ren Zhitian’s ingenious techniques over at Creative Hunt, then I urge you to so -- preferably ahead of visiting Elegant and Empty, which opened this past weekend. Ren mixes car exhaust derivative to create ‘ink’ which he then paints onto silk in abstract patterns. Undulating shades of grey, the large-scale paintings have a certain movement about them, like some sort of pared down Bridget Riley. Nothing in the repeated designs, delicately painted onto a slightly glossy white silk, screams ‘car exhaust’, which is both impressive, and also a little disappointing: beautiful and polished, what’s interesting about these works are the processes and materials used, which allude both to man’s innovation from the weaving of silk right through to the car, and of course the latter’s detrimental effect on the environment. Highly experimental, these swathes of grey dots and lines are certainly striking, but without sufficient background knowledge will be left floating in Art Labor 2.0’s beautifully minimalist space unanchored and without form. It makes for an interesting effect in itself, but may not be everyone’s cup of tea.

'Bangbang and Blackandwhite' @ ifa

Last but by no means least, head over to ifa gallery’s beautiful Changde Lu townhouse for Bangbang and Blackandwhite, a group exhibition comprising seven artists from China’s south western city of Chongqing. Teeming with a staggering 30 million inhabitants, the city is notorious for its lingering fog, cleverly articulated in this concise little show. Shades of blacks, whites and greys abound, and it’s only on leaving the space that visitors notice that the works in the show are all but devoid of color, reminiscent, perhaps of the near permanent pall that shrouds Chongqing. Zheng Yu’s dreamy mountainscapes, for example, are both mysteriously monotone, and also a nod to the city’s difficult terrain. Sticking with a similar palette Li Wenchun’s punchy little pen drawings depict sometimes monstrously frightening and generally highly sexual fantasies. Her Chinese Swear Words series was executed during the artist’s pregnancy, and many of the images are evocative of the fears and concerns of impending birth and motherhood. Head upstairs for the beautifully presented, post-baby and much calmer Love Bible -- pages of the artist’s notebook ingeniously displayed to evoke the intimacy that their small scale and content suggests. *** Finally, and if scrolls, silk and sex weren’t enough, here’s something completely different: 18Gallery are extending their Karl Lagerfeld: Photography exhibition. Unsurprisingly, the fashion icon’s moody black and white shots have proved tremendously popular and will now be on display at the Bund-side gallery until March 7. * All ongoing and upcoming Art exhibitions in Shanghai on SmartShanghai here.