Zhoujiadu

Really glad that we were going to the Yaohua Road area today and happened to look up the China Art Museum as a potential point of interest! It is another totally free Shanghai museum filled with some really fun pieces - not to mention good play and colouring areas to keep kids entertained. In many ways it was more fun for Davy and Meg than the Shanghai Museum, which houses more traditional Chinese artwork and historical pieces. They could find more things that they could relate to and comment on - especially the comics!

First off, the building itself already looks really cool from the outside - definitively Chinese and just as definitively modern. The entrance hall is all metal and glass - very polished and these building materials age better than many others that we have seen around Shanghai. There are certainly a few galleries showcasing traditional Chinese paintings and calligraphy. However, the ones that really took the cake for us were the ones full of very non-traditional pieces - like these mirrors cut and pasted to outline two friends playing diabolo, or this meeting of important-looking Chinese people plus token white guy, or this gorgeous 9-foot Steinway grand piano inlaid according to a famous Chinese painting - apparently took four years to build. Davy particularly liked the comics (can’t recall the main character’s name, but sure brought back memories as we have some of these at home) and the multimedia section showcasing Chinese cartoons across the years.Read more