Hai Guide is our ongoing column series to explain this beautiful, chaotic city in a way that makes it slightly less confusing and marginally more livable. From how to navigate the bustle at Formula 1 weekend, to living as a vegan sourcing vegan cheese without bartering your passport, we've got the essential intel. Think of it as Shanghai 101, written by people who've already made the mistakes so you don't have to.

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Shanghai's aspirations to become one of the top cities for visual arts in Asia and the world have been gathering steam for decades, with a strong gallery scene now buoyed by two respected art fairs every November and more new museums, galleries and nonprofits opening every year. Indeed, the sprawling metropolis is not content to just have one art scene: four districts of Shanghai have art clusters that, even as standalone, would still make most cities envious. Each has evolved its own distinct personality, community and offerings.

Contemporary art in Shanghai first started in 1996 downtown with the first location of ShanghArt in the hallway of the Portman, followed by a charming little room in Fuxing Park from 1999, before expanding into the spacious industrial buildings on Moganshan Rd near the Shanghai Train Station. Downtown, particularly the Xuhui District around Anfu Road, has remained popular with more independent spaces. The stately heritage architecture of the Bund draws others, and unsurprisingly boasts the bluest chip of credentials. On the southwest Xuhui shores of the Huangpu, the government-backed developers behind West Bund have been erecting what they hope will be China's version of London's Museum Mile, with several high-profile museums and galleries alongside one of the city's main November art fairs.

The old textile warehouses along Suzhou Creek date back to the early 2000s, when Shanghai's art scene first began to gain critical momentum. Initially more scattered, demolitions chased galleries like ShanghArt and Eastlink into the complex of old textile warehouses at 50 Moganshan Rd. Now dubbed M50, the lively collection of galleries, studios, design shops, cafes and offices continues apace. "Alongside the galleries and the artist studios, art centers, design firms and designer shops, coffee shops and restaurants, there are all sorts of hidden surprises. It's a very diverse environment, which keeps it interesting," says Lise Li, founder of Vanguard Gallery, which mostly represents early and mid-career Asian artists, 20 years ago in M50 – though the gallery has now moved to a bigger space further east along the Suzhou Creek. "As a cultural area, it has an ecological symbiosis that is a little wild and vibrant, and never boring," says Li.

On sunny weekends, M50 is the site of both experimental performances and elaborate wanghong photo shoots, which can be hard to differentiate at times. Other top galleries there include Antenna Space, founded by Simon Wang in 2013, which represents many of China's top conceptual talents and frequently holds provocative group shows. Area founder ShanghArt now has a flagship space over at West Bund, but keeps its old premises as a project space, mostly showing younger artists. Ofoto remains one of Shanghai's few photography-focused galleries.

Areas further east along the Suzhou Creek have started gathering steam again since the 2021 opening of UCCA Edge, a branch of the Beijing museum. While the Shanghai location of the OCAT nonprofit has shuttered, its premises are now occupied by several galleries, including Vanguard.

The area first garnered prominence in the 2000s with the opening of experimental space Creek Art, in a historic warehouse that currently remains empty. With photography museum Fotografiska and multipurpose destination Suhe Haus, both opened in 2023, the Creek has become the city's fastest-growing art destination. Fotografiska is also home to Mona, a restaurant that has become consistently booked (it's pet-friendly).

The area around the Bund has surprisingly ebbed and flowed over the years since its first space, Shanghai Gallery of Art, opened in 2004 at Three on the Bund. SGA is now only infrequently active, and the heart of the district has passed to the behind-Bund area of Huqiu Rd – appropriately named Museum Road from 1886 – that since 2010 has been home to one of the city's prominent institutions, Rockbund Art Museum. Now reopened after a long facility upgrade, RAM has returned to the thoughtful, diverse shows it is so beloved for. Situated in what was once the Royal Asiatic Society building, RAM will open a new library on its top floor this year.

Smack across Huqiu Rd sits the Amber Building, another renovated heritage site that holds the Shanghai premises of top global galleries: England's Lisson and France's Almine Rech and Perrotin. The Shanghai branch of Japanese gallery Ota has also opened in the new, northern part of the Rockbund development. Around the corner on Yuanmingyuan Rd is the Shanghai headquarters of global auction giant Christie's, while another block west on Beijing Rd is a branch of Beijing's Hive Contemporary. On the actual Bund itself, at the sweet spot intersecting with Nanjing Rd E., the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in the former Palace Hotel hosts an artists' residency. The back Bund area is also home to several spaces with eclectic and exciting programming, like galleries Vacancy and Around Space and the nonprofit project SNAP.

Global Dreams: West Bund

Shanghai art has always run in parallel to its oldest gallery ShanghArt, now among the top dealers in Asia, representing some of the biggest international stars in Chinese art, with additional locations now in Beijing and Singapore. Its longstanding West Bund flagship last this summer, but it has found new premises in a new luxury mall nearby. Korean gallery Arario is also in the area, and nonprofit Pond Society has taken over the building formerly home to the now-closed Shanghai Centre of Photography. The Pompidou-collaborating West Bund Art Museum sits regally across the street.

East along the waterfront are Start Museum and the West Bund branch of Long Museum. Nearby, the former Longhua Airport is being transformed into a library. The area has that formal feel of centralized planning, but glimmers of its history remain.

Organic and Independent: Downtown

Art spaces are thick on the ground all over downtown Shanghai, but the main concentration is around Anfu Road in Xuhui District. There is a loose community of independent art spaces coordinating as the Anfu Arts District. The area's cultural roots go decades deep, with the Shanghai Theater Academy on Huashan Rd. Down a winding lane across the street in an old garden villa, Capsule Gallery presents mostly younger Chinese and international artists. Close to Wulumuqi Rd next to Alimentari sits the Shanghai location of Spain's El Instituto Cervantes, which along with its language courses, offers cultural programming and an exhibition venue, its shows pairing Chinese artists with their counterparts from Spanish-speaking countries. The Terraza Cervantes center shows video and interactive art in its large street-facing windows to the passing crowds. Galleries Art Labor and Linseed have recently joined the heady mix on adjacent streets.

At Fuxing and Huaihai Rds, the state-backed Xuhui Art Museum presents an eclectic mix of projects. A tad further, at Huaihai and Wukang Rd in the photogenic Normandy Apartments, Urban Cross is a project to document and educate about Shanghai's architectural heritage. It will be closing its location on Huaihai soon, with a new location to be announced.

One to Watch: Pudong Rising

The waterfront Modern Art Museum Shanghai helped stake the claim that "Pudong is the future" in the early 2020s, followed in 2021 by the Museum of Art Pudong, a glass-and-steel leviathan backed by state oil money and curated in part through partnerships with London's Tate and the British Museum.

Nearby looms the unmistakable China Art Museum, housed in the crimson crown of the former China Pavilion from Expo 2010 – a symbolically loaded structure where its collection of socialist realism and early modern Chinese art anchors it firmly in national narratives.

The neighborhood's newest arrival is more intimate but no less ambitious: the Centre d'Art Rodin, a contemplative offshoot of Paris's sculpture museum, installed just steps away in the former French Pavilion of the World Expo Shanghai 2010. Where its neighbors impress through scale, Rodin's Shanghai outpost whispers with quiet gravitas, offering bronzes like The Thinker, Balzac, and The Gates of Hell without the barrier of glass, inviting a proximity rarely permitted in major institutions. It is, in a way, a quiet provocation – offering depth rather than spectacle in a city more accustomed to cultural maximalism.

Further inland sit older institutions such as the Himalayas Museum, still grappling with its original commercial-hotel complex setting, and How Art Museum, which has struggled to maintain visibility despite early promise. None yet form a tight cluster, spatially or thematically. Whether Pudong matures into a genuine cultural ecosystem or remains a constellation of scattered stand-alone monuments hinges less on architectural ambition than on curatorial vision – and on the sustained commitment to draw in artists and exhibitions with enough gravitas to contribute meaningfully to Shanghai's evolving art stature.

Ambitious wishes of the past have already materialized into so much art all over Shanghai, and Pudong would have to hustle to ever catch up. The artists, administrators, audiences and collectors that the physical venues facilitate are also growing in ranks and maturity. More has always meant more more more to the city, and despite current challenges, Shanghai art remains an undeniable juggernaut.