Galleries ousted from Shanghai’s West Bund area as property values in former industrial area boom

Don Gallery moved to West Bund in 2017, but will now have to relocate Courtesy of Don Gallery
A cluster of galleries and studios in Shanghai’s West Bund area will be evicted from mid-June, with the buildings purportedly slated for demolition. Impacted spaces include ShanghArt’s flagship space, Don Gallery, Aike Gallery, the nonprofit Pond Society, and artist Ding Yi’s studio.
“We received confirmation in March this year that we would have to vacate,” says Sylvia Sun, the art fair and PR manager of Don Gallery. “We're not sure what the new plan is for this location, but it seems that the neighbouring museums will not be affected.”
Though the Chinese government-owned West Bund Group could not be reached for confirmation, a spokesperson for the West Bund Art & Design Fair says its main hall, a historic plane hangar next to the gallery buildings, will not be affected. And across the street, the West Bund Art Museum recently extended its partnership contract with the Pompidou until 2028. Also apparently unaffected is the Shanghai location of Korean gallery Arario, located in a new commercial building further west along the riverfront. The Shanghai Center of Photography (SCoP), which closed last December, was also within the cluster that is being evicted.
Heavyweight commercial gallery ShanghArt, which also has branches in Beijing and Singapore, retains a project space in M50, the original Shanghai gallery cluster that emerged in the early 2000s in a converted factory space at 50 Moganshan Lu in the city’s north. Rents there, however, have risen as loft offices have nudged out many galleries. The city also has art clusters near the Bund, along the Suzhou Creek, and around Anfu Lu in the historic downtown.
“The instability of the West Bund area has been a long coming and has been discussed for years,” says Sun. But despite the “derelict state” of most of its buildings the area, it “became a bridgehead for the art industry in Shanghai after many artists’ studios, galleries and art institutions moved in.”
Located along the river in the environs of the city’s first airport, Longhua, which closed in the 1960s, the West Bund area was an industrial suburb for several decades, and then a semi-demolished wasteland for years more. A one-off biennial-style exhibition in 2013 kickstarted the cultural ambitions of the state-owned developer managing the area, which launched the West Bund Art & Design Fair in October 2014. Now, despite a nationwide property slump, the area is marketed as a centre for new technology centre, with new office towers and rising rents.
Starting in May 2014 with the Yuz Museum, founded by the late Chinese-Indonesian collector Budi Tek (which last year relocated to the remote Qingpu suburb), the West Bund has been heralded as Shanghai’s museum mile, being home to the Start Museum, the main Long Museum, the West Bund Museum and the erstwhile SCoP. ShanghArt opened its strikingly designed gallery, resembling stacked shipping containers, in November 2016. Another nearby building initially designated as a multi-gallery centre attracted tenants including MadeIn, Kiang Malingue, Don and Arario, but they were evicted for new occupants in 2020.
The galleries around the fair site were first slated for demolition in 2021, and offered space in a new Art Tower. That plan was upended by the tower’s sale to tech companies instead. For several months in 2022 the fair hall was used as a camp for Covid patients, during which galleries in the compound were barred from their offices.
Don Gallery first moved to West Bund from downtown Shanghai in March 2017, opening with a Lu Song exhibition, and moved to several different buildings. “Over the past few years, West Bund has also made an effort to assist us in setting up transitional areas, for which we are really appreciative,” says Sun. “There are also memories of hardships we have shared with other neighbouring galleries and friends. Although relocating is a major task, we are also excited to be starting a new chapter for Don Gallery. We have been approached by a number of locations, so we look forward to meeting our audience again soon.”

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