Shanghai’s Powerstation of Art is an imposing building. It dates back to 1985, when it was built as the Nanshi Power Plant, which operated for more than 80 years until 2007. It occupies 41,000 square meters on the Huangpu River’s eastern banks, and its 165-meter chimney remains a visible marker in the cityscape. In March, when the weather is drizzly and spring hasn’t quite warmed up the air, the chimney fades into the sky. The contemporary art gallery – the first state-owned gallery of its kind in mainland China – opened on 1 October 2012. Its first exhibition was the ninth Shanghai Biennale, aptly titled Reactivation. The Powerstation of Art is viewed as a culture generator in Shanghai, and one of the aims is to provide a platform for the public to learn about and appreciate contemporary art, and break barriers between life and art, and art and culture.
I visited, thanks to the Asia New Zealand Foundation, 14 years and seven biennales later, because for the first time artists from Aotearoa, four of them, were part of the curated exhibition. In its 30-year history, we’ve only been represented one other time, in 2012 when filmmaker Vincent Ward had a solo installation as a satellite event in a church over the river. This time the New Zealand artists were in the central show, meaning that their works were alongside and in conversation with artists from all around the world.
Inside the vast concrete hall, bright yellow flowers hung from ceiling rafters 27 meters high, forming a floating canopy. Others lay on the ground, and while they looked real as I bent over and inspected their petals, they’d been there for four months and kept their colour. They were plastic flowers, 170,000 of them, forming a collaborative work by USA artist Jennifer Allora and Cuban artist Guillermo Calzadilla. It’s the artwork that greeted visitors when they entered the 15th Shanghai Biennale, Does the flower hear the bee? Which ran from November 2025 to the end of March 2026.
Behind the flowers is a familiar structure. It’s a recreation of a gun turret from a warship used to invade the Waikato, remade in kauri and etched with rauponga (notched ridges) and haehae (parallel grooves) that recall the currents of the river and the glistening bodies of eels. This is Brett Graham’s (Ngāti Koroki Kahukura, Tainui) Ka Wheeke, a sculpture I first saw at Auckland Art Gallery in 2024. It seems to hum here, remembering and transmitting the history and the mauri of the river and land it came from. Ka Wheeke’s strength remains, even when it is far from home.
Upstairs, Ngahina Hohaia’s (Taranaki Iwi, Te Atiawa, Ngāti Ruanui, Ngāti Mutunga, Parihaka) embroidered poi made from woolen blankets line up on the wall. Few visitors will know how they might move from a dancer's hand or that they’re conduits and messengers, but on the opposite wall is another work made of woollen blankets by an aboriginal artist, d. Harding, and there’s an echoing of histories. Placed by Harding's blanket works, Hohaia’s poi speak across oceans about the colonial shaping of indigenous lives. Down the hallway a series of photographs by Shannon Te Ao (Ngāti Tūwharetoa,Ngāti Wairangi, Ngāti Te Rangiita, Te Pāpaka-a-Maui) tenderly capture his children under coloured lighting with the sea behind them. They’re next to photographs by Heji Shin that show luminous moving streaks, fireflies, in Tlaxcala, Mexico. They capture an intense and delicate performance by bugs. There’s a shared, gentle nostalgia between the works.
At the end of the hallway is a small room. The sound of heavy rain envelops you along with the darkness as you enter. This is Luke Willis Thompson’s (Fiji, New Zealand) installation Mouvement des Malades. Inside, two works on opposite walls face each other. One is a framed A4 piece of paper, on it a passage has been scrawled with a pencil, in French. “Les anges” it is titled carefully at the centre top. This is a recreation of a partially surviving manuscript by psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon. On the other wall, three temporary walls form a sort of Retablo, a set of panels typically behind an altar in a church. A video, mostly still, of the mural Black Christ and Worshippers (1962) by Jean Chalot that is painted on a church in Naiserelagi, Fiji. It's the same place the sound was recorded, on a day during Fiji’s worst flooding in two decades. This work has also been shown in Aotearoa. In 2024 it was installed in the Michael Lett gallery which occupied an old hall on East Street in central Auckland.
I’ve lived in Aotearoa for the vast majority of my adult life, and this is where I’ve seen our contemporary artists exhibit. I know that many exhibit far and wide, that their careers extend beyond our shores, and that many live overseas to chase different opportunities, but it’s not something I’ve seen with my own eyes. The contemporary art from Aotearoa that I’ve experienced has until now been limited to existing in places like the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, Artspace Aotearoa, and smaller spaces tucked around Karangahape Road or in neighbourhoods. All perfectly good galleries, but it has been a blinkered view of the context the art participates in, and an under-estimation of our artists' careers. Seeing Aotearoa art abroad revealed how deeply it participates in global conversations, even as artists dig deep into our histories and their own roots.
I was also there to see art from China, and experience what the Shanghai art scene had to offer. In seeking art around the city, I found that Shanghai is a city of layered history and reuse. The Powerstation of Art is one example, but there’s also TANK, a non-profit art centre housed in three tanks which once held fuel for one of the first airports in China, decommissioned in 1966. The tanks are much smaller than an ex-power station, and surrounded in a series of carefully designed gardens.
There I saw a group exhibition titled Down to Earth. It was a show curated around the interspecies connections between humans, the land, and the other beings we share it with. The show was curated by Erika Mei Chua Holum, Zining Ke, and Hongxia Pu – three young curators that were involved in a curatorial residency at TANK called the Shanghai Curatorial Lab. Like the biennale, Down to Earth had works from artists around the world, but there was a greater proportion and emphasis on Chinese artists.
On the first floor, a striking video work by Chen Ruicheng (Guangzhou, China), Land of the Floating - Sinking Sea Ranch, saw him in a mass of coloured buoys, tracing the journey of industrially farmed oysters. As the piece unfurled, poetic documentation gave way to magical realism. On the next level, up a set of stairs that followed the curve of the tank’s exterior wall, a series of photos by Xie Rui (Yinchuan, Ningxia, China) reflected on the modern forces that have near extinguished the presence of Mules in the countryside. The photos catalog traces mules have left behind – bones, tracks, and other markings – as well as human footprints, fires, and figures. There’s a sense of archiving and bearing witness, while taking the time to understand, and a bold simplicity in the choice of medium and presentation. Just meters away, a series of organic forms curved and undulated into themselves. These were Wang Yiyi’s (Nanjing) Petriceps series, where she lets fungus grow on and shape clay, and then fires them, incinerating the fungus but leaving behind its form in the excavated clay.
Tucked behind a heavy curtain was a 29-minute-long video by Eugenia Lim (Chinese-Singaporean Australian) documenting the ecology around the Western Treatment Plant in Wadawurrung Country. Metabolism was projected onto a wall big enough to feel enveloping, and reflected off the ground. Landscape scenes followed the Wirribi-yaluk (Werribee river), which is the waterway that has sustained life there. The river runs along the eastern edge of the Western Treatment Plant. Lim thinks of her practice as a way to explore how the diasporic condition can engender ways of seeing in resistance to the colonial gaze, and Metabolism considers the changing use of resources under colonisation and capitalism.
These pieces of contemporary art by Chinese artists would very easily fit in Aotearoa’s art scene. They’re addressing similar themes and concerns, through similar approaches, and using familiar visual languages and mediums. Before I went there, I imagined Shanghai was so far away, and so different, to Aotearoa. I assumed that art there would be like a cipher I didn't have the code for. Instead I realised that our artists, and Chinese artists, are more like different pages of the same book. They can be read with the same eyes, and exist in conversation with each other.
