Fifth anniversary

Since its inauguration on October 1, 2012, Shanghai’s Power Station of Art (PSA) has so far, in its five years of operations, hosted 51 exhibitions (including three Shanghai Biennales), welcomed nearly 10,000 visitors at most on a daily basis, attracted average visitors of 320,000 every year, and organized nearly 400 educational events such as lectures, performances, and children’s activities. For these five years, the Shanghai Biennale, now accommodated by PSA, has been seeing vast improvements in terms of brand recognition and pioneering significance, whilst properly breaking limits of culture, geography and academic authority to voice its own pursuits. The Architecture & City exhibitions and Researches and the Emerging Curators Project, both launched in 2014, as well as the PSA Collection Series, first started in 2015, have all served as strong manifests of the art museum’s attitudes and visions. And PSA’s sub-spacepower station of DESIGN (psD) and theatrical program ReActor, both operational from 2016, have brought design and social theater into the museum to form with it an organic body that narrates a more comprehensive and vivid contemporary landscape and thinking pedigree.

For now, PSA is hosting chief curator selection and preparation for the 2018 12th Shanghai Biennale. While all remain uncertain, museum director Gong Yan said: “I hope that all future curators can dig deeper into Shanghai’s historical backdrop to identify its unique urban culture, and pull the city back to cultural contexts of China and Asia with more diversified perspectives.”

In 2013, PSA inaugurated the Architecture & City exhibitions and researches, thus becoming China’s first contemporary art organization to include urban architecture into its exhibition system. By PSA’s 5th Anniversary, it has staged 13 architectural exhibitions, including solos for three Pritzkerwinners, Renzo Piano, Toyo Ito, and Shigeru Ban.

Boosted by the PSA Collection Series, PSA will continue to enrich its permanent collections. It currently houses works by both Chinese and international artists like Cai Guoqiang, Datong Dazhang, Li Shan, Joseph Beuys, Yona Friedman, Toyo Ito, and Kazunari Sakamoto. In the future, PSA will continue to expand the boundaries of its collections, taking in non-material works such as sounds and performances, with a plan to set up an exhibition hall dedicated to such collections within the next 3 to 5 years.

As the first public contemporary art museum on the Chinese mainland, PSA has dedicated itself to spreading contemporary cultures and thoughts, promoting cross-disciplinary exchanges, exploring possibilities of Anthropocene arts, and creating new urban cultures and lives.

In 2018, upcoming exhibitions:
–a large-scale solo of French artist Christian Boltanski
–the 12th Shanghai Biennale (November 10, 2018)

Please refer to the PSA website to confirm the exhibition dates.
 

Upcoming architectural exhibitions

Shigeru Ban-Works and Humanitarian Activities
October 8–November 30, 2017

Superstudio 50
November 17, 2017–November 3, 2018
a project co-produced with Italy’s MAXXI (Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo)

Press inquiry: liujie [​at​] powerstationofart.com