Shanghai spring: the launch of a new museum and a major commercial gallery on the Bund have enlivened Shanghai's diverse art scene, creating intense anticipation for this fall's biennial

Standouts included Su Wenxiang's I Will Leave You in Due Time, a performance in which a woman slumbers on a bier of crushed red and white sleeping pills. In Zhou Tao's What Do You Want?, mirrors, backlit photographs with piped sounds of water, and Astroturf surrounded the staircase, forcing viewers to climb over the work. Guo Qingling's colorfully grotesque portraits of women, parodying modern China's obsession with superficial female beauty, were here incarnated in the "Seafood" painting series populated by figures like multiple Marilyn Monroe surrogates with Asian facial features. Shao Yi conveyed seediness with Don't Come Here, a massage chair behind a curtain in a red-lit room. It contrasted with the bright innocence of Fei Fei, a chair and a curtain of threads, both encrusted with colorful candy and suspended from the ceiling by China Academy of Art senior Huang Yuelin.

In April, Doland dedicated its lower floors to the paintings of Tiananmen Square and Chairman Mao in "Utopia & Youth Story: New Work of Yin Zhaoyang." Yin was also included in "If you are a collector" at Aura Gallery from Mar. 27 to Apr. 15. The low profile Aura, occupying a Yangpu District warehouse, represents an assortment of promising Chinese, Japanese and Korean artists.

A long with the openings of SGA and Doland, the major contemporary art event in Shanghai so far this year was "Zooming into Focus," from Feb. 18 to Mar. 28 at the Shanghai Art Museum (SAM). The second stop of a traveling show organized at San Diego State University in 2003, it featured pieces from Chris and Eloisa Haudenschild's collection of Chinese video and photographic art.

The exhibition showcased primarily younger--born in the 1960s and 1970s--and southern artists, dominated by the brat pack of young Shanghai media artists Yang Fudong, Yang Zhenzhong, Xu Zhen and Song Tao. It also included video installations by Zhang Peili, Xiang Liqing's elegant photomontages of building facades, and images by Shi Yong, who started digitally cloning himself years before The Matrix. Representing Guangzhou and environs were Cao Fei's flirty photos of herself as a dog, Yang Yong's bleak urbanscapes, Weng Fen's wistful "Sitting on the Wall" series, and Zheng Guo's photographs of toys suspended above urban skylines. Beijing contributed the well-known Feng Mengbo, Hong Hao and Zhao Bandi.

Most of the photos and videos were familiar to Shanghai gallery-goers, having previously appeared at ShanghArt, which organized the show along with SAM. However, seeing the works collected together, spread through an entire floor of the museum, allowed an appreciation impossible in cramped gallery confines. A few new works, particularly Yang Zhenzhong's "Massage Chairs," a group of electric massagers stripped to their mechanical skeletons, clattering and lurching like robots, added spice. Few of the artists and works had been previously shown in an official museum in China: the government art establishment remains largely dismissive of new media art, but the American imprimatur of "Zooming into Focus" forced some grudging recognition.