This rapid cultural development has made Shanghai an important destination on the international art circuit: The Shanghai Art Fair, Shanghai Biennale, Museum of Contemporary Art and countless new private galleries, though young, are turning it into a contemporary arts hub to rival China's capital, Beijing.
There are 12 guest rooms for artists and scholars, with a dormitory for Shanghai art students under way, and even a working organic farm.
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Li Shichun, who runs the downtown furniture shop Vintiques Shanghai Art Deco, says there used to be a fairly steady flow of Deco pieces onto the market, driven by the demolition of old homes to make way for new construction and a general attitude among locals that Deco furniture wasn't something worth keeping.
But the art-censors at Shanghai's cultural bureau applied the stoppers.
The hotel -- with a tower topped by a sharply pitched pyramidal roof -- became the Art Deco trendsetter for Shanghai as soon as it opened its doors in 1929.
WSJ: Touring Asia's Art Deco Gems in Shanghai and Napier, New Zealand
As evidence of its place in design history, the PRADA phone by LG 1.0 is part of the permanent collection in New York City's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Shanghai.
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Art Deco's evolution in Shanghai is also clearly captured in the various strata of preserved buildings.
WSJ: Touring Asia's Art Deco Gems in Shanghai and Napier, New Zealand
But few places in the world embraced Art Deco with the fervor of Shanghai, a city obsessed with fashion and fixated on being up-to-date -- in part because of the view, prevalent in China at the time, that only by modernizing could the country regain its strength and stand up to Western imperialism and a militant Japan.
WSJ: Touring Asia's Art Deco Gems in Shanghai and Napier, New Zealand
The smaller of the two exhibitions, Los Angeles County Museum of Art's "Ming Masterpieces From the Shanghai Museum, " focuses on the Northern school.
This will be run in partnership with Qi Qi Jiang, a young Shanghai entrepreneur who combines developing her own business with studying for a doctorate in Oriental art at Oxford University.
For instance, Shanghai city officials pressed the state-run company that owns the Peace Hotel, an Art Deco icon, to undertake a multimillion-dollar renovation.
WSJ: Touring Asia's Art Deco Gems in Shanghai and Napier, New Zealand
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