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There's more. A Spanish bullfight is planned for next month in a specially constructed ring in the Shanghai Sports Stadium. Starting on Sept. 29, the Shanghai Art Museum will showcase what in just a decade has become one of Asia's premier art festivals, the two-month Shanghai Biennale. "The Shanghainese are quick to adopt foreign and new ideas," says Zhang Qing, one of the curators of the Biennale, which will focus on the symbiosis among art, science and technology. "The city has an accommodating character, so even though Shanghai might not have the best Chinese artists, it provides a platform for international artistic exchange."
This renaissance has been spectacularly rapid. When Handel Lee first visited Shanghai in the early '90s, the 43-year-old American lawyer saw nothing of the city that his father, who studied in Shanghai before joining the overseas exodus in 1949, used to rhapsodize about as the most cosmopolitan place in the world. "I hated it," says Lee, who was based in Beijing at the time. "It was dirty and muddy, and the people were grouchy. I thought 'How could this place have been so glamorous before?'" That the Pearl of the Orient had lost its luster was unsurprising, given that the Communists had deliberately held Shanghai back as retribution for its earlier capitalist excesses. Even when Deng Xiaoping kick-started economic reforms in 1979, Shanghai wasn't invited to the party. It was only in the mid '90s, after Deng had repented on his decision to restrain Shanghai, that then President Jiang Zemin, a former Shanghai Mayor, was able to grant his old domain the same economic freedoms as other parts of China. "I remember visiting in 1998," says Lee, "and all of a sudden, it felt like Shanghai was breathing a huge sigh of relief and saying, 'Hey, we're back where we belong.'"
Like everyone else, Lee began looking for a way to ride the revival. By 1999, he had found it: a dilapidated building on the historic Bund riverfront that, with investment from Chinese tire magnates living overseas, he hoped to turn into the city's premier address. Renovations took nearly five years—an eternity in today's Shanghai—but earlier this year, Three on the Bund opened for business. Transformed by American architect Michael Graves, the 1916 building includes four restaurants, the 1,000-square-meter Armani flagship store and an Evian spa. Despite the stratospheric prices—a ruched scarf at one of the apparel stores goes for $300—half of the building's customers are Chinese. At the Evian spa, women who once were exhorted to trade "lipstick for guns" sashay past indoor streams (filled with Evian mineral water) to private treatment rooms, while on a different floor the famed fusion chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten offers up such delicacies as a $33 coddled egg with crme frache and caviar to executives from state-owned enterprises.
One floor of Three on the Bund is reserved for the Shanghai Gallery of Art, Lee's pet project. Previously, much of Chinese top-end avant-garde art was produced by artists who lived overseas and sold their work to foreigners enchanted by neon-hued renditions of Chairman Mao. Some Chinese artists did live on the mainland, often in communes outside Beijing, but their art, too, was largely bought by a clique of expats. Local art collectors seemed to prefer traditional landscapes over these more challenging pieces. But Lee figured he could convince Shanghai's more open-minded residents to take an interest in modern Chinese art. "Shanghai is a window to the world because Shanghainese have an intense desire to learn about the West," Lee says. "But in a strange way, Shanghai is also a window into a China that many other Chinese are unwilling to imagine." In less than a year, the gallery has sold more than $1 million in contemporary Chinese art to local collectors. "This is the city where trends begin," says Lee, who is now working on bringing a boutique hotel to Shanghai. "We're sitting on an incredible force that's just beginning to come alive."