This article is by Lee Jian and read by an artificial voice.

SHANGHAI - November is arguably the best month to visit Shanghai: mild temperatures, blue skies, and the city's beloved hairy crab in peak season. It's also when Shanghai Art Week - one of China's largest, citywide art celebrations - brings an extra dose of international flair. With major art fairs, Shanghai Biennale and dozens of parties and exhibitions across the city, the port megacity gives art lovers plenty to explore.
At the center is the West Bund, a calm waterfront removed from the city's typical tourist path. On a recent Thursday, it was buzzing with creative energy as collectors and gallerists from around the world gathered beneath the autumn air.

West Bund, along the Huangpu River in Shanghai's Xuhui District, is a government-led redevelopment zone that was initially an industrial area. Over the past decade, it has become one of China's most significant cultural corridors, housing numerous galleries, museums and performance venues. Its landmark institution, West Bund Museum, opened in 2019 as a high-profile collaboration with the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Come fall, the area gains an extra vibrancy with West Bund Art and Design, one of the most representative annual art fairs in China. Its current 11th edition is being held from Nov. 13 to 18, hosting more than 200 galleries and institutions, including international heavyweights such as White Cube, Perrotin and Thaddaeus Ropac, as well as Korean galleries such as Arario and Gallery Grimson.

The fair unfolds across several venues, but the buzziest site is West Bund Art Center - a former aircraft manufacturing plant. With its concrete walls, exposed wooden beams in a two-story layout, it is anything but a white-cube show. Artworks are scattered, stacked and clustered against aged building, creating a slightly dystopian visual rhythm: humanoids, robots and deconstructed structures tangled together under shafts of natural light.

Reusing industrial spaces as cultural complexes is a global trend, but Shanghai's transformations operate on a different scale.
Just a short walk away sits the Tank Museum, exhibiting art inside a decommissioned oil tank that opened in 2019. One of the current highlights is French sculptor Jean-Marie Appriou's solo show "Cosmic Clock," which features monumental metal heads of zodiac animals beneath the circular dome of the repurposed tank.

Shanghai Biennale, running from Nov. 8 to March 31, is centered at the Power Station of Art, a former power plant transformed into a contemporary art museum. Established in 1996, it is mainland China's first international contemporary art biennale. This year marks its 15th edition - and the first under a female artistic director, Canadian curator Kitty Scott. Titled "Does the Flower Hear the Bee," the biennale brings together more than 250 works by 67 artists from China and abroad, spanning painting, video, installation and large-scale mural works.
"There is an emphasis on ethnic minority and Indigenous art this year," a spokeswoman for the biennale said. "We wanted to explore how the world and its connections can be seen through art."
Long Museum, whose branch is also in West Bund, used to be a coal transportation wharf, and still features the original 1950s coal-hopper unloading bridge as its central architectural feature.

A vast urban art exhibition, dubbed the "Artist Treat," is taking place in a former elementary school in the Huangpu District from Nov. 8 to 18. Each classroom is its own exhibit, displaying different contemporary mediums.
Larry's List, an art-market research company, is staging a pop-up exhibition at Guang'er Warehouse, a 1930s-era building, from Nov. 12 to 25. The project gathers 11 curatorial teams alongside foundations, designers, private collectors, artists, and institutions to create a stylish presentation of painting, installation, video, fashion, furniture and art books - arranged as though visitors are stepping ...

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