Huacui Contemporary Art Museum, Changning, Shanghai
Founded in 2021, the Huacui Contemporary Art Museum sits on the banks of Suzhou Creek at 1978 Changning Road, Changning District, Shanghai. It is a contemporary art space with free admission, open Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00 to 17:00. The museum covers nearly 1,000 square meters and has three exhibition halls, a screening room and a café. Alongside its steady program of exhibitions, it also hosts art salons, themed gatherings and other events.
From November 4 to November 22, 2026, the museum is showing Between the Stacks, a solo exhibition by the artist Yuan Kan. The show is one stop in the 8th Sculpture Academic Exhibition Series, organized by the Shanghai Oil Painting and Sculpture Institute.
On view are more than 30 works, pastels on paper and acrylics on canvas, along with about ten sculptures. The exhibition preface was written by guest critic Xia Tian. The show's theme is abstract and avant-garde, and you could say it follows current trends in the international art market closely. Still, it's a real pity that none of the works has a label or any description. The only written interpretation is a piece of criticism, which isn't easy to read or understand. For a free, entirely non-profit exhibition, the curation falls somewhat short. That's only my personal view. I have always believed that with contemporary abstract art, it matters a great deal to help visitors grasp what the artist is trying to say.
All of the paintings, and the main sculptures too, show the artist's feel for blocks and masses of color. Through "line, form and stacking," these colors sometimes sit apart on the canvas in sharply defined zones, and sometimes seep into and blend with one another. Elsewhere they overlap or distort. They even extend into three-dimensional space as baked-enamel fiberglass sculptures, where the contrast between the soft, yielding forms and the hard material they are made of gives the works their tension. Visitors are free to read their own real-world meanings into the pieces through their imagination.
One work I especially liked is Reflection. A pale horizontal band divides the picture. Above it, vertical strokes of blue, yellow and red are stretched out, broken up and blurred below the band, like a still life refracted on the surface of water. For the artist, painting is a way of translating still life into layers of color and rhythm. As the critical essay puts it: "Here, landscape carries memory and emotion: one seems to sense a familiar climate, yet cannot pin it to any particular place."
A visit takes about 40 minutes, and admission is free.
Comments