Liu Haisu Art Museum (Branch)
The Liu Haisu Art Museum's only branch opened in 2009 at No. 1869 Tongchuan Road in Shanghai's Putuo District. The building covers more than 4,000 square meters, and over 1,500 of these are exhibition space. The branch is a designated venue on Shanghai's social-practice platform for the comprehensive evaluation of high school students. It is dedicated to researching and disseminating Liu Haisu's art and to fostering and promoting young artists in Shanghai.
From September 23 to October 31, 2026, the branch is hosting Lacquer Hues of the East, the 7th Shanghai Lacquer Painting Exhibition. The main galleries on all three floors are devoted to contemporary lacquer painting.
Lacquer painting uses natural raw lacquer as its principal medium. Artists also work with gold, silver, lead and tin, along with eggshell, seashell, stone chips and wood. Besides vermilion, the pigments mixed into lacquer include orpiment, titanium white, phthalocyanine blue and phthalocyanine green. The techniques are remarkably varied, and the genre is divided by method into incised lacquer, relief lacquer, carved lacquer, inlaid lacquer, painted lacquer and polished lacquer, among other types. Lacquer painting therefore sits between painting and craft. Contemporary lacquer painting grew out of China's traditional lacquering crafts into an independent genre. It retains the intrinsic visual language of raw lacquer while absorbing the ideas and formal vocabulary of modern painting. The term qihua, or "lacquer painting," became established as the name of the genre around the 1960s.
Making a lacquer painting is a long and exacting process. Raw lacquer has to cure slowly at carefully controlled temperature and humidity, and a single work often goes through dozens of stages over several months. This gives the finished piece a distinctive quietude and weight. The visual effect is just as distinctive. The lacquer surface is lustrous, deep and warm to the eye. The traditional palette of black, vermilion and gold is both solemn and sumptuous. The layers revealed by polishing give off a light that seems to come from within the work itself, and neither oil painting nor Chinese ink painting can readily achieve this quality.
Several clear tendencies stand out in contemporary lacquer painting:
From decoration to a diversity of subjects. Early works leaned toward decorative and folk themes. Artists today take up landscape, the figure, the city, social reality and private emotion.
From figuration toward abstraction and conceptualism. Many artists play down narrative and bring the texture, layered color and material beauty of lacquer to the fore. The result is an abstract idiom in which the material itself becomes the language.
Beyond the picture plane. Works increasingly engage with installation, sculpture and spatial practice, giving rise to three-dimensional lacquer art, mixed-media pieces and other hybrid forms.
A convergence of Eastern and Western idioms. Artists draw on the composition, color and abstract thinking of Western modernism while keeping the restraint and evocative atmosphere of East Asian aesthetics. This work has drawn attention from the art worlds of Japan, Korea and Europe.
Ongoing innovation in technique and materials. Some artists experiment with synthetic lacquers and new media, while others stay committed to pure raw lacquer. The debate over tradition and the contemporary remains lively.
On the first floor, the works share a solemn, measured tone. They draw largely on classical motifs and carry on the aesthetic conventions and historical lineage of traditional lacquer art. The second floor brings a richer palette and lighter subjects close to everyday life, with a marked secular and quotidian orientation. The works on the third floor tend toward abstraction. They set figurative narrative aside, distill a formal language from natural forms and dwell on the textures and layers of color that belong to lacquer itself. All in all, the exhibition is well worth a visit.
Admission is free all year round. Allow at least an hour to see all three floors.
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