Art Walk with Cathy

In September 2025, I decided to work with the Art and Beyond club to organize a themed art exhibition. Before curating, I conducted a survey to better understand everyone's needs and thoughts. You can access the detailed content by visiting https://www.artsandbeyond.net/art-iniative-and-curating/collisionandfusion/survey. The survey found that even though the respondents were primarily art enthusiasts, over 60% still indicated they couldn't frequently participate in art activities. The main factors causing this problem were art museums being too far away, difficulty making reservations, poor viewing experiences due to overcrowding at popular exhibitions, and a lack of nearby art resources. The findings made me consider a question: in Shanghai, a city that leads the nation in arts and culture, why do so many people still find it difficult to visit art museums or feel they lack art resources?

Through conversations with several respondents and my online research, I found an answer: most people choose to visit art museums that are concentrated among those few venues with high visibility or media exposure. These venues, due to their high attention and large number of visitors, become difficult to book and offer poor viewing experiences. Meanwhile, it's challenging to locate exhibition information for other art museums online, and a significant portion of the content is outdated. In fact, there are as many as 99 art museums registered with Shanghai's Bureau of Culture and Tourism (https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%B8%8A%E6%B5%B7%E5%B8%82%E7%BE%8E%E6%9C%AF%E9%A6%86%E5%90%8D%E5%BD%95/65457622), not including many private galleries. Correspondingly, most of these museums don't have their own websites or social media accounts, and with minimal promotion, many people don't even know they exist, let alone understand what exhibitions they have or what makes them special.

Previously, to better serve club members, followers of Art and Beyond, and art enthusiasts, and out of personal interest, I planned to collect and update exhibition information from Shanghai and surrounding cities monthly, publishing it regularly. But after understanding the above problems, I decided to do something "bigger"—visit all the art museums in Shanghai and even surrounding cities, especially those with low visibility and no promotional channels of their own. I would then compile the exhibition information, venue characteristics, exhibition categories, and viewing tips I gathered from field visits into small reports, promptly publishing them on my personal website and the club's social media account. I named this plan "Art Walk with Cathy," hoping to visit one art museum each week. Since the original intention of this activity is to provide information to readers, I will write the "Art Walk with Cathy" reports from as objective a perspective as possible.

I hope "Art Walk with Cathy" can help more people who love art like me learn about and visit the art museums around us.

Shanghai Fosun Art Centre