Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art

The Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art was founded in 2003 by the Hongkou District Bureau of Culture and Tourism (formerly the Hongkou District Bureau of Culture). It is the first public museum on the Chinese mainland dedicated to contemporary art and the first professionally run modern art museum established on a government platform in China. Located at No. 27 Duolun Road, Hongkou District, the museum was planned and built with a modern, multi-functional vision. As a non-profit cultural and artistic institution serving the development of contemporary art in China, it fulfills five core functions: exhibition, research, education, collection, and exchange and serves as an international platform for contemporary art dialogue.

The museum building has seven floors in total, with the first, second, and third floors dedicated to exhibitions. Currently on display is Behind the Mask—A Sino-Italian Contemporary Image Art Exchange Exhibition, running from April 10 to July 12, 2026. Organized by the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art and co-curated by Da Renli and Zeng Yulan, the exhibition brings together over 100 works of photography and video art by 10 artists and artist groups from China and Italy.

The exhibition focuses on portraits of people living within different sociocultural contexts, with a particular emphasis on the depiction of the human face. It deepened my appreciation for the art of portrait photography. The subjects in the photographs smile, gaze, whisper, or laugh and play, while the settings powerfully evoke the character of different eras and regions—the Western-style houses of old Shanghai, ancient residences in Suzhou, Tibetan tapestries, narrow alleyways, time-worn longtang lanes, old-fashioned steel-framed windows, and mud-plastered walls—stretching from coastal metropolises to the distant city of Kashgar, from small towns in the south to villages in Western Europe. Cultures and people from vastly different places come alive within these photographs, as if standing right before the viewer, each telling their story.

The work that captivated me most was Non-Existent Portraits—a video piece in which the artist used AI to generate 15 figures of different ages, skin tones, and appearances. Each figure appears on screen for only eight seconds, with nearly identical lines: "I can only live for eight seconds. Please remember me." Alongside the video, portrait-style ID photographs of all 15 figures are projected onto a wall. Through this work, the artist poses a profound question: when asked to do so, would people be willing to remember these unfamiliar yet entirely fictional faces? Do these portraits represent living individuals, or are they merely archival records—no different from the numbers printed on an ID photo?

This piece moved me deeply and sparked something in me. I have recently been conceiving and planning an art exhibition themed "Naturally," which explores questions surrounding adolescent growth: should we meticulously engineer our development, step by step, to ease the anxiety of an uncertain future—or should we follow the natural order of our inner selves and simply grow? When life's existence is as fleeting as a mayfly's, who, truly, still worries about tomorrow?

The exhibition is free of charge, and a complete visit takes approximately one hour.