Outside's Go Magazine - Travel and Style for Men

Curator Zhao Yong Gang tours Shanghai, China’s staggering boomtown, as it reclaims the title of world’s wickedest city

By Dan Washburn
Photographs by Andrew Rowat

Pudong skyline

Before World War II, Shanghai earned the label “the Paris of the East” with a decadent culture of jazz, sex, gangsters, opium, and corruption. The party came to an abrupt end with the 1937 Japanese occupation and the subsequent rise of Communism. Today, after a gradual shift from Soviet-style austerity to capitalism with Chinese characteristics, China is poised to overtake Germany as the third-largest economy on the planet, after the U.S. and Japan. And Shanghai, as king of the Chinese economic castle, is reassuming its mantle as the world’s hottest city.

The career of Shanghai curator Zhao Yong Gang — like China's nascent art scene — has mirrored Shanghai's stratospheric rise. Though the outside world had little interest in the country's art a few years ago, today collectors consider Chinese contemporary art a great way to cash in on China's "It" factor. Thanks to a keen eye for talent and an impeccably timed decision to try his hand at dealing art (Zhao was a struggling artist until 2004), the 32-year-old now owns two prominent Shanghai galleries and is considered a rising star in the increasingly big-business world of Chinese contemporary art. Last fall, Zhao took Go on an insider's tour of the best haunts in the city.