The 15th Shanghai Biennale, curated by Kitty Scott with co-curators Daisy Desrosiers and Xue Tan, opened on 8 November 2025 and runs through 31 March 2026 at the Power Station of Art, with 250+ works by 67 artists and collectives.
The Shanghai Biennale is China's first international biennial of contemporary art. Founded in 1996 by Fang Zengxian — then director of the Shanghai Art Museum — and approved by China's Ministry of Culture and the Shanghai Municipal Administration, the inaugural edition opened on 18 March 1996 under the title Open Space, with a working premise (Chinese painting in dialogue with international contemporary practice) that has since broadened across fifteen editions into the principal continental survey of contemporary art-making in and from China. The biennial was sited at the Shanghai Art Museum on People's Square through its first eight editions; it moved in 2012 to the Power Station of Art, a converted former power plant on the Huangpu River, where it has been programmed at substantially expanded scale ever since.
The 15th edition, Does the flower hear the bee?, opened on 8 November 2025 under the curatorship of the Canadian curator Kitty Scott — formerly Carol and Morton Rapp Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Chief Curator at the Serpentine Gallery in London, and Curator of Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Canada — working with co-curators Daisy Desrosiers and Xue Tan and curators Long Yitang and Zhang Yingying. The exhibition runs through 31 March 2026, gathers more than 250 works by 67 artists and collectives (with sixteen from China and more than thirty new commissions), and takes its title from recent botanical research on plant–pollinator signalling: the working premise is that flowers themselves operate as information-gathering agents, and that the exhibition's argument turns on the broader question of sensorial intelligence across the "more-than-human world."
From the Shanghai Art Museum to the Power Station of Art
The institutional spine of the Shanghai Biennale is in two phases. The first, 1996 to 2010, was sited at the Shanghai Art Museum: a city-museum biennial sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and the municipality, with early editions devoted to Chinese ink painting (1996, 1998) and a gradual opening — under the third edition Spirit of Shanghai in 2000, headed by a curatorial team including Hou Hanru — to a broader international contemporary register. The second phase, from 2012 to the present, is sited at the Power Station of Art on the south bank of the Huangpu, in the former Nanshi Power Plant. PSA, which opened on 1 October 2012 as the first state-run museum dedicated to contemporary art on mainland China, was conceived from the outset as the biennial's permanent home; the 9th edition, Reactivation, curated by Qiu Zhijie with Johnson Chang, Boris Groys and Jens Hoffmann, was the inaugural Biennale at the new site.
Subsequent editions across the PSA period have continued at the format the institution settled on in 2012: a single-museum exhibition supplemented by City Projects across the wider Shanghai urban fabric. The 12th edition, Proregress (2018), under Cuauhtémoc Medina, the 13th edition Bodies of Water (November 2020 – June 2021, in three phases) under Andrés Jaque, and the 14th edition Cosmos Cinema (2023) under Anton Vidokle each programmed at roughly that institutional scale. The 15th edition, programmed under PSA's continuing relationship with the Shanghai Municipal Government and the Ministry of Culture, opens the institution's first survey of the post-2024 cycle.
