A century of Chinese art between memory and rebirth

There is an invisible thread running through nearly a hundred years of Chinese history. It is called memory, and at Shanghai's Long Museum (West Bund) it takes the form of almost eighty works: paintings, woodcuts, snapshots of a country that has lived through wars, revolutions and rebirths without ever ceasing to search for itself. Flow: 2026 New Year Exhibition is a chronological journey from the 1930s to the present, built around a private collection of modern and contemporary Chinese art. Not a celebratory retrospective, but a reflection on time - on what it leaves behind, and what it carries forward. In the first galleries, the mark is hard, urgent. Huang Yanghui depicts the interior of a wartime tunnel in 1942. Tu Ke captures a harvest team - life resuming stubbornly amid the rubble. The chapter closes with Chen Yifei, a figure seen from behind, facing the weight of the past: the most silent work in the exhibition, and for that reason the most eloquent. Then something shifts. Shen Yaoyi portrays in 1983 young people on the steps of a newly reopened university - in their faces, the hunger for knowledge of an entire generation. Wei Ershen turns his gaze to a mother and son on the grass, beneath the sun. Everyday scenes that, within this exhibition, become proof that life - despite everything - keeps flowing.