The Cloister Project is Macalline Art Center’s special project space in Shanghai. Located on the second floor of the Cloister Apartments at No. 62 Fuxing West Road, Shanghai, the Cloister Project is a non-profit space for exhibitions, public education, and cultural exchange. Since November 2020, the Cloister Project has held ten exhibitions, public programs, and screenings, with further programming planned for 2021-2022.

The Cloister Project is situated on the fringes of Shanghai’s urban culture, embracing artistic intuition and novel creativity. The Cloister Project is the successor of the cultural salon, a place of ongoing encounters. The invited artists, curators, writers, and researchers are constantly shifting between the roles of host and guest, exploring the heterogeneity and spirituality of an artistic community today based on the common value of mutual respect.

The Cloisters Apartments was once called huating (a reception room or parlor), an elegant word that has many layers of meaning. Shao Xunmei wrote, “A ‘salon’ is a guest reception room (huikeshi), but I have translated it as huating so that it would literally sound more appealing.” In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Salon des Indépendants became an important annual exhibition for Parisian painters working in new styles, and it served as a springboard for the Neo-Impressionist, Cubist, Expressionist, and Abstract movements. However, in the context of Republican Shanghai, the French word salon, which simultaneously indicated a living room, a group of people, and an exhibition system was transformed into a cultural parlor (wenyi keting), a reception room (huating), and a salon (shalong), and became a gathering place for intellectuals and social elites. At their worst, these gatherings had pretensions of culture, and at their best, they were hotbeds for the spread of Western learning in the East and the modernization of culture and art. As a microcosm of a new metropolitan culture unique to Shanghai, the salon was considered a “good society” in miniature, and a “cultural core” for a larger “good society.” The Shanghai Aestheticism born of salon culture, like nineteenth-century European Aestheticism, explored a path of artistic autonomy. However, in contrast to the European Aestheticists’ radical pursuit of spirituality and opposition to the worldly and commonplace, Shanghai Aestheticism advocated more for the aesthetic lifestyle, which happened to coincide with Republican-era Westernization and industrialization. The movement inevitably devolved into unchecked aestheticism and became the victim of commercialized culture.

In rethinking the meaning of artistic activity, we now need to test the boundaries and relationships among art, politics, and business, and explore a renewal of the artistic soul through these interpersonal interactions. Xu Zhongnian advocated for salons: “In France, the gatherings of artistic and cultural personages are called ‘salons’… The hosts of these salons are very beautiful, very clever, or very distinguished ladies… Sometimes, an expert or luminary will give an informal lecture, sometimes a film will be shown, and still other times, someone will turn on the wireless for dancing… I think that it wouldn’t hurt for us to imitate this custom.”

*The Cloister Project is supported by THE SHOUTER and Macalline Art Center.