The Bestselling Old Shanghai Watercolors

Historic Shanghai, in collaboration with artist Cai Zhen, offers her collection of Shanghai heritage building watercolors for sale, and we’ve been surprised at what the favorites have been. You might think it’d be the Bund, or the skyscrapers of Pudong, maybe Nanjing Road.

You’d be wrong.

The number one painting is Walking Through the Old French Concession, a charming watercolor of an everyday scene of a couple walking a share bike past a little cottage, the plane trees just beginning to turn to autumn.

It doesn’t scream Shanghai … unless you happen to know Shanghai, and unless you’ve walked that street, or a street like that, a thousand times, and it’s your Shanghai. Unless you feel, as you look at the painting, that this is you. Walking Through the Old French Concession is so popular, we think, because it puts you in the scene, participants rather than observers.

The second most popular watercolor is Green Wave Pavilion, or Lu Bo Lang, its details beautifully rendered in Cai Zhen’s artistic hand. This one depicts so clearly what in many ways defines Shanghai: the juxtaposition of the old and new, past and future. It’s all around us. Here, Cai Zhen has painted the oldest part of Shanghai as her main subject, but on the horizon rises the newest, the skyscrapers of Pudong. It’s a contrast that’s at once surprising, and yet somehow harmonious, Shanghai in a nutshell.

The third most popular is less surprising, and more predictable: the I.S.S. Building/Normandie, the building where hundreds upon hundreds gather every day to gaze upon this cruise ship-like creation of the Hungarian architect Laszlo Hudec. Cai has painted the building head on, as if the great cruise ship is slowly approaching port. Perhaps the most surprising element of this painting is the lack of humanity, which always seems to be pressing on this corner—and maybe that accounts for its popularity, a view of the Normandie sans people. Now’s that’s rare.

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