No Man’s Art Gallery 'Popped up' in Shanghai

From 17th to 26th May, a weeklong pop-up art exhibit popped up in Shanghai, and hundreds of art lovers where eyeing their inbox to find out where.

The nomadic No Man’s Art Gallery, run by Emmelie Koster, showcases a selection of works in cities around the world. For its Shanghai exhibition, it spotlighted 20 artists, five of them Chinese – photographers Aixia Li, Caucasso Lee Jun and Fenk Zhang, and painters Nini Sum and Hu Xing Yi, Ms. Koster, 26 years old, said.

She chooses quirky locations, such as a former cotton mill in Mumbai and a bomb shelter in the Netherlands, and each venue turns the lights out for one “art in the dark” night, where guests inspect the works with flashlights — a novelty that started out of necessity after one of her events.

“We had two floors of exhibition space in Hamburg, but only one had electricity,” Ms. Koster said. “I bought 100 flashlights, handed them out and made the space completely dark. Everyone loved it.”

A lawyer by trade, she developed the pop-up concept in 2010 after her attempts to sell her own paintings online were unsuccessful. As a joke, she created a male alter ego, Bob Koster, raised her prices and also conjured a fictitious online gallery to represent him. Works began selling, and artists started asking if No Man’s could represent them as well.

Ms. Koster’s first pop-up, in Rotterdam, Netherlands, only drew 10 visitors, but spread to Amsterdam, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Paris and Mumbai. For more than a year, she has had her eye on China, a market she knew nothing about until recently. She does not speak Chinese, but with the help of local interns, she spread the word through online platforms such as Weibo and Douban.

“In China, the challenge is getting a large response,” she said. “Usually I get about 150 local artists’ portfolios for one pop-up gallery, but in China we only got 50. At first, I was a bit afraid that I wouldn’t be able to find the right amount of artists, but in the end the quality of the portfolios was much higher.”

The Shanghai event received more than 900 RSVPS for the guest-list-only opening night. “I’ve always loved law, and I wanted to be a criminal defense lawyer, but right now I have the best job in the world,” Ms. Koster said.

(Author: Jill Petzinger, Source: The Wall Street Journal)