In the first half of the twentieth century, Shanghai was a city that attracted performers, writers, artists and designers from around the world. A breeding-ground for new art forms, such as oil painting, cinema and poster art, this ‘high time’ of Shanghai’s past has long been considered the city’s cultural and artistic zenith. Today, Shanghai’s cosmopolitan heritage is under restoration. Over the past five years in particular, a growing number of international artists have made Shanghai their base.

Since its establishment in 2006, the new media art collective, Liu Dao (aka island6), has become something of a stalwart of the Shanghai art scene and beyond. The collective’s creative and operational centre is its production studio and exhibition space in Shanghai’s m50, also known as Moganshan arts district, where individuals from different backgrounds come together to engage with and comment on contemporary life in Shanghai. The collective’s signature LED art, interactive art and sculptures makeup only a fraction of Liu Dao’s ever-expanding repertoire. Meanwhile the tone of the work is often humorous, delivering social commentary in unexpected ways — see the LED display, Puxi Fluffer (2012), pictured above, which references the city’s dependence on an army of ‘ayis’, or domestic cleaners, for a cheeky example.

With its international member-base and technically and conceptually experimental practice, Liu Dao embodies the vision of cosmopolitan Shanghai. Liu Dao’s collaborative structure, valuing communication over egocentrism (their approach has been likened to film production), provides a model for cross-cultural and collectivist approaches to art making, curation and arts management in China.

In the spirit of Liu Dao’s uncompromising collectivist ethos, the following interview responses were submitted anonymously by its members.

What system of classification separates an animation or documentary film from video art? None really, if you’re looking at China and the screen-based work being shown and created there. China’s is an art world still building its institutions, and with this comes a freedom from such expectations or constraints.

Laurens Tan is a digital media artist and sculptor, based in both Australia and China. With Chinese parents, but a childhood spent in The Netherlands, Indonesia, Singapore, and Australia, Tan’s background also defies simple definition. In 2006 Tan moved to Beijing, to learn the language of his family heritage, and make work as part of the thriving contemporary Chinese art scene.

Tan and I spoke recently about the flux and energy of today’s Beijing – a city Tan’s calls ‘a great little research site to consider what will happen with contemporary art.’ More specifically, we discussed Tan’s curated exhibition of Chinese video art, Arena: A Post Boom Beijing, currently at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery in Sydney . This exhibition is both beautiful and provocative, and I seriously recommend seeing it if you’re in Sydney.

In the minds of many curators and collectors today, Chinese art of the 1990s is synonymous with kitsch Cultural Revolution iconography, and large-scale paintings and sculpture. However the 1990s were also a time of experimentation for a handful of artists uninterested in these market trends. Frustrated with the limitations of traditional media, they worked with video and installation as a means to extend their art practices and to raise issues that would challenge their audiences.

Wang Gongxin was one such pioneer and, along with his friend and colleague Zhang Peili, is now considered one of the granddaddies of new media art in China. Wang and Zhang were both headline acts in the exhibition 幕Mu:Screen, Three Generations of Contemporary Video Art which ran at UTS Gallery in June this year, curated by Marie Terrieux.