Shanghai is not a city that is big on preservation. What little remains of its once dense, pre-war architecture has been mostly renovated beyond recognition. An exception, however, is the 1929 Shanghai Bank Union Building at 59 Xianggang Lu (Hong Kong Road), which has retained its wood flooring and stately stairwells.

Just a few blocks inland from the city’s historic waterfront area, the Bund, the building is a former clubhouse of Chinese bankers and its second floor has been turned into an art space, aptly named BANK.

BANK is the curatorial arm of MABSOCIETY, a company that produces exhibitions, cultural exchange initiatives and publications on contemporary visual arts, explains its founder Mathieu Borysevic, a New York- and Shanghai-based curator and writer.

Shanghai Bank Union Building. Photo: Sam Gaskin 

“In the past, we were curating for other institutions and doing some pop-up exhibitions,” says Borysevicz, a DART reader. After working out of the 23rd floor of an office building for a year, he started looking “for a little project space to incubate some interesting programs; four walls to create a destination for people, a project room, etc”, though Broysevicz says his organization will continue to work with other galleries, artists, collectors and institutions. “We think of ourselves as ‘post-gallery’.”

For the 2014 Armory Show, MABASOCIETY presented Fitness For All as part of the year’s special project, Focus on China. Created by the Chinese art collective Polit-Sheer-Form-Office, the work takes off on the government’s program to motivate society to exercise and pay more attention to their health. One way this campaign is accomplished is through the installation of exercise equipment throughout public parks in China.

This weekend, MABSOCIETY launches The Book about Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground, edited by MABSOCIETY and published by MIT Press/Mass MOCA (English), and Guangxi Normal University Press (Chinese). For this presentation, BANK Gallery’s project space will be transformed into a reading room, where this publication, along with Xu Bing’s book From the Ground – From Point to Point and related artworks can be viewed.

Artwork for Xu Bing's Reading Room, from the MABSOCIETY announcement

Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground is a seven-year and ongoing project that explores the possibilities of universal communication through the language of icons. His practice has culminated with From Point to Point, a graphic novel composed entirely of icons, ideograms, and logos. The Book about Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground is a reader’s guide to this novel and presents archival material, interviews, texts and translations of this momentous work. It provides individual insights from semioticians, authors, art critics, as well as the artist’s own words and background stories about Xu Bing’s breakthrough book.

Opening reception, Sunday, May 18 from 3 to 6 pm: Solo Projects by Xu Bing and Liao Guohe. BANK Gallery, iF, 59 Xianggang Lu, Huangpu District, Shanghai.

Xu Bing is an internationally acclaimed artist whose work has been shown and collected by museums and galleries including the National Art Museum of China; the British Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Museum. He is a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant and is currently serving as Vice President of the Central Academy of Art, Beijing. Based in Beijing, he also maintains a studio in Brooklyn.