SHANGHAI -- Move over, Bund. The lineup of elegant but faded British-designed banks and office blocks along this riverfront boulevard may be the perfect illustration of Shanghai's colonial, Western-influenced past. But when it comes to the present -- in a city reviving and extending its international reach -- the West Bund district, just 20 minutes' drive down a curve in the Huangpu River, is now at the cutting edge.
Planners targeted this 11-kilometer stretch, a former industrial and port-loading zone, for Asia's largest art zone -- aiming to be China's equivalent of the Rive Gauche in Paris or London's South Bank. "Shanghai is the city of the 21st century, similar to what Paris was at the end of the 19th," says Lorenz Helbling, longtime head of the city's influential ShanghART Gallery.
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