Shopping Gallery is situated in Shanghai’s famous M50 art district; it is run by a consortium of the city’s more successful artists, including Xu Zhen, Shi Yong, and Liu Jianhua, to promote reasonably priced works by emerging artists. The gallery’s commercial bent is not only made explicit by its English and Chinese moniker (a pun on the name of China’s economic reform guru, Deng Xiaoping), but in its programming, which since its inception in 2008 has been dominated by painting. This recent exhibition by Dai Qing was no exception: Painting once again reigned supreme. However, instead of offering