With a host of exciting events lined up for September, Shanghai’s West Bund area is poised to build on its reputation as one of the city’s premier arenas for world-class art. Over the coming weeks, the area will play host to works from several internationally-renowned contemporary artists and design teams.

With an emphasis on interactive installations, performance pieces and designed works, exhibitions at the Long Museum, the Yuz Museum and the West Bund Art & Design Fair also promise local art lovers and collectors a rare opportunity to see pieces that transcend the more commonplace genres of painting and sculpture.

Two highlights include “15 Rooms” at the Long Museum and the Yuz Museum’s “Rain Room,” both large-scale pieces that offer visitors the chance to experience art in new, exciting ways. Meanwhile, organizers of the area’s art and design fair — which is back for its second year — are looking forward to capitalizing on the acclaim won by the event last year.

West Bund Art & Design Fair

From September 8 to 13, the West Bund Art Center, an 8,000-square-meter converted warehouse, will host the West Bund Art & Design Fair.

This year, the fair is directed by Zhou Tiehai, one of China’s best-known contemporary artists as well as a veteran art-event organizer. The event will showcase a variety of artwork from all over the world. Organizers have selected 34 outstanding galleries and design institutes to present the show’s main concept of “The Meaning and Impact of Art and Design in our Lives.”

Compared with last year, when the fair made its debut, this year’s event will emphasize design works as organizers seek to differentiate themselves from other art fairs in the country.

According to Zhou, the design of the fair space is being realized by creative media platform UNDEF/NE, one of the event’s partners as well as the curator of “Turn the Page,” the fair’s interactive design area. This area is intended to merge literature and design into a multi-dimensional experience and also highlight the relationship between people and everyday items.

In total, 10 design studios have been invited to present their work at the fair. These include design and lifestyle book publishers Boocup, accessory makers Ipluso; furniture and household good brand Dutch Design Workspace, and premium bike manufacturers Wake Up.

Date: 12pm-8pm, September 8 to 11; 10am-6pm, September 12 to 13

Address: 2555 Longteng Ave, Xuhui District

15 Rooms

With an exhibition area of 16,000 square meters, the Long Museum West Bund is the second private museum opened by investment guru and business mogul Liu Yiqian and his wife Wang Wei, both of whom are noted art collectors.

Opened in 2012, the museum has already attracted considerable attention. In fact, last year the museum was visited by none other than Angelina Jolie and Prince Charles.

This September, the Long Museum will welcome a special exhibition entitled “15 Rooms,” curated by Klaus Biesenbach, director of MoMA PS1 and chief curator-at-large at the Museum of Modern Art, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, co-director of the Serpentine Gallery.

For the exhibit, 15 artists from China and overseas were invited to create performance pieces in each of the titular rooms. Using human beings as subject matter, each piece explores the relationship between space, time and physicality. With a new situation inside each room, visitors can engage in an eclectic and intimate art experience.

According to Obrist, the upcoming exhibit represents the expansion of an exciting new concept in performance art.

“This exhibition was first presented as ‘11 Rooms’ in 2011 as part of the Manchester International Festival, and ‘14 Rooms’ at Art Basel in 2014,” explained OBrist, “This surely will be a thrilling exhibition, as it reflects how performative art can create the possibility of an exhibition that might be restaged later, or of something that can be reproduced endlessly. Art can travel over time — not just through objects and not just through documentation. ‘15 Rooms’ is like this: from the basic text, it can be restaged in different places all over the world and it can also take place again in 50 year’s time.”

Also impressive is the list of artists attached to the project, which includes Marina Abramovic and Yoko Ono.

Born 1946 in Belgrade, Serbia, Abramovic is widely regarded as the “mother of performance art.” Her performances include a series of experiments aimed at exploring the limits of her own body and her own vulnerability.

Abramovic gained international acclaim for her 2010 show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York entitled “The Artist is Present.” For this work, Abramovic sat motionless for over 700 hours as she gazed into the faces of 1,400 visitors who sat across from her.

Another eye-catching name is avant-garde Japanese artist Yoko Ono. Born in 1933, Ono has worked as a visual artists as well as poet, musician and performer. By examining the complexity of human emotions — from loss and conflict to harmony and love — she experiments with her audience’s conception of art and the world in general. In her room, entitled “Touch Piece,” visitors are encouraged to touch one another in the dark. Some may be blindfolded, others may discover pencils to write messages on the walls, challenging each visitor’s sense of intimacy and privacy.

Space for the exhibition was purpose-built by Herzog and de Meuron, the design firm behind the famous Bird’s Nest National Stadium in Beijing.

Date: 10am-6pm, closed on Monday, from September 25 to December 6

Address: 3398 Longteng Ave, Xuhui District

Rain Room

Just a few blocks from Long Museum is Yuz Museum, opened by Chinese-Indonesian entrepreneur and collector Budi Tek. A relative newcomer to the local museum scene, Yuz Museum is set to make a splash with the large-scale installation “Rain Room” and a solo-exhibition from Yang Fudong.

As the name suggests, “Rain Room” is an indoor room with water perpetually pouring from the ceiling. The “rain” is controlled by sensors, which shut off the water when visitors walk underneath. This monumental work encourages people to become performers on an unlikely stage, while at the same time creating an intimate atmosphere of contemplation.

The work is also an invitation to explore the roles that art, science, technology and human ingenuity can play in stabilizing our environment.

“Rain Room” was first presented at the Barbican in London in 2012. It was later shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2013. The installation is making its Asian debut at the Yuz Museum Shanghai, where it will run from September 1 to December 31.

Conceived by the artistic team Random International, “Rain Room” is on view courtesy of the Yuz Collection, which commissioned a 150 square-meter site-specific version of the installation in response to the vast space of the Yuz Museum. This is the most ambitious scale of the work to date, covering 50 percent more area than previous versions.

Founded in 2005, Random International is a collaborative studio for experimental practice within contemporary art. Taking science as a means to develop a new material vocabulary, their work invites consideration through exploration of behavior and natural phenomena — with the viewer an active participant.

To bring the “Rain Room” experience to as many people as possible, organizers at the Yuz Museum have introduced extended viewing hours as well as a “view only” queue for those who want to see the installation in action without actually walking underneath it.

On view concurrently with “Rain Room” is a solo exhibition by Chinese contemporary art master Yang Fudong, entitled “Twin Tracks.”

Using film and video, Yang Fudong captures the potent interval between reality and unreality. According to the museum, his works hint at the tenuous relationship between maturity and naiveté, beauty and sadness, freedom and responsibility, broadening the understanding of film narrative, while also reflecting the inner world of Yang himself.

The title of the exhibition, according to Yang, comes from the Chinese proverb nanyuan beizhe, literally meaning to “go south by driving north.” This title is meant as a nod to the eclectic works on display, as well as Yang’s improvisational creative process.

According to organizers, the exhibition explores the complex, ambiguous relationship between reality and unreality. The images, and themes within them, seem to alternatively emerge from echoes of the past, while others are obscured and disappear in a distant haze.

Through the primary medium of video, Yang’s work expands upon the formal qualities of film language. When creating a work, Yang does not start with a clear concept or image in mind. Instead, as he describes it, he pursues a “recognized sensibility, which happens to be precisely the same sensibility felt by the audience.” The final result is a “recognized film” independent of a unified style or subject matter.

“Twin Tracks” focuses on five major works by Yang created since 2007: East of Que Village (2007), Blue Kylin: A Journal of Shan Dong (2008), The Fifth Night (2010), About the Unknown Girl: Ma Sise (2013-2015) and The Colored Sky: New Women II (2014).

Date: 10am-6pm, through the end of December

Address: 35 Fenggu Rd