Shanghai Deco

Shanghai Deco is a one-hour documentary on the Art Deco design style popular in 1930s Shanghai. During the 1920s and 30s, Shanghai was the most glamorous, cosmopolitan city in Asia. Dubbed “The Paris of the East,” it had both an expatriate community and a middle-class Chinese population that adopted many of the trappings of Western lifestyle: jazz, dancing, and nightclubs, as well as Art Deco design. The film focuses on the contributions of the Chinese designers and the problems of artistic repression in times of war and political upheaval, as well as the factors that led up to the adoption and eventual demise of Shanghai’s Art Deco lifestyle.