City's artistic wall paintings now seen in rural villages
Wall paintings in Shanghai can be said to reflect the different characteristics of each district.
In a downtown commercial plaza, you could sometimes see a giant mural in which a fashionable lady has a luxury bag on her folded arm while pets scamper around her feet. That talks to the high-end commercial character of city life.
In a more artistic lane, you may run into spontaneous and sporadic graffiti composed of deliberately twisted letters or images that depict a detached or casual way of life.
Shanghai is never short of these kinds of urban wall paintings. If you go to Maoming Road (near Nanjing Road W.) or Moganshan Road along Suzhou Creek, you will chance on many.
Graffiti works are seen in a downtown lane on Wuyi Road.
But a new genre has begun to take shape recently – this time in the city's vast countryside. In many villages, colorful depictions of rural life – from vegetables and fruits to rivers and bridges – often catch a first-time visitor by surprise – a pleasant one, though.
Despite their simple strokes, these grassroots paintings reveal the city's rediscovered enthusiasm for a better rural life. Indeed, these depictions of a bucolic life are part and parcel of the city's efforts since 2014 to spruce up the villages.
The city has called for bringing the countryside's aesthetic value to full play, in addition to its economic and environmental values.
Here are some examples of Shanghai's rural murals.
These paintings, though not artistically sophisticated, arouse people's fond memories of simple pleasures connected with rural life.
If you are tired of the hectic downtown life, go to the countryside and have a restful time with rural art.
A wall painting in Hemu Village, Qingpu District, west Shanghai, depicts a harmonious scene of rural life. Hemu means harmony in Chinese.
A detail of a wall painting in Hemu Village. The four Chinese characters on the top left read: Remember the romance of rural life.
A wall painting in Fangxia Village, Qingpu District, depicts a grocery typical of a bygone era.
A wall painting in Fangxia Vilage, depicts the simpler rural life some decades ago.
A farmer-house-turned-cafe is colorfully painted in Fangxia Village. Behind it are some farmers' houses adapted into an apartment for engineers who work in nearby software parks.
A wall painting in Dongshe Village, Qingpu District
The front wall of a public toilet is decorated with a landscape painting in Dongshe Village.
Abstract paintings decorate the walls of a local office compound in Fangxia Village.
A wall painting about girls playing a kick game, long before computer games
A wall painting in Fangxia Village about rural postal service that was popular decades ago
