In an Uncertain Market, Shanghai’s Bank Gallery Looks to New York for Stability

Shanghai’s Bank gallery, one of China’s leading art spaces, will open in New York as its leaders brave an uncertain global art market.

From March 21 until mid-August, Bank will operate a “pilot” space at 127 Elizabeth Street, the current home of Nathalie Karg Gallery, which will take a hiatus during this period. Bank’s inaugural set of shows there will be a solo exhibition for Patty Chang and a group show organized by writer and curator Yuan Fuca. The space’s two floors will allow New Yorkers to access “a little tasting menu of our program, in a way, to get our feet wet,” Bank founder Mathieu Borysevicz told ARTnews. But, Borysevicz said, “We’re not committed to a brick-and-mortar just yet.”

Borysevicz, who has split his time between New York and Shanghai for the past two years, will also move Bank’s space in Shanghai to a cultural industry park in the Jing An district, to give the gallery more flexibility. That space will be inaugurated on March 30 with a Lin Ke solo show.

Last September, Borysevicz staged Oliver Herring performances in New York as a Bank pop-up, but it was not his first time dabbling in the city’s art scene. He briefly worked at Jack Tilton Gallery in the late ’90s, and through that job, he met Chang, whom he befriended. (He has since produced her 2007 film Flotsam Jetsam and mounted solo shows for her in Shanghai.)

In New York this March, Chang will show three works: Learning Endings, We Are All Mothers, and Things I’m Scared of Right Now. The opening of the show is timed to her inclusion in “Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie,” a group exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art featuring work by Asian and Asian American artists.

With the New York outpost, Borysevicz said he hopes to deepen his connection with the artists and audiences in the city beyond simply doing fairs such as the Armory Show, where his gallery won an award for its booth last year. He’s also hoping to tap Chinese collectors living in the US and to connect with the city’s museums.

On the art fair circuit, Bank is among the most prominent galleries—the gallery has participated in some 22 art fairs between 2023 and 2024. Borysevicz said he’s hoping to do around half of the usual 11 this year. “You’re on this trajectory where you’re made to feel like you need to do those fairs, like you’ve got to be in it to win it,” he said.

This new way of operating on a less strict exhibition schedule in two cities is one way forward for his gallery, which has been in business for over a decade. “I want to be a little bit more surgical, more precise, and do things that matter and are meaningful. It’s also a way to be a little bit nimbler and more flexible,” he said.

The recent wildfires in Los Angeles and other disasters resulting from climate change have also made him rethink the gallery’s carbon footprint. “I think these fires were a big signal that this is unsustainable—it’s only going to get more and more like this,” Borysevicz said the day after Frieze LA opened, where he had a solo booth for the photorealist painter Liang Hao. “We have to reel it in; we have to sober up to the fact that we can’t keep up at that pace. My feeling is that a lot of times we’re doing shows just to do shows, just to keep on schedule, just to be in the fair, but you can sidestep quality, continuity, or consistency for quantity.”

Before starting Bank, Borysevicz was an artist and, later, an independent curator and freelance writer, contributing to Artforum, whose Chinese edition he helped launch. He wanted some more stability and began working at a commercial gallery, Shanghai Gallery of Art, for two years. After he left, he went back to working independently, penning a monograph on Xu Bing as he got ready to launch Bank in 2013.

Bank first began as what Borysevicz termed a “curatorial studio.” “I wasn’t thinking of a gallery,” he said. 

At first, Borysevicz took a space on the 23rd floor of a tower in Shanghai; he remained there for just a few months. While he was looking for a space, he met someone who had just moved into a former bank building from the 1920s in the city’s historic Bund area. (Today, that part of the Bund is home to blue-chip Western galleries like Lisson, Almine Rech, and Perrotin, as well as the Rockbund Art Museum.) Since the building was nearby, they went to take a look around midnight. It was “semi-dilapidated and abandoned, but super cool. It had all the workings of a really groovy place to do something in.” 

The first few shows were thematic ones. Its second show, “Paint(er)ly,” looked at “how the painterly crosses all kinds of medium boundaries” and included Paul McCarthy, Roxy Paine, Zhang Enli, and Howard Hodgkin. Future shows in this space would include solos for Xu Bing and Hito Steyerl.  

Bank quickly became one of the city’s most closely watched spaces, and artists who appeared here began to receive wider acclaim, many of them getting representation at other galleries. “It was like the place to be at the time because it was so open-ended,” Borysevicz said. “The idea was always that we wanted to create a platform where China and the world could have a dialogue.”

Around a year after opening, he decided to formalize the operation as a commercial gallery to help guide the careers of the artists he was interested in showing. Another factor in the decision-making was the rise of art fairs in Asia. In 2013, Art Basel Hong Kong and ART021 Shanghai both launched; the former had operated as ArtHK for six years prior to Art Basel’s complete acquisition of the fair. The West Bund Art & Design fair would come a year later. The fairs stipulated what operations qualified as galleries—the number of exhibitions per year and a roster of artists were two factors—and who could be admitted as an exhibitor.

In the Bund, Bank continued its rise, eventually adding a project space to its footprint there. But then, in 2016, the gallery was forced to give up its namesake space following a nation-wide edict that government-owned properties were to be reclaimed by the Chinese government. “It was devastating, even though we knew it was coming,” Borysevicz said. “They only gave us six days to leave everything.”

It took him about six months to find a suitable replacement, a basement space on Anfu Road in the Former French Concession district. Over the next eight years, that new space would only see Bank’s prominence continue to rise, with shows mounted for emerging artists like Lin Ke, Austin Lee, and Lu Yang alongside ones for mid-career artists like Patty Chang, Petra Cortright, and Xie Qi. Off-kilter group shows would also still be a major part of its program, like 2017’s “PST/CST,” which was timed to the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative and featured Beatriz Cortez, Clarissa Tossin, Carolina Caycedo, Carmen Argote, and Gala Porras-Kim.

When Bank moved to the Former French Concession, the now defunct Leo Xu Projects was not far away, and the neighborhood was a quiet bohemian enclave dotted with coffee shops. Recently, it’s become more of an influencer alley, where recently opened coffee shops have long lines. There may be some more foot traffic and some of Bank’s shows may have gone viral on Xiaohongshu (RedNote), but the context has changed. “I just feel like it’s time to sort of loosen up,” Borysevicz said.

The lingering aftereffects of the pandemic, the recent slump in the Chinese real estate market, and the recent correction in the global art market have also been factors in how he is plotting Bank’s future. In 2020, Borysevicz and his family were in Thailand for Lunar New Year and decided to stay there after China closed its borders to foreign nationals and they couldn’t return to Shanghai. Borysevicz was eventually able to return to China about nine months later, but his family couldn’t until three years later. They stayed in Chiang Mai for two years until Thailand went into lockdown and Borysevicz was in Shanghai.

They decided to meet in New York and have since relocated there, with Borysevicz going back and forth to China. The move to a new Shanghai location and the idea to test the waters in New York, he said, came partly because Borysevicz is no longer in China full-time. Also, he said, in the past two years, “the Chinese economy has sort of hit a wall. There’s a very palatable contraction of the market going on.”

He added, “Logistically, we’re in China, so it’s becoming more and more challenging to get work approved for censorship, and then there’s the tax and the rising shipping costs.” Additionally, there’s the uncertainty of another tariff war between the US and China. But these changes and his expansion to New York haven’t dampened his commitment to Shanghai’s vibrant art scene. “I want to keep Chinese artists visible, to keep a dialogue” between China and the wider art world, he said.