Delhi and Shanghai are over 4,000 km apart, but Aparajita Jain, director of Seven Art Limited, thinks art can be the great cultural bridge connecting the two cities. “The two are cosmopolitan and bustling and the interest in art brings them close,” says Jain. She, along with the Institute of Contemporary Indian Art, Mumbai, is organising an exhibition “India Xianzai” at the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art. Curated by Shanghai-based Diana Freundl and Delhi-based art critic Alexander Keefe, the exhibition will begin on July 15 with 65 art works by 21 Indian artists, including Subodh Gupta, Jagannath Panda, Mithu Sen and Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra from Delhi. “The aim is to present the best of Indian contemporary art,” says Jain, who will also show Chitra Ganesh and Schandra Singh based in the US.

While most artwork has been sourced from private collections, Jain had artists like Singh, Riyas Komu and Suhasini Kejriwal create special works for the exhibition. There will be a Subodh Gupta canvas painted with his trademark utensils and Sen’s two drawings from the series “Half Full” and a video-and-photograph collage titled False Friends. “These deal with issues like gender and racial identity,” says Sen. “There is interest in Indian art the world over and China is no exception. It will be interesting to explore the cultural link between the two countries,” says Jitish Kallat, who exhibited a light installation at the Guangdong Museum in Guangzhou last year and also had a solo at Arario gallery in Beijing in 2007. In the forthcoming exhibition, he will have on display a resin-and-steel installation titled Aquasaurus. Is an exhibition of Chinese art in India in the offing too? “We will take it as it comes,” says Jain.