Shanghai celebrates 100 years of Chinese comics with a historic exhibition

The Liu Haisu Art Museum in Shanghai will open in early November the first stop of the traveling exhibition "One Hundred Years of Chinese Comics: A Retrospective." The exhibition occupies four rooms and is presented as the first concentrated review of the history of Chinese comics in a century.

The project starts from a specific milestone: on December 6, 1926, the Manhua Hui, the country's first organized group of comic artists, was founded in Shanghai. That moment marks the beginning of modern Chinese comics and serves as the starting point for an exhibition that arrives just as a hundred years are completed.

The exhibition is a project of the Fine Arts Academy of Shanghai University and has the support of the 2026 National Arts Fund. The general curator, Professor Jin Jiangbo, explained that the goal is not just to put on an exhibition, but to build an academic framework that organizes a hundred years of comics scattered across newspapers, publications, archives, and oral testimonies.

View of one of the exhibition rooms with Chinese comic works on the walls.m.sohu.com

The tour is divided into four blocks. The first, "Origin and Foundation," starts with the satirical vignettes of the modern press and uses pieces like The Map of the Situation, the Manhua Hui, and magazines like Shanghai Manhua or Modern Sketch to explain why Shanghai was the center of that first scene.

The second block, "Responsibility and Edge," brings together works with social and political weight. There visitors will see Xiyou Manhua by Zhang Guangyu, Maoguo Chunqiu by Liao Bingxiong, and the Sanmao comics by Zhang Leping, both in their military and street stages.

From paper to artificial intelligence

"Rebirth and Splendor" covers comic creation in communist China, the return of magazines after the economic opening of the eighties, and the relationship between comics, animation, and mass culture. This block focuses on how certain animated characters became collective memory for several generations.

Decorative entrance of the exhibition with visual elements of Chinese comics.m.sohu.com

The closing block, "Crossing and Coexistence," is the most connected to the present: webcomics, international exchanges, video games, animated films, urban culture, and creation with artificial intelligence. The curators' thesis is that comics no longer live only on paper, and that this leap opens questions about originality, copyright, and the human value of the work.

Jin Jiangbo insists that this is not a nostalgic exhibition. His proposal is to move from "Shanghai comics" to "great Shanghai comics," a concept that does not enlarge the canvas but the field of action: humor, satire, imagination, and visual narrative applied to different formats and disciplines.

A visitor interacts with an installation of a Chinese comic character.m.sohu.com

The exhibition will travel to other cities afterward as part of a national outreach program. For now, Shanghai is the only stop with a confirmed date and the first opportunity to see pieces that had been scattered across archives and publications for decades.