Meetings finished for the day in Shanghai and a couple hours to go until I had to take the bullet train back to Suzhou, I decided to check out the Salvador Dali exhibit at the Shanghai Art Museum. And I’m glad I did!

In addition to his painting “The Persistence of Memory,” they did have lots of other artwork of his there with melted clocks. For Dali, in his obsession with dreams and symbolism, melted clocks symbolized the fluidity and malleability of time. Time as illusory, really. So, we see a Statue of Liberty-esque woman with a melted clock slung over her arm, a horse saddled with a melted clock, and melted clocks peppering various sketches. Dali was also obsessed with crutches (usually supporting some grotesquely overgrown limb), unicorns, vaginas and penises. Lots of penises.

The left side of the exhibition (as you enter the main foyer) is devoted to his religious and mythological work, as well as a section on “Lust and Women”, while the right side predominantly to his dream symbologies. I very much more enjoyed the mythology side of the Hall, as it devoted a sizable portion of the exhibit to his paintings and sketches from stories in the Old Testament and Dante’s Divine Comedy. Of course, Dali’s vision of the Inferno (Hell) is far more inventive, grotesque and enthralling than either Purgatory or Heaven, as is the case with the literary work itself. Why does the devil get to get all the fun, after all?

Some of his more risque work involved lithographs inspired by the works of the Marquis de Sade, with sketches of human beings contorted in the most inhuman poses doing naughty things to each other.

His sketches based on the 1967 poems of Mao Zedong were interesting in the sense that central to every picture was the idea of one man against either a massive giant or a horde of people or herd of horses. Sounds like Dali nailed that personality gestalt just right.

It was all good fun and well worth the 20RMB it cost for entry – plus the cost of the sketchpad and watercolor pencils I couldn’t resist buying in the Museum store. Keep an eye out for my own retrospective sometime in the future. Posthumous, of course.