GLASSDRESS

Since 2009, GLASSTRESS has been an important international art project presented during the Venice Biennale, continuously inviting leading contemporary artists from around the world into the glass furnaces of Murano to create new works. The project has brought glass into the core context of contemporary art and has toured to cities including New York, London, Stockholm, and St. Petersburg.

In the height of summer 2026, this “wave of glass art” that has swept across Europe and the United States for decades breaks through geographical boundaries and arrives on the Bund in Shanghai for the first time, staging a pioneering dialogue in contemporary art.

The blazing furnaces of Murano have burned for 700 years. Here, glass artisans have safeguarded one of Europe’s most important material cultures and traditional crafts. From modern masters such as Picasso and Chagall to more than 400 contemporary artists, generations of creators have entered into dialogue with glass in this place. Today, GLASSTRESS completely overturns the fixed notion that “glass is merely craft,” transforming the furnace into a creative field where artists release the tension of their ideas.

This is a visual feast bringing together an “all-star” lineup of international contemporary art. Artists whose works have appeared as symbols of contemporary art at institutions such as MoMA in New York, Tate in London, and Centre Pompidou in Paris now take glass as their core creative medium and enter the century-old building of No. 1 on the Bund.

Taking the “Venetian Carnival” as its narrative thread, this exhibition invites you to become a participant in the masked procession. Across four chapters, it delves layer by layer into the metaphors of material and spirit, forming a fascinating dialectic with the history and civilization of Venice. Amid the light and shadow refracted through glass, you are invited to join the artists in a profound exploration of the self and identity.