Chinanews, Shanghai, October 12 – Sculptures have long played an important part in urban planning in Shanghai, and the municipal government is planning to decorate the city with more than 5,000 sculptures, including 100 landscape statues.
In pursuit of this goal, more and more foreign sculptures have been imported at very high prices; however, the quality of these expensive articles has never been guaranteed. A recent survey shows that only 10% of 1,034 sculptures in Shanghai are satisfactory, and another 10% are “totally awful”. Actually, these bad sculptures have already harmed Shanghai’s image.
Duplications of masterpieces are also popular in Shanghai. Every art exhibition in the city are like big auction houses of duplicated arts. The duplication of Rodin’s the Thinker was sold at $1 million in 2000; duplication of César Baldaccini’s Le Pounce was sold at more than $600 thousand.