Certainly worth a visit is the “Peasant Da Vincis” show curated by Cai Quo Qiang at Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum. The fabulously crafted rough contraptions by peasants collected here together with Cai’s installations provide an emotional counterfoil to David Chipperfield’s perfectly executed, coolly restrained intervention at the old bund building.

On the ground floor, Cai filled the dim gallery with a field of mechanical reeds, each a little mechanical fan mounted on a bending steel rod blowing at a floating kite with a video projection superimposed onto it. These floating kite-films tell each peasant inventor’s personal story.

While acts of flagrant promotion of the disenfranchised peasant/worker classes in China’s modernisation by official media could be met with cynicism, here Cai’s wordless eulogy has a fitting fragility that questions the role they play in this whole lionising enterprise.

Providing further evidence up on third storey of the museum: a 3-level sky-lit atrium turned into a pastoral wonderland straight from the world of Miyazaki Hayao. A meadow of green grass and wild flowers on the floor, above hang strange aircrafts, flying saucers, a submarine and watercrafts, small live birds swooping around, filling the air with their sprightly chirping. This is one magical moment to come for, if you’re feeling a little jaded with the other expo in town.