Shanghai is in a rush. Towards what, no one is quite sure. Make-Over at Oriental Vista Gallery, is a meditation on what is lost in the process of “progress.”

The short answer, according to many of the artists, is a lot of the city's organic life, such as street vendors, who will largely be swept away in the coming months before Expo. They are commemorated in Jutta Friedrichs' Paved Landscapes , a coffee table-like structure that dominates the gallery entrance, contrasting bright objects bought from street vendors with grey concrete.

Friedrichs, a Shanghai-based German artist, combined the piece with a series of interviews with street vendors about how they will survive the coming months. The interviews contribute a documentary aspect shared by several of the other strong works in the show, such as Jiang Hongqing’s paper funeral house, a recreation of a demolished residence in Putuo. It's accompanied by a video of a similar “ghost house” being burned as an ancestral offering at the house's original location.

Christina Shmigal's The View in Fragments (pictured) sets miniatures of unremarkable Chinese architecture in showcases, lionizing them, turning the notion of what is worth fetishizing on its head.

At the opening, Shanghai staple Qiu Anxiong exploded a smoke bomb to symbolize a city’s cleansing, but the performance–with two cylindrical bombs–evoked America’s 9/11, instead. Jin Feng etched Internet rumors and fabricated news into dry-wall. Ben Houge turned images of Shanghai’s transitional population into algorithms, creating a colorful, abstract video. Bird Head re-told a Tang poem with snapshots from propaganda posters.

Yet it was Ji Wenyu's take on propaganda which was the most memorable. Ji took 100 slogans from 50 years of propaganda, printed them on parchment and glued them one on top of another, recalling the mixed messages that the Shanghainese have been subjected to. The wrinkled, confusing result resembles the skin of old hands.

Lisa Movius