West Bund Art & Design opened in Shanghai this week with more than 150 galleries spread across four venues along the Huangpu River, and early sales suggest collectors are still buying despite a cooler market. The opening day coincided with a sharp drop in temperature and a slight dip in international visitors compared with previous years, a shift some linked to the absence of the city's biennial and a crowded autumn calendar that also includes Art Week Tokyo and Art Collaboration Kyoto.

Thaddaeus Ropac reported brisk business within hours of the doors opening, selling new paintings by Megan Rooney for £400,000 to a private foundation in China and a work by Martha Jungwirth for €220,000. At White Cube, Antony Gormley's sculpture LOOK I, made in 2025, sold for £500,000, while a 2018 canvas by Marina Rheingantz changed hands for $110,000. The gallery's booth was anchored by a golden painting more than three metres tall by Georg Baselitz, part of the final body of work made during the late artist's lifetime, alongside a new Damien Hirst painting and a recent work by Liu Wei.

Elsewhere, Shanghai's Don Gallery presented sixteen artists spanning generations, from Li Shan, a core member of the historic No Name group, to the French painter Luc Ming Yan, with a major textile installation by Lin Fanglu as its centrepiece. Paris's Galerie Christophe Gaillard, showing at West Bund for the first time with Berlin's Hua International, offered works priced from €5,000 to €65,000, including a 1974 painting by Claude Viallat that was acquired by a Chinese collector.

Hong Kong and Taipei-based Galerie du Monde brought sixteen artists in a presentation centred on memory and identity, while MASSIMODECARLO mixed Italian post-war masters with Chinese artists and showed mushroom sculptures by Carsten Höller. Taken together, the five booths capture a fair that is leaning on the scale of China's domestic collector base even as international attendance softens.