The introduction argues that the global turn in contemporary art has been limited by overly generalized cultural categorizations and inadequate coverage of the local social, economic, political, and historical contexts of non-Western artworks. In response, the author posits an urban-focused, historically grounded, and theoretically rigorous model of disciplinary diversification that foregrounds key examples of art and design created in and about Shanghai. The city is described as an exemplary case study with which to localize global contemporary art, accounting for Shanghai’s longstanding “East-meets-West” mythology and genealogy stemming from its early twentieth century semi-colonial past and radical transformation during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). The introduction acknowledges how Republican Shanghai has been recognized by scholars as a modern cultural capital with its own unique Shanghai style, haipai (literally sea style), and proposes that we must also consider the city’s art and design of the 1990s-2000s, the period of Shanghai’s most rapid growth as an international financial and cultural capital.