Edvard Munch's The Scream is currently on exhibition at the Shanghai Jiushi Art Museum. The showcase will end on Jan 3, 2021.

This is the second time the famous artwork has been exhibited in China. Its first appearance was in the Shanghai Museum in 1997.

Titled Scream & Respond, the exhibition features 53 artworks and is the first showcase of a Western master artist at the Shanghai Jiushi Art Museum, which opened three years ago. It is also the largest display of Munch's works in Asia since his 2018 exhibition, Munch: A Retrospective, at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.

Munch's masterpieces such as The Scream, The Sick Child and Melancholy came to Shanghai for the first time in 1997, when the Norwegian king and queen visited China.

"More than two decades later, some of Munch's great works are again brought to Shanghai," says Sun Donglin, director of the Shanghai Jiushi Art Museum.

"This year marks the 66th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Norway, and this exhibition will give viewers in this city and across the whole country an up-close and personal encounter with this expressionist artist."

The Scream is considered one of Munch's most famous works and one of the most iconic in art history. It was once hailed by the BBC as the second best-known painting behind Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci.

Munch (1863-1944) was a pioneer of expressionism in modern art, and such is his renown that his portrait can be found on the Norwegian 1,000 kroner banknote, says Ma Zhenzheng, the Chinese curator of the exhibition.

"Rather than depicting the exterior world in detail or accuracy, Munch looked inward to explore human emotions and the inner world. The inner spirit of his creations does more than just represent the objective of the form－it breaks conventions and revolts against the naturalistic dictates to express the soul," says Ma.

Munch himself once summarized his creations, saying that "every stroke of mine is laid to capture those overwhelming emotions".

"Munch found a catharsis of his truest emotions through his artwork, where he recorded his joys, sorrows and much of his life experience," Ma says.

Most of Munch's creations are now in museums, and the exhibits in Shanghai come from the private Gundersen collection in Norway.

Munch started to experiment with printmaking in 1895 when he was 32 years old. For the next 49 years until his death at Ekely in 1944, print was the constant medium of his creation. Munch not only wielded his brush with ease as a master oil painter but also captured and depicted the "soul" in the monotonous black-and-white world of prints, according to Ma.

The Scream, for example, was a lithograph print hand-colored by Munch himself. To date, only two copies of these hand-colored prints of The Scream have survived. The other belongs to the collection of the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway.

The exhibition features five sections showcasing 47 prints and five oil paintings by Munch. Aside from The Scream, the exhibition showcases three different versions of his best-known print, The Sick Child, and one of his best portrait prints, The Brooch (Eva Mudocci).

These works were created over a span of nearly 30 years starting from 1895, the start of the most productive and colorful period of his career, which witnessed his transformation from, as Munch himself described, "a cursed, restless soul that was forced to wander and would never find peace" to a man who finally settled down in his hometown of Oslo.

If you go

10 am-6 pm (last entry before 5:30 pm), Monday-Sunday, Sept 25-Jan 3,2021. Jiushi Art Museum, 6F, 27 Zhongshan No 1 Road East, Huangpu district, Shanghai.