Since Shanghai was designated a treaty port by Britain and China in 1842, it has beckoned to the world. It quickly became, and remains, a center of finance, trade and economic opportunity as well as a hotbed of political turmoil and artistic ferment. It has long been a crucible for a visual culture that hungers for the new while remaining uniquely Chinese. "Shanghai," an ambitious new exhibition opening this month at the Asian Art Museum, spotlights the intersection of history and visual art in a city that's a point of convergence for East and West, the ancient and the modern, traditional values and innovative technology, while maintaining a firm grip on its own identity. "That identity is kind of edgy," remarks Michael Knight, the museum's senior curator of Chinese art. "Shanghai brings the West and China together with its own idiosyncratic perspective in an artistically unique way. The art and architecture has a strength and vitality with a distinctive vibe." Art played a crucial role in defining Shanghai's public persona, and a composite portrait, part myth, part reality, emerges as the exhibition charts the city's cultural evolution, from 1850 to the present. Divided into four broad sections ("Beginnings," "High Times," "Revolution" and "Shanghai Today"), the show's 130 works include richly evocative oil and ink paintings, dramatic wood block prints, Art Deco furnishings, vivid posters, watercolors, contemporary installations and cutting-edge videos laced with social commentary as well as film clips. Freedom and exploitation, extravagant wealth and devastating starvation existed side-by-side in Shanghai during the "High Times" (1912-1949), a peak era in fashion, graphic art, Western-style oil painting and film. The influence of Hollywood generated cross-pollination with Shanghai's booming domestic film industry. (Nearly half of all Chinese films were produced in Shanghai and major U.S. studios kept offices there.) Like their American counterparts, female movie stars of the 1920s and '30s personified the ideal modern woman. Alluring actresses such as Ruan Lingyu and Butterfly Wu, seen in film clips projected in one gallery, grace posters and the covers of movie and lifestyle magazines on view here, embodying elusive glamour and a fashion-forward style that fueled the public's love affair with Shanghai. Yuan Xiutang's poster "Moonlight over Huangpu River," in which a demure young woman lounges in front of the city's skyline with a full moon overhead, captures the essence of cosmopolitan romance. During this period, Shanghai, in contrast to the rest of China, was an oasis of civilization with an aura of high-toned excitement, luxury shops, a full complement of entertainment and an environment that allowed women relative freedom. This independence is reflected in the proliferation of the Chinese "modern girl," a popular icon that epitomized urban chic. Some of the images found in advertisements of the 1920s through the 1940s are sexually provocative. Jin Meisheng's "It Often Begins with a Smile," a pin-up of a woman in a revealing negligee, looks like Shanghai's answer to the Vargas girl. The East/West nexus takes tangible form in the unconventional approach of landscape artist Lin Fengmian, one of a small number of Chinese artists to study in Europe. (Lin once claimed that he wanted to make works of "beauty" and "power" that overcame "handicaps in both Western and East Asian arts.") He borrows from French post-Impressionism in "Beauty Holding a Mirror," an ink and color painting drenched in twilight and mystery. Against a flat, dark background, a woman with long black hair wearing a shimmering robe is seated before translucent curtains, a vase of flowers lit by moonlight on a table behind her. Lin's emotionally expressive "Anchoring a Boat under Pine Trees," a dreamy hanging scroll, is equally rich in mood; shades of gray signal an approaching storm, and mist hangs over hilltops and a clump of blackened trees in the foreground. Known to some as the Paris of the East, the city was also home to all manner of decadence, from a thriving sex trade to foreign nightclubs and opium dens. Artists with reformist socialist sympathies began reacting against these perceived excesses of the high life years before Mao Zedong officially took power in 1949. Examples of the modern woodcut, the favored medium of the public art movement that flourished prior to the establishment of the Communist regime, are displayed in the section called "Revolution" (1920-1976). Influenced by the distortion and heightened emotion of German Expressionism and Russian Social Realism, artists promoted causes or vented outrage in startling works such as Li Hua's "Roar, China!," a fierce depiction of a naked man blindfolded, bound in thick rope and tied to a wooden post, his face contorted in pain. (It was based on an actual incident in a Chinese town that also inspired a poem and a play.) The final area of the show, "Shanghai Today," incorporates aspects of popular culture and works by contemporary artists who use the latest technology to address social issues. Yang Fudong, a photographer and filmmaker, explores alienation among striving urban professionals in his trio of non-linear videos; Zhang Jian-Jin's installation and related video, "Vestiges of a Process," bear witness to the rampant demolition of old neighborhoods; and Liu Jianhua's installation "Can You Tell Me?," composed of stainless steel books hanging from a wall and a series of questions posed in five languages, ponders the future of Shanghai, a perpetually changing city driven by economic imperatives. "For more than a century and a half, Shanghai artists have not only been documenting the city's many changes but also leading its way into the future," reads an exhibition text panel. "It is impossible to understand the city without an awareness of its artists--or to understand its art without an awareness of the city's history." "Shanghai" runs at the Asian Art Museum, Feb. 12-Sep. 5. For more information: www.asianart.org; 581-3500