Jue Lan Club

HISTORY OF THE JUE LAN CLUB

​In the early 1930s, the Chinese painter Ni Yide came to Shanghai to organize a group of like-minded artists, sharing a disaffection of conventionality and a devotion to the avant-garde. They declared themselves the Jue Lan Society. A new art scene emerged by creating secret meeting places in 1930’s Paris to trade, create and buy art outside the watch of their homeland in Communist China. It was the Chinese response to the European art movements of Cubism, Surrealism and Dadaism.

​The name itself ( 决 澜 社 ) literally means, “determination to create change.” That small group of artists rejected what had come before them; they sought to improve not only themselves but also the world around them through their artwork. It is in that spirit, on the site of the 20th centuries’ most notorious nightspot that they opened the Jue Lan Club at The Limelight Church in New York City.