"Paris Of The East" is Liu Dao's homage to the Golden Age of 1930s Shanghai, an era in which the city gained its reputation as the capital of the Orient, a playground for the rich and famous and a mecca for the movers and the shakers of the world. The pursuit of wealth, commerce and pleasure reached unprecedented proportions -- as did vice and organized crime. Alongside the flourishing of grand Art Deco structures and great commercial enterprise, the city was ruled by the mafia-like Green Gang (chin. 青帮), rife with brothels and reeking of readily-available narcotics. "Paris of the East" seeks to capture the moment of the riches, adventure and sin that Shanghai in the 1930s has come to stand for; a time when the can-can dance of Europe's nightclubs was performed by Chinese women with impossibly white skin in the cabarets on Rue Montauban, now Sichuan Nan Lu; a time when giants of finance would stumble out of opium dens and into the raucous clubs of the French Concession, where singing patrons twirled with waiters as if in a Toulouse-Lautrec painting; a time when twenty year-old actresses would shriek with laughter as they danced on tables in restaurants and hotel bars with diplomats and royals from around the world, while the ships from every continent continually docked and set off in perpetuity to make the Port of Shanghai a paddlewheel that drove the city on through the nights of every season of every year until it all ended in the blink of an eye. The artwork ...