Abstract:To investigate the Reform Period of 'Opening Up' in Shanghai (1990-present) I have selected two artefacts from that time to situate in the greater social context of the city. The first case study is the crossing of the Yan'an Road and Chengdu Bei Road Elevated Expressways in downtown Shanghai, nicknamed the Nine Dragons Interchange, built in the mid-1990s. The second case study is the tallest building in China, Shanghai Tower(2008-2014), located in the Pudong New Area district.These two case studies can be seen as bookends of the Reform Era, highlighting Shanghai's re-emergence into the global flows. I begin by investigating the social context of Shanghai's development as a city with a brief overview of the city's history until the Reform Era arrived in Shanghai in 1990. I then perform two separate case studies on artefacts from this era of urbanization, grounding the artefacts in their specific social context to see what ideological programming they spatialize and embody.I investigate each object to probe the experiences of visuality at play and to see, as WJ.T.Mitchel has advanced, how“visual encounters with [these artefacts]inform the construction of social life."I argue that the visibility of these objects make them ideologically invisible —rendering their underlying neoliberal political economy generally unquestioned.Both objects are part of a system of visibility which invokes traditional symbolism which obfuscates and naturalizes what the urban process is about.