The largest-ever exhibition in Asia of artworks by Pablo Picasso is now open in Shanghai.

The large collection of artworks by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) now on display in Shanghai -- a total of 265 prints -- is miniscule compared with his prolific output during his long career as one of the world's most famous artists.

As part of the Year of France in China, all the works in the exhibition are on loan from the France-based Picasso Foundation.

"This is a rare opportunity for visitors to appreciate the master's artworks," says Zhang Wen, one of the organizing staff at the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall, where the exhibition is running. "It is even impossible for Europeans to see such a large number of Picasso's original prints in one exhibition."

Divided into eight sections, the month long exhibition is a wide-ranging look at Picasso's impressive artistic output. And one, the "Three-Cornered Hat" created in 1920, is on public display for the first time. Huge photographs showing the master in scenes from ordinary life are hung in the hall and take viewers closer to the artist's life and work.

"I am a big fan of Picasso," says Tony Wang, a 30-something white-collar worker. "Although some of his great works are still stored in overseas museums, this show at least is a special treat for me."

At the entrance of the exhibition hall is a biography of Picasso, which traces the artist's development from his Blue Period (1901-04) and Rose Period (1905) to his pivotal work, Les Demoiselles d' Avignon (1907), and the subsequent evolution of Cubism from the Analytic Phase (1908-11) through to the Synthetic Phase (1912-13).

But for most local visitors, these academic terms are unfamiliar. They are more interested to see the burning emotion contained in the Spanish bullfighter.

A series prints of bullfighting scenes are reminiscent of traditional Chinese ink-wash paintings because Picasso used succinct brushstrokes in outlining the critical points.

Picasso was not a philosopher or a mathematician. For him, reality is not just figure and space but is all relationships.

And surely the most powerful element in Picasso's work is sex. The female nude was his obsessive subject. Everything in his pictorial universe seems related to the naked bodies of women. Picasso imposed on them a load of feeling, from dreamy eroticism to a sardonic but frenzied hostility.

"To displace," as Picasso described the process, "to put eyes between the legs, or the sex organ on the face. To contradict. Nature does many things the way I do, but she hides them! My painting is a series of cock-and-bull stories."

(Shanghai Daily February 2, 2005)