Skate of the Art
Skateboarding Across Cultures
Every photograph captures an authentic reality. Every leap belongs to a specific city, a circle of friends, or an entire era.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
On July 24, 2026, Fotografiska Shanghai launches its major group exhibition, Skate of the Art: Skateboarding Across Cultures. Bringing together over twenty seminal artists and visual creators from five continents, the exhibition deploys a rich archive of photography and video installations. Together, these works map the global trajectory of skateboarding, revealing how the camera lens has not merely documented this youth phenomenon, but actively driven its cultural evolution.
Skateboarding has always exceeded its definition as a sport; it constitutes an anarchic practice, a lived attitude, and a complex visual and social code. Emerging as an improvised extension of surfing onto asphalt in the 1970s, it has fluidly navigated urban spaces, photographic lenses, print media, cinema, and popular culture, gradually evolving into a cross-regional, intergenerational visual culture. The moments frozen in these photographs do more than chronicle the evolution of a movement; they serve as a profound, shared archive of the street, freedom, and raw creativity for generations.
As a rare, major skate-themed exhibition framed through the lens of photography and visual culture in recent years, Skate of the Art gathers creators across generations to comprehensively chart skateboarding’s migration from the American West Coast to the global stage, forming a rich, pluralistic cultural landscape. Concurrently, the exhibition introduces multimedia installations and raw street-textured elements into the gallery space, crafting a multi-layered, immersive viewing experience centered on the core aesthetics of skate culture.
Iconic Imagery Defining Skate Culture
Photography has accompanied modern skateboarding at virtually every pivotal stage of its development. From early iconic images splashed across magazine covers to documentaries, independent zines, and photobooks, visual media has transformed skateboarding into a universally shared visual experience. Skate of the Art unfolds along the trajectory of these definitive images, looking back at the evolution of skateboarding culture over the past fifty years.
The exhibition features several seminal creators who have defined the visual identity of skateboarding. Since 1975, American photographer Hugh Holland has captured the nascent California skate scene. His documentation of sun-drenched empty swimming pools, dry drainage ditches, and hillsides captured the most emblematic settings of skateboarding’s infancy, establishing an aesthetic and a sense of freedom that continues to resonate today.
Extending the visual idiom that Holland pioneered, Dutch photographer and skater Marcel Veldman has spent over two decades documenting skate communities around the world in black and white. His frames expertly capture both the raw physical intensity of skateboarding and the intimate, unguarded moments of everyday life.
Larry Clark, a photographer renowned for his raw, unfiltered gaze at American youth culture, positions skateboarding within a broader social reality, utilizing an uncompromising, direct visual language to document the coming-of-age experiences of a generation. Ed Templeton—who masterfully balances the identities of professional skater, fine artist, and photographer—utilizes an intimate, diary-esque photographic approach to document road trips, friendships, and domestic life. This allows audiences to look past the gravity-defying tricks and look directly into the authentic, vivid daily realities of the skate community.
The exhibition also highlights significant works by artists such as Magdalena Wosinska, and Nikki Toole. Spanning photography, moving images, and independent publishing practices, their works collectively form the evolving visual genealogy of skate culture, showcasing how different generations of creators have dynamically responded to the street.
Beyond California: The Global Spread of Skateboarding
As skate culture permeated the globe, photographers turned their lenses away from the American West Coast toward diverse cities and communities worldwide. Skate of the Art curates pivotal photographic projects from multiple nations, illustrating how skateboarding has adapted and birthed localized identities across varied cultural landscapes. Through these photographs, viewers glimpse authentic stories of youth, community, and public space across global metropolises.
Brazilian photographer Luisa Dörr documents the indigenous female skate collective ImillaSkate. Her lens captures young women skating through streets and skateparks while proudly donning traditional polleras skirts and embroidered blouses as a tribute to their cultural heritage. In preserving their cultural identity while claiming public spaces via skateboarding, this series has garnered widespread international acclaim, becoming one of the most iconic bodies of work in contemporary skate photography.
Canadian-British photographer Lauren Luxenberg collaborated with Medellín-based skater and creative director Ronal Aguilar Sanmartin on the project Touching Ground. Using the skate community as a prism, they document how the city of Medellín, after years of upheaval, has regenerated with raw energy and vitality.
Yassine Sellame from Morocco continuously documents North African skate scenes, capturing the organic integration of skate culture into the daily lives of youth in Côte d'Ivoire and Morocco. Meanwhile, Georgian filmmaker David Meshki employs a poetic visual language to capture a young generation in Tbilisi searching for self-expression amidst historical heritage and modern reality.
Beyond documenting specific communities, the exhibition explores how photography redefines the relationship between skateboarding and urban space. Kenji Haruta focuses on the unique spatial dialogues engineered between skaters and structural forms, giving architecture a new, almost sculptural dimension through movement. Nils Svensson utilizes fisheye lenses to compress speed, elevation, and the urban site into high-tension frames. Meanwhile, photographer Sem Rubio’s decade-long collaboration with legendary skater Mark Gonzales continually pushes the boundaries of street photography, taking skateboarding into vast natural landscapes and travel expeditions, culminating in a collaborative monograph published in 2025 that serves as a definitive archive of their long-term creative odyssey.
From the Great Wall to the Chinese Street
In recent years, China has emerged as one of the most vibrant centers for global skate culture. Skate of the Art purposefully integrates an Asian perspective into the dominant narratives of skateboarding’s Western origins, pairing historic imagery with works from contemporary local creators to illustrate how skateboarding continues to thrive and forge unique localized expressions across Chinese cities.
The exhibition features one of the most widely circulated and iconic images in skateboarding history. In 2005, professional skater Danny Way famously jumped the Great Wall of China, a historic feat captured by photographer Mike Blabac. The resulting photograph graced international skate magazines and spread rapidly via documentaries and the early internet, becoming an image of what becomes possible when ambitious dreams meet precise planning. It was not only an unprecedented triumph of extreme sports but also marked China's definitive entry into the visual memory of global skate culture.
While this historic image marks China's entry into the global skate lexicon, a wave of home-grown photographers and creators from Beijing, Shanghai, and beyond have documented how skate culture has truly taken root in the fabric of daily Chinese urban life.
Jedi Zhou has long documented the streets of Shanghai. The skaters in his frames navigate through traffic, bridges, and skyscrapers, where urban light and shadow intertwine with skate movements to form rhythmic compositions, capturing a dissolving ribbon of light and speed. Jeff Yiu takes a long-term, documentary approach to tracking the evolution of the Beijing skate community. In his work, skateboarding is not an isolated athletic pursuit but the authentic, everyday coming-of-age story of a group of young people growing up together in the city, tracing the evolution of Chinese skate culture from a niche street interest to a mature community.
Bilal captures the singular aura of Shanghai skater Pikai through a street-photography lens, highlighting the close interweaving of streetwear and skate style—one of the defining elements of youth culture. Wan Yize (Skgr) brings his camera into the private, domestic spaces of skaters after they leave the streets; his analog film project focuses on the quiet, intimate realities of nineteen skaters caught in a state of suspension during the pandemic, offering a warm, humanized look beneath the gritty street exterior. Terry Xie takes his lens to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, following the region’s sole professional skater, Tsring, as he embarks on a three-day, thousand-kilometer journey just to participate in a skate gathering in Lhasa.
These regional narratives collectively construct a rich, authentic contemporary portrait of Chinese skate culture, allowing global audiences to see how Chinese youth navigate uncertainty, interpret skateboarding, and carve out their own physical and symbolic spaces within rapidly shifting environments.
Every photograph captures an authentic reality. Every leap belongs to a specific city, a circle of friends, or an entire era.
Skate of the Art: Skateboarding Across Cultures invites everyone to step into these cross-regional, timeless visual terrains—to rediscover the boundless creativity of skate culture through photography, and to re-examine how a spatial practice continues to reshape cities, youth, and the way we view our world.
ABOUT ARTIST
Bilal
David Meskhi
Ed Templeton
Hugh Holland
Jeff Yiu
Jedi Zhou
Kenji Haruta
Larry Clark
Lauren Luxenberg
Luisa Dörr
Magdalena Wosinska
Marcel Veldman
Mike Blabac
Nikki Toole
Nils Svensson
Sem Rubio
Terry Xie
TLB
WAN Yize
Yassine Sellame
Yoshiro Higai
ABOUT CURATOR
Nadine Barth is a curator and publicist specializing in photography and contemporary visual culture. In 2006, she founded barthouse, an agency for cultural projects. She has curated exhibitions at Fotografiska Stockholm, New York, Tallinn, and Berlin, among other international institutions, and is the editor of over a hundred books on photography, art, fashion, and design. She lives in Berlin.
Powered by: Nike SB
As the cultural partner of Skate of the Art: Skateboarding Across Cultures, Nike SB joins Fotografiska Shanghai in presenting a series of public programs throughout the exhibition, centered on skate culture. Nike SB has always put skaters first, serving the global skateboarding community—born from sports, true to the streets, and rooted in skate culture. As China’s skate community continues to grow, street skating has become a vital means for young people to express themselves, assert their identity, and build cultural belonging. For Nike SB, skateboarding is more than skill and performance—it is inseparable from street culture itself. Through this collaboration, Nike SB and Fotografiska Shanghai aim to further the growth of the local skate community and the spaces where skateboarding can thrive as a stage for self-expression.
In this partnership, Fotografiska Shanghai and Nike SB bring skateboarding into a dialogue with art, sport, and youth culture—extending from the museum space to the city itself. Through exhibitions, public programs, and community engagement, they connect image-making with street culture, demonstrating how skateboarding, as a living contemporary language, continues to emerge, evolve, and connect with broader public conversations.