In September 2020, as the world shifted between lockdowns and tentative reopenings, a new magazine arrived from Shanghai with a title that read like a thesis statement: CODE 52, Issue 01, "A Fold in Time, Here and Elsewhere." Created by Marie Berger — the editor-in-chief and creative director also behind the Istanbul-based CODE magazine — this annual publication positions itself as both a print object and a curatorial platform, exploring contemporary art, music, and culture across borders and categories. Where most art magazines build walls between disciplines, CODE 52 deliberately tears them down.
The first issue set the tone: Xiaopeng Yuan's documentation of nature photography culture among seniors in Shanghai sat alongside work by Tomás Díaz Cedeño in Mexico City, whose moderately humanized objects blur the lines between landscape, body, and culture. Shanghai Community Radio appeared beside NAAFI, the Mexico City–based collective. Pierre Podevyn, Sucuk und Bratwurst, Henrik Alm, and Cécile Di Giovanni rounded out a contributors list that read less like a masthead and more like the guest list for a very good dinner party in a city that doesn't exist yet. The editorial framing was urgent but unhurried: in a moment of global uncertainty, the magazine turned inward to examine community, connection, and the relationships that persist outside institutional structures and algorithmic feeds.
CODE 52 is printed on considered paper stocks and designed with the same visual intelligence that characterizes its Istanbul sibling, which has explored subjects from quantum physics to fashion through loosely bound, elastic-banded editions on varied paper. The Shanghai edition shares that commitment to the magazine as a physical experience — something to hold, turn, and discover — but carves out its own identity through a tighter focus on cross-cultural exchange and what it calls "future-facing perspectives." Distributed through Motto Distribution and available at outlets from Stack Magazines in London to Salon für Kunstbuch in Vienna, it reaches the kind of readers who think of a magazine shelf as a curated exhibition space.
For a publication born during a pandemic in one of the world’s most dynamic creative cities, CODE 52 has staked out a distinctive position: not a Shanghai art magazine that occasionally looks outward, but an international platform that happens to think from Shanghai. That vantage point — between East and West, between art and music, between the contemplative and the confrontational — is what gives it its edge.
<a href="https://www.code-52.com/">Visit CODE 52