ShContemporary has become the largest event on Shanghai's art calendar, but while it offers collectors ample opportunity to purchase international art, it gives little regard to the city's own art history. This month, Biljana Ciric is curating an ambitious exhibition that aims to fill the void: a crash course in Shanghai art since 1979.

"This city has a really short memory span," says Biljana Ciric, curator of History in the Making: Shanghai 1979-2009. "You always think you're doing something very avant garde and contemporary and la la la la, but you look back and people did it 10 years ago."

Ciric has taken an especially thorough look back at Shanghai art, interviewing 40 significant Shanghai artists, building an archive of their work, and now gathering – and even helping reconstruct – pieces by around 50 of them to create a timeline of post-Cultural Revolution art making in the city.

Her research has shone a light on a lot of Shanghai innovation, especially with regards to installations and performances in the 1980s, that left Beijing artists eating dust. Shanghai also had private museums and institutions before other cities: The Shanghai Art Museum opened back in 1986 with a mix of contemporary artists like Ding Yi and Yue Han, as well as more traditional artists. The inaugural Shanghai Biennale was held in 1996, before the Beijing Biennale and the Guangzhou Triennial were created. Shanghai also led curatorial experimentation with, for instance, an exhibition held in 1996 that required all artists to fax their artwork to the organisers.

Ciric attributes Shanghai's innovativeness to its uniquely cosmopolitan attitude. "There wasn't much communication with the rest of China in the '80s. I think Shanghai at that time was one of the cities where most of the information came through to China."

Despite their ingenuity, one reason Shanghai artists haven't received as much acknowledgement as their counterparts in Beijing is because Shanghai, generally speaking, has lacked the critics to comment on their work. As Ciric points out, "Most of the Chinese art history canon is written in Beijing."

An exciting feature of History in the Making is the opportunity for artists to revisit their own work – a kind of crtiticism through reinterpretation. Shen Fan, for instance, has taken landscapes he produced in 1979 and affixed neon lights that trace today's skyline. The name of the work is ‘Shanghai Landscape from '79-'09’ (pictured).

Another artist, Xu Zhen, is showing the giant formaldehyde tank dinosaur he created, which Ciric calls "a big, expensive joke on Damien Hirst." The dinosaur's insides are made of real cow and pig meat. Even Hirst's animal works are deteriorating, and Xu's piece has been far less well looked after, but again the exhibition is happily exploiting the passage of time. Ciric persuaded Xu Zhen to show the work by acknowledging that it was falling apart, but suggesting "maybe we can show your failure?"