At 120 Moganshan Rd, a lane leads onto a large open green area surrounded by the Suzhou Creek. There, in severe contrast to Shanghai's ever-towering skyscrapers, stands Island6, a four story red brick building. Its history: Shanghai typical.

Island6 and its two sister buildings were established, like most flour mills and breweries, along the Suzhou Creek at a time when the river nurtured a major industrial base in Shanghai. The three buildings (built 1913-1930), came to be part of a complex designed to house the office headquarters and depots of Foo Sing Flour Mill. Signed by Atkinson & Dallas, a British architecture and civil engineering firm that thrived in the city during the early 1900s, the structures are representative of typical masonry architecture, originally constructed with wooden arcades and red brick walls.

In the 1900s Island6 stood as the "small packaged flour" warehouse. Today, it has survived a derisory fight with the city; in July 2003, the complex faced imminent demolition to make room for real estate developers. Yet the doom of warehouses along the Suzhou Creek was fought by a series of cultural campaigns and by many architects and university professors and Island6 is now declared a cultural heritage and is protected by the Shanghai Municipal Government. Wu Jiang, a professor at Tongji University and deputy director of the Shanghai Urban Planning Administration Bureau says; Industrial buildings are part of what defines this city. Modern avant-garde artists are going about their creative work in stark contrast with the old mysterious warehouses. Han Yugi ads: The dilapidated state of the walls, pillars, roofs and stairways holds so much appeal for artists. They bear the traces of history, telling us riddle-like stories of the bygone era, the great changes wrought by time are condensed in the buildings, giving them a power and dignity that excite and move us.
Several research programs have also taken place in this area; a mayor one, headed by professors Zhang Song and Han Yugi produced a report entitled "Left Bank of the Seine of the East: The Art Warehouses of the Suzhou Creek"; a picture story-telling book.

Island6 now rises as a center for the arts, one that aims to interact with the cultural relics that surround it. Its main pursuit is to be an ongoing project that researches the limits, in a multidisciplinary fashion, of the visual culture. The product of an association between Thomas Charveriat, a French electronic media artist and Margherita Salmaso, a creative curator from Italy and Belgium, it seeks to investigate the latest trends in contemporary art and create a dynamic exchange between Asian and European artists; the gallery will work as a trust, where the artist has the choice to exhibit in different galleries and various locations; Shanghai, Paris, Brussels, Barcelona, and Bologna.