Impressive Impressionist works on view in Shanghai K11 mall

In 1874, the first group exhibition featuring Claude Monet's work was, famously, a failure. The artist had hoped to sell his painting Impression, Sunrise for 1,000 francs; to provide scale for those financial expectations, the entrance fee was 60 francs. It went unsold. But that painting's title did provide a waggish critic with a term he used to sneer at this dubious new art movement - and inadvertently giving it the name by which it would become known.

Impressionism, however, had caught the eye of a man called Ernest Hoschedé. Being the owner of a department store, he had some money. Hoschedé's name wasn't mentioned at last weekend's opening of China's first-ever Monet exhibition but his spirit evidently lingers on.

As the show consists of 40 Monet masterpieces - including some of the Water Lilies series and several later depictions of the Japanese bridge at Giverny - plus 12 paintings by such stellar Impressionists as Berthe Morisot and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, it might have been assumed this extraordinary artistic banquet had been laid out in a museum. But no. It's in the basement of K11, a Shanghai mall.

Shanghai K11 is the younger sister of Hong Kong's K11 which, when it opened in Tsim Sha Tsui in December 2009, was described by its owners New World Development as "the world's first art mall". Shortly afterwards, the K11 Art Foundation was set up by Adrian Cheng Chi-kong, the 34-year-old heir to New World Development (and to Chow Tai Fook, the jewellery juggernaut). Shanghai's K11 opened last June, and is continuing Cheng's mission to bring art to the masses.

It's easy to see what K11 gets out of this arrangement. But why has the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, which has lent all the paintings, agreed to stage the mainland's first Monet exhibition in a shopping complex?

"Many reasons," says Marianne Mathieu, assistant director of the Marmottan museum, briskly. In 2004, working for the Musée d'Orsay, she helped organise the "Impressionist Treasures from the French National Collections" shows in Beijing and Shanghai, as part of the Year of France in China.