A special art exhibition, revealing the mental world of affective disorder patients, opened to the public at the Shanghai Mental Health Center’s Rehabilitation Daycare Center yesterday.

The exhibition — at the center’s “No. 600 Gallery” — is called Blue Dreams and is the second at the gallery showcasing the inner world of patients who live with mental illness, depicting their fight against the disease.

Blue Dreams has brought together artists, who are willing to tell their stories and show their emotions.

“Painting can help me relieve negative emotions, immerse myself in my own world, and enjoy the feeling of emptying and relaxing myself,” said an artist patient suffering from bipolar disorder, who calls herself Cracks.

“There is this feeling sometimes in me, like water entangled in my body. I am tightly bound, but my will is free, it flows out of my body,” Cracks explained, pointing at one of her paintings, named “Water.”

All the paintings at the exhibition were created by affective disorder patients.

“Each piece is a self-portrait in a certain sense,” said Chen Mengyuan, in charge of the planning the show. “Behind the power of symbolic language and metaphor is the expression of a dialogue between the artist patients and their mental world.”

The reason for choosing “Blue Dreams” as the theme of the exhibition was to lead visitors to understand the topic of emotional disorder from a different perspective, and invite them to enter the beautiful spiritual world of the artists, Chen added.

The “No. 600 Gallery” is the first art gallery to be set up in a mental health clinic on the Chinese mainland.

This is the second time that the Gallery has held such an event this year. The first one, held in August, was another cross-industry interchange of “PsychiatryxArt” by the exhibition planning team.

“From the special moon cakes to the themed art exhibition, the center is trying to make itself a state-level model rehabilitation center,” its director Xu Yifeng said.