Shanghai-based island6 Gallery is gaining renown as an arts collective

The long, narrow fish tank in the corner of Shanghai's island6 Gallery is empty, but a couple of weeks ago it was full of water and a naked woman, completely submerged, writhed about inside. That may sound exotic, but it was just another day in the office for gallery director Jean Le Guyader. All of island6's artworks are similarly conceived and created on site at the Moganshan Road studio and exhibition space.

"That shoot took a day. It's a big tank, it took a long time to fill, and we had to make sure the water wasn't too cold for the model," says Le Guyader. Footage of the event has been given an LED light treatment and the ethereal result - Astral Projections - is part of the gallery's "Through the Wormhole" exhibition that opened on Friday.

Over the past eight years, the gallery has carved a niche in Shanghai's modern art scene by combining experimental work with LEDs, video, neon and laser art with techniques such as painting and paper cutting.

The way it operates is almost as interesting as the work itself. There is no single artist's name attached to the work. The gallery operates as a collective - hence the Liu Dao Art Collective ( liu dao literally means "six islands" in Chinese) - and seven or eight people work on each piece: usually a curator, an artistic director, a couple of artists, a cameraman and a model.

The group's collective method has a curator conceive the framework for an exhibition, write a synopsis of the vision for it and then choose the artists for the project. An artistic director then works with the artists.

The brief for "Through the Wormhole" reads like a trippy short story, the sort that William Burroughs might have written.