Surrounded by roads and the tallest skyscrapers in the city, Lujiazui Central Greenland is one of the last places you'd expect to find peacefully grazing cows. But recently, five curious-looking cows have appeared on the patch of green in the middle of the concrete jungle. However, being made of fiberglass and steel, they are quite at home among their man-made surroundings.

The cow sculptures are part of CowParade, one of the largest transnational public art events in the world. They are all the same size - around 2 meters long - and come in three basic positions of standing, grazing and reclining. While the shapes are the same, each can be painted within its own unique design.

The number of cow sculptures in the city will grow to 60 during the National Day holiday, will reach 200 by the end of this year, and will peak at around 500 at the beginning of next year, when the event will draw to a close.

Children paint on a cow sculpture in Lujiazui Central Greenland at the opening of CowParade Photos: Courtesy of the event organizer

During the event, cow sculptures will be found at many major public places in Shanghai, including the Bund, People's Square, Nanjing Road Pedestrian Street, airports, shopping malls and metro stations.

CowParade began in Zurich, Switzerland in 1999. Now the event sees hundreds of cow sculptures put on display at various public places in cities across the world. Local artists and celebrities are invited to design the exteriors of the sculptures.

Around two to three weeks after the displays end, the pieces are auctioned off to raise money for charity.

Over the past 15 years, CowParade has visited 79 cities with over 10,000 artists participating and over 250 million people seeing the cows.

This year, Shanghai becomes the 80th city to host CowParade. Before that, Taipei had been the only Chinese city to host the event, in 2009.

CowParade Shanghai is co-organized by CowParade Holdings Corporation (the US-based worldwide owner of the CowParade brand), Shanghai Media Group (SMG) Performing Art Center and Halcyon Gallery in Shanghai.

Wu Xiaofeng, deputy director of SMG Performing Art Center, said at the event's opening conference last week that it will be a challenge for each hosting city's participating designers to come up with original designs that differ from those featured in previous events. He said they can seek inspiration from the culture and history of their own city, and moved by their own interpretation of the cow as an object of art.

CowParade Shanghai has invited over 100 local celebrities and leaders in their fields to design the cows, including artists, architects, fashion designers and writers. These include transsexual modern dancer Jin Xing, art critic Lu Rongzhi and architect Ma Qingyun.

Anyone else can also submit their own design for consideration via the official website of CowParade Shanghai (http://www.cowparade.com.cn/). The site also has a map showing where the sculptures can be found.

The five cow sculptures on display at Lujiazui Central Greenland were designed by cartoonist Murong Yindao and artists Chen Chenchen, Zhu Xingyi, Wang Xuejun and Gong Xinru.

Murong is well-known in China for his cartoon Daodao. For the CowParade, he has painted a colorful cartoon map of Shanghai on the cow body, which he has named Lightening the Star, Searching for Dream. He explained the piece by saying Shanghai is not composed of streets and buildings, but people's dreams, and that a map is like a guiding light that helps people realize their aspirations.

Gong Xinru, a contemporary artist who graduated from the stage design department at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, also designed a colorful cow body named A Lost Cow (pictured below), covered with various signs and symbols related to public transport. Through this work, the artist intends to show that, without the help of signs, urban residents would remain trapped and would lose themselves.

Compared to Murong and Gong's colorful cows, the design by artist Chen Chenchen is grey and gloomy. The cow, named Kistler Museum (pictured below), is covered in rough, abstract lines. Chen said the picture is an illegible jumble when seen from a distance, but up close looks like a pile of rocks clustered together.

Past events have seen people such as Vivienne Westwood (fashion designer), Vaclav Havel (former president of the Czech Republic), David Lynch (American film director) and Andy Lau (Hong Kong actor and singer) create designs.

To date, the highest price fetched for one of the cows at charity auction was Wage Moo from CowParade Dublin in 2003, selling for $146,000. The design was a large, beautiful mosaic consisting of thousands of crystals. It was designed by Ireland-based Hong Kong designer John Rocha.