SHANGHAI —The conceptual artist Chen Zhen was 25 when he learned that he had a rare form of anemia and might have only five years to live. It was the early 1980s, and China was beginning to loosen travel restrictions on its citizens, so in 1986 Mr. Chen left his parents and his hometown of Shanghai and headed to Paris, where he studied art and worked as a sidewalk portrait artist.

Mr. Chen ultimately died in the French capital in 2000, of cancer, but by that time he had achieved global recognition for his large-scale sculptures and installations, which explored themes of travel, health and homeland. His work had been in included in several international exhibitions, and he had been the subject of more the 30 solo shows in Europe, the United States and Asia.

Now, Shanghai is celebrating its local son with a show at the Rockbund Art Museum through Oct. 7 — “Chen Zhen: Without going to New York and Paris, life could be internationalized.” It is only the second solo exhibition of Mr. Chen’s works in the city where he was born in 1955. The first was in 2006 at the Shanghai Art Museum.

“I think the whole Chinese art community feels like we owe him a comprehensive project,” said Liu Yingjiu, deputy director of the Rockbund. “He was so respected in the art community. We thought it was time to make another exhibit to show that his thoughts and his works still deeply resonate with our times.”

Hou Hanru, the curator of the show and the artistic director of the Maxxi, Italy’s national museum for contemporary art in Rome, said: “Art and being an artist was almost a kind of therapy for Chen Zhen, not just physically but psychologically and spiritually.

“For 20 years, he struggled for survival. But his health constraints and his traveling also made it possible for him to feel like he was in a state of constant discovery, which allowed him to develop more critical thinking on art and why he wanted to be an artist.”

In mounting the show, Mr. Hou worked closely with Xu Min, Mr. Chen’s widow and longtime collaborator, to put together a condensed survey of the artist’s works, with pieces chosen to highlight his interests: the relationship between humans, nature and objects; Eastern and Western medical traditions; and urban planning and architecture.

The show also marks the fifth anniversary of the Rockbund Art Museum, one of several private contemporary art institutions that have emerged in Shanghai. The 11 works are spread over five floors of the renovated Art Deco building, which opened in 1932 as the headquarters of the Royal Asiatic Society.

The exhibition begins on the second floor with a re-creation of one of Mr. Chen’s early works, a large-scale installation called “Purification Room.” Visitors are confronted with what he once called a sort of “archaeology of the future”: Scattered through the room are objects like furniture, a shopping cart, a desktop computer and a scooter. Everything — the objects, the floor, the walls — is bathed or “purified” in beige-colored mud, reminiscent of a practice in Chinese folk medicine. The visual effect is what Mr. Chen termed a “monochrome tomb.”

“When Chen Zhen arrived in France in the ’80s, he found a society that unlike China was already very much driven by the capitalist economic system,” said Mr. Hou, who along with Mr. Chen was closely associated in the 1990s with a circle of Chinese artists in Paris that included Huang Yong Ping and Yan Pei-Ming. “This was his way of contributing to the intellectual critique in France of consumerism, by introducing this kind of romantic idea, somewhat Chinese in a way, of purifying the culture that had been polluted by money and consumerist values.”

In subsequent galleries, the focus of the show turns to Mr. Chen’s reflections on the body and his concerns with the city and urban development — specifically his connection to Shanghai. For “Daily Incantations” (1996), he created what resembles a bianzhong, an ancient Chinese musical instrument with bronze bells, except wooden chamber pots replace the typical graduated arrangement of bells. A large jumble of old radios, televisions and telephones is placed at the center of the structure, while the sound of the daily ritualistic cleaning of night stools, routinely heard on the streets of Shanghai during Mr. Chen’s childhood, emanates from the suspended chamber pots.

In a conversation about the work published on his website, Mr. Chen spoke about the intertwining of daily repetition and modernization.

“‘Daily Incantations’ is the result of my first home visit to Shanghai after eight years of overseas life,” he said. “Nobody gave me an invitation to exhibit at the time. Only, I saw once again those lovely Shanghai women cleaning night stools by the street side in early mornings, and they did this in the shadow of the Shanghai Hilton Hotel!”

He added: “That was very similar in nature to the ‘daily readings of the Red Book’ during the Cultural Revolution: an apathetically mechanic ‘daily repetition.”’

Sharing a floor with this sculptural installation is “Untitled Steamships” (2015), a work created for the exhibition by the museum, under Ms. Xu’s supervision, and based on detailed sketches by Mr. Chen and on Ms. Xu’s conversations with him. Given the recent news spotlight on China’s currency policy, the piece could hardly seem more timely. It consists of two wooden boats that were built with their bows intertwined, like conjoined twins. One is carrying goods labeled “Made in China” while the other says “Western Products,” in what can be seen on the simplest level as a comment on the interconnectedness of global markets.

The top two floors of the exhibition are dedicated to Mr. Chen’s various research projects. On display on the upper floor of the museum cafe are photographs from a project undertaken by the artist on one of his visits back to Shanghai in the 1990s. Taken with the aim of documenting the evolution of the city, the photographs show a Shanghai just beginning to come into its own as a modern, outward-facing city. They also reveal Mr. Chen’s sense of humor.

In one photo, for example, he pictures a Shanghai subway advertisement for a local real estate development. “Without going to New York or Paris, the life could be internationalized,” the sign reads.

“When I saw the photo, I thought it would make the perfect title for the show because it really tells you what the Chinese dream is, then and now,” Mr. Hou said. “It raises an essential question about what the real image of a modern society is and how people project themselves onto it.”

While Mr. Chen’s concern with the body and the self is reflected throughout the show, perhaps the most intimate expression of his thoughts is revealed in a selection of portraits and passages from a diary he kept during a six-month residency with a Shaker community in Maine in 1997.

“Today I was thinking about how maybe the people in the art crowd are sick somehow, or crazy,” he wrote in Chinese in one passage. “We have countless connections to money and power, but we are often enslaved by them. We are the nonsmokers in a smoky room.

“Then again, the artists are the most powerful, because we participate in the ‘game,’ we know the rules and we know how to overcome them. But we have to be crazy or psychotic. The sick ones often have the clearest minds.”