Text by Thomas RouechéPhotography by Sohrab Golsorkhi-Ainslie

The Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai has, since 2010, continually reimagined what an art museum might be. In a building originally constructed in 1932 for the Royal Asiatic Society, it was renovated by David Chipperfield as part of the regeneration of the entire surrounding area between 2006 and 2023. The result is that the building now has two facades: one historic, one modern. In a city defined increasingly by architectural spectacle, the RAM sits Janus-faced and contemplative.

As with the surrounding neighbourhood, the RAM is a relic of Shanghai’s colonial past, and a stone’s throw from the Bund which served as the stage for imperial commerce and display. The museum retains the physical structure of that past, while interrogating that period and its influence on the decades since. Once a research institute, the building was requisitioned by the Chinese government in 1952. During the Cultural Revolution, it became a storage depot for confiscated books; the librarians and their families lived there. It is to the RAM’s credit that the institution approaches these histories not as subjects to be either celebrated or resolved, but brought into conversation with the contemporary moment. As China’s confidence and position on the world stage rises, RAM offers a space to interrogate the narratives it tells about itself.

For its first decade, the Rockbund Art Museum served as a kunsthalle, bringing major international artists to China. However, since 2023, the institution has found a more radical, conceptually rigorous and critically engaged voice under the leadership of director X Zhu-Nowell. Zhu-Nowell grew up in Shanghai before leaving to study in the US, where they undertook a PhD, and worked on the Guggenheim’s major 2017 show Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World, as well as the highly acclaimed 2021 installation by Wu Tsang, Anthem. Zhu-Nowell’s experience has clearly shaped an approach not only global in reach but reflexive in tone. There is a persistent inquiry in the museum’s recent exhibitions not simply into art, but into the institution itself and the conditions under which it operates.

The Rockbund development as a whole tells a parallel story. The museum sits within a wider commercial development of luxury boutiques and restaurants that belong to contemporary Shanghai’s recent urban refinement. Chipperfield has created a series of charming piazzas which have become a popular site for photography and social performance, a kind of aspirational stage for the city’s middle classes and hopeful influencers. RAM stands within but apart from this, neither resisting nor embracing its surroundings. Rather, it presents itself as a space where the logic of exchange is suspended, deferred and challenged.

As the Royal Asiatic Society, the institution was dedicated to a colonial project of knowledge production based on control, cataloguing and codifying Chinese culture. In the communist period the building was requisitioned to serve as a warehouse for the Shanghai Library. In those years, the building became a place of silence: a storage library, rather than a place of reading and research, yet one that was nontheless inhabited by families. What might be made of that silence?

It’s a line of questioning taken up by Cici Wu’s new exhibition at the RAM, Lanterns from the Unreturned. Wu’s work takes the traditional form of the paper lantern and asks us to consider it as an early form of cinema, and a feminist ancestor of video art. This show traces Wu’s interest in the lantern began with her film, Unfinished Return of Yu Man-Hon (2019).

The three shows that opened this May at  the RAM together form what Zhu-Nowell has called a “fugue”, but they also feel like a statement of intent

The film is about the real-life figure of Yu Man-hon, a young autistic boy who, in August 2000, crossed the border from Hong Kong to the mainland and disappeared. His case remains unsolved; in the film, Wu imagines his return. Elsewhere, Wu’s work uses lanterns to create spectral images of the confiscated books that the RAM building once housed: a series of sculptures hang in the windows of the east staircase, visible from the street, their forms making a sort of film strip. Each work is freighted with memory and emotion, glowing from within.

Wu’s show is one of the three which opened this May at the RAM, which together form what Zhu-Nowell has called a “fugue”, but also feel like a statement of intent. On the first two floors, Irena Haiduk’s Nula project reimagines the museum as film set and economic experiment, coinciding with the RAM’s removal of an entrance fee. Set nominally in Yugoslavia in the late 1990s, the work plays with labour and value, inviting viewers into a kind of semi-fictional economy. Haiduk’s interest in non-alignment and non-participation feels particularly resonant; less a critique than a scenario or an imagined alternative.

The top floors of the RAM are taken up by A Crack in the Shape of Light Getting In, a mid-career retrospective of the work of Ash Moniz, a Cairo-based artist whose work has long been preoccupied with the complex valences of the world of commercial shipping. Moniz’s video-based installations tell stories of dock-worker solidarity, but also describe the invisible logics of market control, insurance and risk that underpin global trade.

For this show, Moniz was commissioned to make a new work, and the result is a powerful void. Moniz took the money for the work’s production and redistributed it to families in Gaza. The resulting piece, “Just Tell Them it’s an Artwork”, is an empty space marked by a sign: a powerful gesture and institutional critique that once again draws into sharp focus how the RAM operates beyond traditional limits. On the top floor, Moniz has added volumes on piracy and Palestinian literature to the museum’s growing research library, and drawn a map of international solidarity between dock-workers globally: building an installation that fuses archival material with speculative research in a layered exploration of how knowledge is produced, held and transmitted.

Taken together, these three shows articulate a common approach, one that refuses to see the institution as a static and hegemonic space, but which continually unpicks the structures in which it finds itself. Time and again, we see a turn to research and complexity over resolution and explanation.

Many contemporary institutions seek to ask what the limits of the museum are, and how they might be overcome, yet few can claim as RAM can to interrogate these questions at every step. This is a space that refuses the binaries of centre and periphery, of national and global, of East and West, and even of past and present. Rather, it presents a more distributed network of meaning, grounded in place and attentive to local histories but woven into trans-local resonances. RAM is an institution that feels thrillingly alive to our contemporary predicament, and chooses to confront it with eyes wide open.

TR You left Shanghai around 12 years ago, and you were in the US until you returned here to the Rockbund. What was it like to leave and return?

XZN Well, I don’t think I properly have ever left, or I don’t think I have ever returned. I am still living between New York and Shanghai, first and foremost. I was a high school student when I left, so I was a very different person when I returned. I always think of the journey as long. The most formative moments came at the end when I started working in the US. For me, it’s interesting not to think about what I learned in the US as a kind of influence but rather as a threshold to thinking through what is in the belly of the beast: understanding how empire works, and how conditions are created for institutions, and learning how it works for the dissidents: the artists and thinkers who believe in rupture, in contested geographies, and are interested in contradictions. I am at least encouraged to think that I am part of a movement of people who believe in contradiction. I think US-China is the biggest contradiction in the world right now, and they are functioning as different sides of a coin. Travelling between the two allows me to understand the limits of both places, and also, potentially, the possibilities of those places.

TR What it was like to work on the show Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World at the Guggenheim in New York? There’s a way in which Chinese art of all forms is presented in the West as the sort of voyage of discovery. At the same time, the show came at a sort of tipping point of changing perceptions between the US and China.

XZN I devoted four years of my life to that one project. I was also at MIT doing a thesis that was connected to that project, but at the same time it constituted four years, all in, of research about experimental practices between 1989 and 2008. It’s a very precise framework, one that was not necessarily just about Chinese art. It was about a very particular group of Chinese artists, and I think it was less about China per se, but more about how artists worked in the conditions of that period, this hyper-globalised period of hyper-modernisation. In China this was also an uber-capitalised period. So we were thinking through how artists were working with those shifting conditions, something you can of course learn from artists from China, but also artists from the SWANA region or from Latin America. It was really more of a case study, looking at how artists were dealing with these transformative social changes at lightning speed. It’s the post-modern condition, right? Everything was squashed together as though it was a pack of gummies – sorry for the metaphor – but smashed together full of contradictions and ruptures. It was a very exciting moment for many artists, during which time the contemporary art field emerged in this country as it did elsewhere. My thesis looked at an exhibition that three artists curated in 1998 in a shopping mall in Shanghai. At the time, the shopping mall was new. No one had any idea what a shopping mall was. People had to be taught how to shop. Consumption was a new idea, because back then you were given tickets to receive things. Buying a nail polish was a new experience because people didn’t see it as something they needed. Chinese economists literally had a strategy to help people understand that they could invest in themselves by paying for higher education, or beautify themselves by buying nail polish. This was the late 1980s and early 1990s, when shopping malls and supermarkets and self-select stores began to emerge. So artists were using these novelty ideas to help people to understand contemporary art. It was super interesting! There are a lot of examples I can give you from around that time. That kind of exhibition history was grounding the research for Art and China after 1989, so it was very nerdy, deep research with hundreds of artists and curators. That formed a really good basis for me to understand the history of this country, especially within the kind of experimental art scene that I’m working with now. 

TR That sense of commitment and interest in research clearly continues to underpin both the work that you’re doing at the Rockbund but also the type of artists you are working with. 

XZN Looking retrospectively, it becomes clear what drives you or what makes sense of a practice. The exhibition at the Guggenheim also caused a public outcry, which raised questions of representation or misrepresentation. There was an incident concerning a work involving animals that became huge. There were critiques from the left and right. For me that was the most interesting thing about the project – besides, of course, working with artists I love. It happened a week before the show and it really helped me understand America, and realise what representational politics can do in a country like the US. But going back to your question about how it’s influenced my practice: now, destabilising a narrative is a continuation of something I’m interested in, but also playing with form. I now realise that I am such a formalist, in a Foucauldian way. Form is an organisational structure that contains, and you can work with it to restructure more than just power dynamics, more than just economic strcuture. Form is such an interesting thing! So I started looking at a lot of institutional forms. What do they mean? Working with artists also challenged me to think about exhibition forms as well. I think artists enjoy working with me and the team because we push them to dream crazier – to do things that a Western institution will normally tell them not to do, because I’ve been in those shoes too. It’s building a platform, and also building a site of contradiction where artists can act.

TR You took up this position at the Rockbund while the world was still in the midst of the pandemic. What was that like?

XZN It was a decision made in relation to moving relationships. One were the shifting conversations and discourse happening in China. I wasn’t interested in working here pre-pandemic because it was very market-driven, but during the pandemic I began to see the emergence of a lot of younger artists, and even older artists still truly engaging in the political side of the contemporary moment. That was exciting. The other shifting situation was a Western institution that I was a part of, which began to review the limits between the organisational structure, the pure form, which was forged in the 19th century or even earlier, and how it was now being demanded to meet DEI diversity needs, and rightly so. But the form and those needs did not congeal well. Within a pyramid form, it’s actually hard to have a truly diverse, truly equitable working process. I think that the form has to shift. So looking at the urgency and the “difficult” situation in Shanghai opens up possibility, because difficulty produces a clarity that abundance does not. There is a certain clarity here that doesn’t exist in the West at the moment. This was two and a half years ago. I just went to sleep and it was clear that this could be a good idea, and then everything just kind of aligned. The director of the Rockbund, who had been here for 12 years, decided to leave. I started thinking about the possibility of inventing new forms in this context, and realising how important those would be for local artists and artist communities. Coming back was not a career choice – it was much more exciting than that. There’s so much more energy, and so much more unfinished business – there are speculative structures that one can test and experiment with. At the time I had some other offers in other parts of the world, but I just didn’t – don’t – see this energy in other places. Still, I made the decision before China opened the border. It was a gamble. 

I like to stay with the trouble. I really see challenges as an invitation to invent new forms and open up new possibilities

TR Did you always have a sense of what you wanted to do with the institution? 

XZN I was actually a consultant curator here in 2020 when I was still living fully in New York. I did a show called The Good Life just a few months after the quarantine in 2022. That was a really powerful show for a lot of people, even though I didn’t see it. Working online with the team, I understood the context a bit better before I fully committed to joining. But when I arrived officially, Larys [Frogier, the previous director] had not left much of a programme. So I had to jump in immediately. I had three months to convince artists to work with me. Of course I went to the community of artists I’ve been in conversation with for a long time. I think each curator is working within an ecology anyway, and if you are going to a place, that ecology comes with you. I curated six solo exhibitions with Asian diasporic women and non-binary artists, which became the focus. To be completely honest, I used the first year of those solo shows to understand the public. It has changed so much. Previously, the audience had been very much from the art world, but since the pandemic, that has shifted. We have a lot of internal debates and discussions about how to better understand our audience, but I’m not sure that it’s needed. You just have to do what you do, and they will come – which is amazing and exciting as well. I spent a whole year just understanding that. And then last year, 2024, I would say was more of a starting point for understanding the site, because I realised that so many of us, myself included, and also my colleagues from a younger generation, hadn’t really dealt with history deeply enough. We haven’t really dug into our own territory. That investigative method is something that started in 2024, and progressed through a year-long programme, thinking about exhibitions thematically laid out as a structure, intermingling with each other as well.

TR It seems like there is a gap in the understanding of the city and the building between the colonial period and the present. 

XZN In my first welcome party here, someone came up to me and said, “I was born here.” I already knew that there was an interesting layered history to this building. We had not delved so deeply into that history. One show is not enough. We wanted to slowly unpack the layered history of the building. After the building became the place for librarians and confiscated books, it became a stock market office working with the city. The history of the building is kind of a capsule of what happens in each period in Shanghai. The 1990s were shaped by economic reforms, and the 1950-1970s by the communist era. Now, we have an art institution here, that allows us to unpack that history. 

TR How do you think about the sort of affordances and the possibilities that all of this offers you as an institution?

XZN I like to stay with the trouble. I really see challenges as an invitation to invent new forms and open up new possibilities. I think that’s also a bit Chinese. I work with a lot of contractors here and I feel like they’re very inventive when presented with budget or structural limitations and it pushes you to reinvent things yourself. I think a lot about design theory about affordance and limits. Institutions don’t have to be so static – they have to be able to move with emotions and morph in shape. To allow the possibility of a kind of fluid movement will allow us to kind of think better or be more resilient.

TR Especially in our current moment. 

XZN In opening these three shows, we intentionally sought to address the present. There are so many shows in the world, and too often I feel like they don’t do much to me as a viewer because they don’t confront what’s in front of them. Last year, I felt that I really have to work with urgency or pressure. I just want to be really honest about where I am. I don’t want to pretend this is a nice, beautiful utopic world. It’s not. We’re in very chaotic times. Why don’t we do shows that really confront this? Why don’t we work with artists who also teach us how to work with decay? Why don’t we let artists lead us through these moments? Their bravery, their experience and perspective on the world can actually lead us out. So I think it’s important to take time. Smaller institutions like ours, we have the luxury to work with time. Bigger institutions plan exhibitions four years ahead, and by the time you get there the world has changed completely. Even though we plan ahead, we work with artists so closely that the work can change. We all feel that this is the right response to the moment that we are in. 

TR How do you connect to the local art community here?

XZN We’re still learning. It’s a commitment to the long term. Any real organisational work takes effort and takes time. So it’s not that you come in and everyone welcomes you straight away. It takes time to form deep, real conversations. One thing I noticed – and I’m strictly speaking about artist communities – was that a lot of local artists weren’t speaking to one another. I thought, how are we going to form a new discourse? To respond to this, I decided to start a very simple, unofficial programme that doesn’t cost much. After hours, we ask artists to come in to present their works, then we invite everyone over and give them some beers and snacks. It turned out great. We ask artists that we work with to give a presentation when they come for a site visit, peer to peer, just to other artists. Now, when artists come through Asia they text me, and come to give presentations to local artists. I think creating those spaces for continued, sustained dialogue within art communities is what institutions should do, and that’s what we’re committing to do for the long term. For the audience, I always hope that the institution can be a more borderless place – like the Klein bottle in mathematics where the interior and the exterior are the same kind of surface. What is the institution? Is it the 15 full time staff, or the building? Can’t it include everyone? I don’t feel like the people that come to the museum are visitors, but part of the movement I am trying to build. Maybe if they come once, they won’t find it inspiring, but if they come twice they will be inspired. Repeat visitors are important for us. That’s why, within Irena Haiduk’s Nula economy, repeat visitors are rewarded for their time and their presence. 

TR In many institutions in the world there’s a disconnection between local artists and institutions that interface with the international, they can be alienating to local communities. 

XZN RAM has historically had a reputation for working with pretty established artists. We have younger artists as part of our programme who never thought they would be presenting their work here. So it’s already starting to shift, but it’s a slow process. I am not saying that we’ve fixed everything, it’s about building trust. I feel like I have a really great team and everyone is deeply connected and grounded. This year we’re doing an artist retreat and bringing a lot of newly formed artist-run spaces outside of these capital cities of China – Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen – other places like Chongqing and Guangzhou, and they will invite other institutions, so we will be around 30 people gathering to share and also present to the public.

TR How do you relate the institution to China, the region, the world?

XZN I don’t think about things in this kind of mapping way. For me, it’s about creating connections and networks, point to point, and knitting together a new cartography of similar-minded institutions or people. There is actually so much more shared history and shared relationalities. If you look at Ash Moniz’s map on the sixth floor, you can see there are so many old, extant forms of solidarity networks. It’s about activating them and setting them in motion, while also initiating new ones. I don’t only think that Shanghai is part of China and China is part of Asia. I think those types of geographical constructs are not helping us because that is the colonial framework that has led us to where we are today. It’s really about reinventing the game, writing our own rulebook and trying to figure out how we could create a new cartography of relations. 

TR These Western ideas of how the world looks have suffered a profound blow over the last few months. How do you see those cartographies or networks becoming more empowered, maybewith shifting in the years to come?

XZN What I have noticed with my work in the past has been that any institution offers a certain level of visibility and also a certain level of influence. Some institutions have a lot, and some institutions have a little. Even with us being a very small institution, we have some influence, and I think that matters. Once we start pointing our spotlight at something, people start noticing, and that creates a ripple effect. These marginalised narratives, marginalised histories, marginalised connections, matters and projects that we start here will, a couple of years down the road, perhaps be picked up by a bigger institution and radiate out. We don’t think of ourselves as isolated, as we are a network of colleagues and friends and institutional thinkers. I think it’s important to share these interests. We can do a lot by doing small, simple things. 

TR There are bigger institutions, with much more possibility, that do much less than you!

XZN I position the institution very clearly as a resistant institution because, again, we do not represent China. I don’t want people to get that confused. We are very critical of where we are – not just in China, but in the world. Understanding this resistance as part of the ethos of the institution is very important. There are many other resistant institutions in the world as well. Bigger institutions have a different kind of theory of their affordances. They have to be mainstream. They cannot afford to be resistant. For me, it’s also a privilege. My colleagues are aligned, as are the artists that we work with. It’s valuable nowadays to allow an institution to be unfinished and open in its form, to hold contradiction, and be allowed to hold a positionality of refusal. We are very privileged to be able to hold these values. 

It’s valuable nowadays to allow an institution to be unfinished and open in its form, to hold contradiction, and be allowed to hold a positionality of refusal

TR What surprised you most during your tenure here?

XZN The most positive surprise was how quickly the audience learn. We have people who come in the first couple of days of a show, not knowing how to make sense with it, or they don’t find any connection with the Pacific, for instance. Then a couple months later they come back and they have become super knowledgable, and they start to write social media posts about the narratives of Aboriginal artists in Australia that are told through oyster shells. Chinese people work hard, and they learn quickly. They’re open minded and curious.

TR People must always comment on the selfie culture around the Rockbund. It’s interesting how actively engaged the public is in the space. I imagine free admission is going to knit the institution into its context even further. 

XZN You know, this is important. Before I joined the museum, it was a construction site. The whole neighbourhood was not yet finished. Construction only concluded in 2023 when we opened the first edition of the Rockbund Art Museum Assembles, RAMA, the architecture festival. So there was a dramatic shift in how people engaged with the museum and how they engaged with the neighbourhood. We’ve been witnessing that shift for the past year and a half. We used RAMA as an opportunity to address it. We wanted to bring the thinking in the museum outside to the neigbourhood slowly. Maybe five years ago, or even before that, I would see a lot of wedding pictures taken in art galleries – even in front of the craziest installations. But I’ve realised that people have moved on. People no longer do that in the galleries. They read, they look at art, and they take pictures on the street. But the audience is growing and maturing. It is still a very emergent place in terms of museum-going habits, but that is changing at speed. The younger generation are building habits which are exciting and fun to see. .