Stills from Distorting Words (2019), Wang Tuo. Images courtesy of of the artist.
Surprising encounters abound in The Great Camouflage at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. Bringing together 16 artists and groups that work across theatre, installation, video and painting, the show unfolds from an ongoing dialogue between curators X Zhu-Nowell and Kandis Williams, and explores “the material and aesthetic transnational circulations of Black radical thought and the limits of revolutionary politics” in China and across Asia.
The show takes its name from a 1945 essay by the French writer and anti-colonial activist Suzanne Césaire, and considers how contemporary artists use aesthetics as a means of uncovering what power works to conceal. Zhu-Nowell and Williams’s curatorial dialogue traces the legacies of several notable black feminist revolutionary figures: Amy Ashwood Garvey, Eslanda Goode Robeson, Shirley Graham Du Bois and Grace Lee Boggs. Their work is set against the broader geopolitical backdrop of anti-imperial politics in the 1950s and 1960s, which brought together figures like W. E. B. Du Bois, Mao Zedong and Kwame Nkrumah, and the political currents of Black Maoism.
Still from A Radical Duet (2023), Onyeka Igwe © Onyeka Igwe. Image courtesy of the artist and Arcadia Missa, London.
These meetings and dialogues, real and imagined, form the curatorial groundwork for a dense and thoughtful grouping of works that traverse time and space, and prioritise, in the curators’ words, “rupture, unknowing, and political feeling as methodological anchors for engaging the spectral legacies of revolution”. In Onyeka Igwe’s A Radical Duet (2023), an imagined meeting is staged between Adura Falade, a Nigerian socialist activist (and mother of Fela Kuti), and Sylvie St Hill, a Jamaican playwright and actor, presented both as performance and as rehearsal. In the film, the artist sits with the actors, foregrounding artifice and process, and bringing the revolutionary afterlives of these two historical figures into conversation with the contemporary performers acting out their imagined dialogue.
The work shares the same room as another extraordinary video work, Distorting Words (2019), by Changchun-born artist Wang Tuo, which interweaves the death of student Guo Qinguang in 1919 and the execution of Zhang Koukou in 2019. The former was a figure of the May Fourth Movement whose death made him a martyr of Chinese revolutionary politics, while Zhang killed three of his neighbours as a form of vengeance for the murder of his mother and the years of legal inaction that followed, sparking a debate across China about filial piety and the moral order. These two sacrifices find themselves unexpectedly bound together in Wang Tuo’s elegiac film installation.
Still from Trade Routes (2023), Bhenji Ra © Bhenji Ra. Image courtesy of of the artist.
Elsewhere, other works tread similar conceptual and geographic lines: Eric N. Mack’s hammocks and costumes made from antique and rare fabrics, Renée Green’s personal video works, Charlotte Zhang’s conceptual video essays, Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s exploration of Afro-Vietnamese identity, Guangzhou-based collective 44 Monthly’s collaborative installation, and Bhenji Ra’s video portrait of transversing and self-filming along paths and root systems in Oaxaca, Jamaica, the Philippines, Los Angeles and the Tiwi Islands.
The Great Camouflage culminates in a visual timeline that maps out on the wall of the gallery the many meetings, both literal and figurative, conceptual and practical, between its historical subjects and characters, opening out a rich historical landscape of study. It’s a testament to Zhu-Nowell and Williams’ curatorial dialogue that the result is as successful as it is challenging, traversing revolutionary afterlives through history and across the world, and bringing them into direct confrontation with our complicated global present. Thomas Roueché
Installation view, The Great Camouflage (2025-2026), Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai © Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. Photo: Ling.