November 6, 2025–April 26, 2026
Shanghai
China
Hours: Wednesday–Sunday 11am–7pm
info@rockbundartmuseum.org
The Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) fall-winter program features two intertwined projects: the major thematic exhibition, The Great Camouflage, co-curated by Kandis Williams, exploring contemporary artistic practice situated within the afterlives of revolutionary movements, and Short-term Histories, a focused solo exhibition by artist and filmmaker Peng Zuqiang, marking his first museum show in Asia.
RAM’s Executive Director and Chief Curator, X Zhu-Nowell, comments: ”The Great Camouflage and Short-term Histories make legible how our failed revolutionary past continues to haunt the experience of the everyday. I’m interested in how artists translate these inherited contradictions and failures.”
Both exhibitions approach questions of resistance through material archives, transnational exchange, and non-textual forms. For Zhu-Nowell, the program is also an institutional proposition: “We are asking how a museum in Shanghai—long a terrain of collision between colonial modernity, socialist utopianism, and speculative futurism—might carry forward its revolutionary past. How do we sustain a revolutionary attitude toward life within the constraints of contemporary institutions?”
Williams adds: “Histories of revolution, whether failed or successful often negate the work of women, especially marginal women. Black women artists and intellectuals are then relegated to the realms of the social and entertainment, their political power, its afterlife, and their models for organization become hidden from history. We are looking at their strategies, however submerged by dominant erasure, to resurrect them as leaders of how revolutions persist and shape revolutionary care into our everyday lives.”
The Great Camouflage
Co-curated by X Zhu-Nowell and Kandis Williams
November 6, 2025–April 26, 2026
Artists: Boz Deseo Garden, Bhenji Ra, Renée Green, Hao Jingban, Hao Liang, Onyeka Igwe, Euridice Zaituna Kala, Eric N. Mack, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Pope.L, Cauleen Smith, Christine Tien Wang, Wang Tuo, Charlotte Zhang, Cassandra Press, and 44 Monthly.
“So, far from contradicting, diminishing, or diverting our revolutionary feeling for life, surrealism shored it up. It nourished in us an impatient strength, endlessly sustaining this massive army of negations.
And then I think also to tomorrow.”
—Suzanne Césaire
The Great Camouflage presents sixteen contemporary artists and groups working across film, video, painting, and textiles, alongside archival and research-based practices, to explore material and aesthetic circulations of transnational Black radical thought and the limits of revolutionary politics. Drawing on Suzanne Césaire’s call to sustain an “army of negations,” the exhibition situates contemporary artistic practice within the afterlives of revolutionary movements.
Caribbean writer Suzanne Césaire (1915-1966) appears as a central figure, whose writings on dissent the exhibition title. Her poetic and theoretical work offered surrealism as an urgent artistic, intellectual, and political intervention. She explored how colonial mimicry and imposed Western frameworks could be reworked into radical, emancipatory modes of creation. As Césaire observes in her important essay The Great Camouflage, her island’s beauty camouflages its harsh realities of colonial violence. The artists in this exhibition engage in forms of aesthetic labor that reveal how beauty, image, and surface are bound to political struggle and historical displacement. Drawing from traditions of Negritude and Surrealism—where poetry, image, and dream became tools of resistance—using aesthetics itself as camouflage: a means of circulating awareness, mobilizing influence, and uncovering what power works to conceal.
In parallel, this exhibition moves with the legacy of Black feminist revolutionary figures whose lives intersected across decades, creating networks of dialogue, solidarity, and artistic-political experimentation that spanned continents and generations. Amy Ashwood Garvey (1897-1969) cultivated Pan-African salons and grassroots networks that became vital spaces of aesthetic and political experimentation. Eslanda Robeson (1895–1965) navigated Hollywood, diplomatic, and Pan-African circuits, producing cultural and political work that traversed borders. Shirley Graham Du Bois (1896-1977) brought operatic, televisual, and literary forms into her internationalist activism. Grace Lee Boggs (1915-2015) extended feminist and Third Worldist solidarity into collective forms of care, knowledge, and activism.
The Great Camouflage focuses on video, textile, and theatre to extend these inquiries into political and aesthetic worlds. Textiles act as migratory materials, both medium and metaphor, tracing the tactile inscription of global Black and Asian radical imaginaries, diasporic movements of labor, memory, and solidarity, while reflecting on the “army of negations” that await these inscriptions.
Emerging from X Zhu-Nowell’s invitation to center artists from marginal and diverse origins at the Rockbund Art Museum, the exhibition was initiated and co-developed in dialogue with artist and writer Kandis Williams, founder of Cassandra Press. Together, they frame the exhibition as a space of oscillation—recognizing how revolutionary stages have been disrupted, fragmented, and reconfigured by imperialism.
The Great Camouflage is organized by X Zhu-Nowell, Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Rockbund Art Museum and Kandis Williams, Founder of Cassandra Press, with the support of Sam Shiyi Qian and Pan Zhen.
About X Zhu-Nowell / About Kandis Williams, founder of Cassandra Press
Peng Zuqiang: Short-term Histories
November 6, 2025–April 26, 2026
Short-term Histories is Chinese artist Peng Zuqiang’s first institutional solo exhibition in Asia: Working primarily with moving image and installation, Peng Zuqiang (b.1992, Changsha, China), based in Paris, experiments with the history of film and media, with attention to the affective resonance within histories, bodies, and language.
In Short-term Histories, Peng Zuqiang presents four works (three film installations and one chromographic print) and responds to the abrupt fractures characteristic of short-lived and ephemeral media histories, such as the unique 8.75 mm film format that circulated in rural China from the 1960s to 1980s. Peng Zuqiang further rearranges ambiguous carriers of memory by using experimental film techniques that create abstraction, such as the handmade “photogram” process in the darkroom, challenging the linear narratives of time-based media.
The title Short-term Histories, a play on the phrase short-term memory, reflects the artist’s response to the inaccessibility of history. Discussing why he makes cameraless photographic images, the artist comments: “How can we reimagine the medium of film as another source of resilience? I’m less interested in making something linear and legible but more interested in thinking about how something can be told, how new memories can be added, and how new stories can emerge across time and space.”
Sam Shiyi Qian, curator of the show, comments: “Peng’s work reminds us of the layered nature of memory and social stratification. In contrast to the seemingly clear-cut cinematic histories in cosmopolitan cities like Shanghai, the invention and screening of 8.75 mm film in remote regions of China have left behind a more ambiguous memory—particularly due to its circulation in rural and border areas.”
Peng Zuqiang: Short-term Histories is curated by Sam Shiyi Qian, Curator of the Rockbund Art Museum with the support of Pan Zhen, Curatorial and Editorial Assistant.
International press
Sarah Greenberg, Evergreen Arts, sgreenberg@evergreen-arts.com / T +44 (0)7866543242
evergreen-arts.com
Chinese press
Natalie Niu, Rockbund Art Museum Communication Manager, natalie.niu@rockbundartmuseum.org
