As winter approaches, the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) in Shanghai unveils the second cycle of its annual exhibition program: the sixteen-artist group exhibition The Great Camouflage, occupying all floors of the museum, alongside the solo exhibition Short-term Histories by artist Peng Zuqiang. Since its reopening in 2021 after extensive renovation, the century-old former building of the Asiatic Society has continued to assert itself through an ambitious and distinctive exhibition program. In early 2023, with X Zhu–Nowell assuming the roles of Director and Chief Curator, the museum’s institutional focus has become increasingly centered on critical narratives of diaspora, labor, and historical inheritance under globalism. RAM’s collective modes of expression and its experiments in public engagement have since remained firmly in the spotlight.

Much like the six solo exhibitions that unfolded from a shared curatorial premise in 2023, and the lectures and workshops that expanded the museum’s institutional boundaries in 2024, RAM has, over the course of this year, begun to weave together “depth” and “breadth” into a coherent curatorial strategy. On the one hand, three stylistically distinct yet conceptually interdependent solo exhibitions spread across six floors sustained the museum’s signature, rigorously articulated exhibition-making. On the other, the spring–summer program marked the lifting of a long-standing ticketing policy that had been in place since the museum’s founding in 2010—rendering RAM free of charge for all visitors. While such a sudden opening inevitably carries the risk of overflow, the institution has clearly chosen the stance of an active agent—one that experiments and adjusts rather than hesitates.

Beneath unresolved tensions and unanswered questions lie ongoing interpretations, judgments, and commemorations of historical myths; collective strategies for engaging with what might be called “residual legacies”; and comparative inquiries that traverse race, belief, and geopolitics. These impulses coalesce in the curatorial thinking behind this autumn–winter program, which ultimately affirms a belief—measured yet resolute—in the possibility of human empathy.

At 20 Huqiu Road, a site long haunted by the specters of classical ornamentalism and the obscure history of learned societies, how—and why—does the institution continue to modulate its tone, murmuring softly to contemporary time and its audiences? Over the past three years, this question has accumulated and unraveled itself repeatedly, remaining an unresolved enigma. This time, however, the boundary of the nightmare appears faintly visible.

I. Silent Choreographies

Through black-and-white gradient spatial reconfigurations, dialogues in flux are staged as visual disguises—like landscapes transmuted into internal forces.

The Great Camouflage takes its title from the Caribbean writer Suzanne Césaire (1915–1966), anchoring the exhibition in the intellectual legacy catalyzed by revolutionary movements of the mid-twentieth century. From this point of departure, the exhibition proposes a renewed interpretation of radical expression: just as the natural beauty of certain islands has historically masked the violence of colonial domination, radical ideas and aesthetics themselves may function as forms of “camouflage,” sustaining latent internal forces.

At the entrance to the first gallery, the English title is isolated and enlarged, rendered in stark sans-serif lettering on a sliced wall plane. It reads like a slogan that seems to advance with the rhythm of reading, yet remains fixed in place. The exhibition design further reinforces the curatorial premise through an immersive black-to-white gradient that gestures toward a form of spectral realism.

Positioned at the center of the gallery is Pope.L’s (1955–2023) inverted wooden sculpture Du Bois Machine (2013). Accompanied by the chilling statement, “Disseminate fragments of historical figures to the public. If that makes people as good as Martin Luther King, then great,” the work offers a provocative counter-text. While W. E. B. Du Bois stands as one of the great Black intellectuals within male-authored revolutionary narratives, Pope.L embeds the recorded voices of young girls within dark loudspeakers lodged between the hollow wooden legs. Through biting satire, the work exposes the sanctification of intellectual heroes as entangled with moral posturing and authoritarian desire.

Passing through this tribunal-like space illuminated by a single, unforgiving light source, visitors encounter a black wooden staircase imbued with neo-classical gravitas. Two symmetrical yet subtly mismatched polyester curtains hang lightly at the threshold. Printed with countless juxtaposed portraits of Black female singers, the curtains sway gently in an unseen breeze.

II. Polyphonic Specters

Between colonial archives and theatrical fictions, histories of hybridity and postcolonial identity resurface as entangled echoes.

Ascending to the second floor, the exhibition’s interrogation of “camouflage” shifts from the external reconstruction of historical fragments to an allegorical exploration of individual conditions and contemporary identities.

The fluid transitional space at the gallery entrance is bathed in an ambiguous crimson glow. Yet the archival footage playing on the screen—Mother, Métis, Memory (2019–2022) by Vietnamese artist Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn—cuts through the haze like a blade. The work summons a haunted history rooted in the Vietnam War, when Senegalese Tirailleurs conscripted by French colonial forces committed acts of violence against Vietnamese women. The film unfolds complex entanglements of victimhood and complicity, fractured identities of “mixed-race” descendants, and the trauma of transnational memory.

Inside the gallery, a constellation of theatrical installations reconstructs a memory-scape from the era of British colonialism: a wooden round table draped in aged cloth sits atop a Persian rug, scattered with cigars, tobacco, faux books, and paper props. Two diagonal white lines divide the darkened floor into three zones—one labeled Clive’s Living Room, the other Rehearsal Room, suspended between truth and fiction. Seating occupies the destabilized center, flanked by intermittently illuminated screens.

Here, Onyeka Igwe (b. 1986) presents A Radical Duet (2023), alongside the installation series Notes on the Production of Props and Sets (2024). Together, they restage an imagined confrontation among international intellectuals, artists, and activists in a London revolutionary base during the late wartime twentieth century. Fictional figures—Adura Falade, a Nigerian socialist, Christian, labor organizer, feminist, and mother; and Sylvie St. Hill, a Jamaican student, dancer, actor, and playwright—navigate between invented historical narratives and contemporary reflections, reconstructing postcolonial imaginaries through performances that verge on documentary realism.

III. Subterranean Currents

From street graffiti to transoceanic textiles, grassroots forces and collective trauma surface through practices of solidarity and self-organization.

How might one excavate, touch, and articulate fragments buried beneath dominant historical narratives?

On the fourth floor, the exhibition offers a series of community-based responses. One such response comes from 44 Monthly, a Guangzhou-based collective writing group whose practices span text, space, murals, installation, video, performance, and publishing, with an ever-shifting membership. Their commissioned installation Viparyāsa Station(2025) transforms the double-height, naturally lit atrium into a chaotic, provisional street scene reminiscent of communities in South China or North Africa. Through concrete grates, awnings, and expansive graffiti, the exhibition disguises itself as a kaleidoscopic psychic refuge, internalizing pain and pleasure alike as unfinished encounters and acts of trauma repair—assembling a form of solidarity that cuts across time and experience.

In The Great Camouflage, histories of geopolitical colonialism diffuse across the discursive terrain we inhabit, unfolding in configurations that are at once parallel and antagonistic. Provisional affinities, narratives, and actions—formed in situ—operate as a set of alternative methodologies, allowing viewers, through an embodied movement akin to searching for blossoms in the fog, to recompose their own paths. In this process, consciousness gives rise to new sensory faculties, enabling a renewed seeing and hearing of reawakened images and sounds. At the same time, the exhibition sharpens a critical vigilance: why has collective consciousness lain dormant for so long, and why does the act of awakening and rethinking appear so urgent—here and now?

Across the interlinked fourth- and sixth-floor mezzanine space, Bhenji Ra’s three-channel video Trade Routes (2023) enters into an informal dialogue with Eric N. Mack’s monumental textile assemblage suspended above. Mack’s work stitches together Kente cloth—handwoven and dyed textiles associated with Ghanaian ritual traditions of the 1940s—with locally sourced fabrics collected from Shanghai flea markets and Chongming Island. The assemblage vividly echoes Lisa Lowe’s argument in The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015), foregrounding the entanglement of craft, labor, and cultural exchange within postcolonial global trade networks.

IV. Awakening in the Mist

Through a circular archive, the exhibition constructs a theater of awakening, calling upon viewers to think actively within fractured temporalities.

Echoing the classical narrative structure of qi–cheng–zhuan–he (introduction, development, turn, and resolution), The Great Camouflage unfolds across four chapters. By the time visitors reach the fifth floor, they have already become embedded within this dynamic dramaturgy.

As the final chapter, the fifth-floor gallery foregrounds individual agency across disparate historical scripts. In the face of rupture, uncertainty, and involuntary collective trance, the exhibition assembles revolutionary ideas and practices across eras and geographies—urging viewers to awaken from the fog, to remain in motion rather than stagnation.

The commissioned publication Army of Negotiations (2025) by Cassandra Press enters into dialogue with the exhibition’s central text and its concept of an “army of negations,” proposing a counter-force capable of realigning displaced knowledge and culture. As visitors circulate through the ring-shaped space, textual density intensifies while embodied immediacy recedes—an effect familiar to many exhibitions that conclude with documentary indices. Works such as Cauleen Smith’s Homegirls (2024) and Christine Tien Wang’s gold-leafed hashtags painted on found cardboard maintain a light, drifting, and spiraling orientation aligned with the curatorial call for active thought. In this context, the museum’s “no photography” policy—an instinctive gesture shaped by hyper-speed screen culture—reveals itself as unnecessary, even counterproductive.

Stepping away from The Great Camouflage and returning to the third floor, visitors transition seamlessly into Peng Zuqiang’s solo exhibition Short-term Histories. The exhibition unfolds as a triptych of filmic thresholds: beginning with the deliberately “faulty” imagery of Déjà vu (2023–2024), projected from a French vintage 16mm color film projector; moving through the newly commissioned Afternoon Hearsay (2025); and finally immersing viewers in The Cyan Garden (2022), a transferred video supported by frosted glass.

Amid these dense, semi-conscious monologues, one recalls that Peng has recently relocated from rain-soaked Netherlands to Paris, the historic nexus of the Nouvelle Vague. His experimental engagement with Super 8 film manifests not only in the diversity of presentation formats but also in the institution’s deliberate maintenance of an indeterminate tone. This uncertainty allows the once-industrial medium to oscillate between object and subject—mirroring the museum’s own poised transformation within an in-between state.

Cauleen Smith Homegirls, 2024 Color video, with sound, 17 min., 44 sec. Courtesy the artist and Morán Morán, Los Angeles