X Zhu-Nowell Is Remaking Rockbund, From Admissions to the Archive
Observer ·
The executive director and chief curator has turned the private, nonprofit museum into one of China’s most experimental institutions, with radical exhibitions, free admission, international co-commissions and collabs in working hotels.
On October 31, the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai anticipated Shanghai Art Week by opening three exhibitions from two artists that may be alienating many of the well-heeled collectors in town for West Bund Art & Design and ART021. For “ Kit Yi Wong: BANK-A-OKE ,” the artist turned the museum’s main entrance into a branch of the Bank of Karaoke. Visitors can sing into machines designed to resemble ATMs, thereby depositing their voices. Its companion piece “TEM-PLE-OKE,” is set in a temple, and said to have been made by an artist named “ Wong Kit Yi .” Upstairs, “ Jota Mombaça: stuck in movement (in the tide) ” is the Brazilian artist’s first solo exhibition in Asia. It’s an opera, but instead of singers there are hand-formed earthen mounds that have sound systems concealed inside them.
All this might feel more at home in an edgy gallery in New York’s Chinatown. In fact, the Rockbund Art Museum, known as RAM, is a respected international institution located in a tony part of Shanghai. The non-profit, non-governmental space opened in 2010 on the Bund, in an Art Deco building constructed for the Royal Asiatic Society in 1933 and later restored by David Chipperfield Architects.
Shanghai-born X Zhu-Nowell joined RAM as artistic director in 2023 at age 34, coming to the museum from the Guggenheim in New York, where they commissioned “ Wu Tsang : Anthem” in 2021 and worked on the 2017 survey “Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World.” In January 2025, they were named executive director and chief curator.
From the start of their tenure they’ve been pushing boundaries, asking what a contemporary art museum should look like in the 21st Century. Their first year saw six solo shows of new work by women artists from the Asian diaspora, each one staggered so that it overlapped with the next. In May 2025, the museum eliminated admission fees . An ongoing project, “Wan Hai Hotel,” puts exhibitions inside actual working hotels. Last fall’s “The Great Camouflage” used W.E.B. Du Bois ’s visits to China in 1936 and 1959 as a starting point for a group show about Afro-Asian solidarity—radical stuff, in every sense of the word.
We caught up with Zhu-Nowell to get their thoughts about institutional freedom, international collaboration and what it means for museums to have a voice.
Rockbund is a non-profit, non-governmental museum, which is still relatively rare in China. What liberties does this structure allow, and what are the drawbacks?
Our particular institutional structure gives us more flexibility to be more adventurous in how we curate: how we allocate resources, how we build relationships with artists over time and how far we can push the forms an exhibition can take. Of course, that freedom comes with its own dependencies. As a privately supported museum, we rely on funding and institutional relationships, and [on] the conditions under which [the museum] is legally and politically permitted to operate. We have to constantly negotiate between artistic freedom, financial sustainability and our public responsibilities.
So I wouldn’t describe institutional freedom as something that’s automatically guaranteed by our organizational structure. It is something that has to be continually negotiated, and sometimes defended through very concrete decisions.
I visited Rockbund last year and saw your shows on Peng Zuqiang and “The Great Camouflage.” I was blown away by their experimental qualities. Those exhibitions would have been considered cutting edge in New York. How do you balance the local and international audiences, and how do you prepare the public for the kind of programming you do?
I think the distinction between local and international audiences is worth questioning. When I worked in New York, the entire world was understood as a legitimate field of curatorial inquiry. We didn’t necessarily begin by asking why an artist or historical question was relevant to New York. The institution assumed that it could participate in conversations taking place anywhere in the world.
Why shouldn’t that also be true of a museum in Shanghai? At the same time, RAM’s program has become more deeply engaged with Shanghai’s particular histories under my directorship. Projects involving Rindon Johnson , Hu Yun , Evelyn Taocheng Wang , Irena Haiduk , Cici Wu , Wong Kit Yi and others have developed through encounters with the city’s colonial histories, material conditions and geographic relationships.
In terms of audiences, I don’t think intellectual rigor and accessibility should be understood as opposing ambitions. I don’t think preparing audiences means resolving every question in advance or telling visitors what they should take away from an exhibition. It’s important to create conditions in which visitors can develop their own relationships with an artwork, and to recognize that sometimes uncertainty, disagreement and questions that remain unresolved are part of that engagement.
What did you gain from your time at the Guggenheim?
The Guggenheim was an extraordinary place to learn about both the possibilities and limitations of a large cultural institution with a collection at its center. I learned a great deal from my colleagues, but also from the building. Frank Lloyd Wright ’s “temple” remains my favorite building to work in. It’s never a neutral container for art. It becomes a partner in exhibition-making and sometimes a rather demanding editor of your work. It challenges you to rethink how artworks relate to each other and [how] those relationships unfold for the audience over time.
I’ve always been drawn to the ambition behind the Guggenheim’s founding, particularly Hilla Rebay’s ideas about the role art should play in society . She founded the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, the precursor to the Guggenheim, because she believed that art could cultivate new forms of perception and intuition, with consequences that extended beyond the experience of looking at art to how people and nations understand the world and relate to one another.
Many of her claims are quite far-reaching, and I don’t necessarily share her particular spiritual commitments, but I appreciate the seriousness with which she approached art’s social purpose. What I find most compelling is the idea that a museum could be an instrument for giving art an active role in shaping society, rather than primarily collecting and displaying it.
You took on the directorship at 34, the youngest director in the museum’s history, following Larys Frogier ’s decade-plus run. What did you inherit from his tenure that you kept, and where do you seek to innovate?
It’s easy to be the youngest when there have only been three directors in the museum’s history! One of the things that initially attracted me to RAM was its rather radical transparency, both within the team and in its relationships with artists. Coming from a much larger institution, I was particularly sensitive to this quality. The hierarchies and bureaucracy of established museums can make this kind of openness difficult to sustain.
Larys established RAM’s international reputation, its curatorial rigor and a distinctive institutional culture. He also developed important relationships across Asia and beyond. Those were significant achievements, and I wanted to build on them rather than replace them with an entirely different vision.
At the same time, I felt the museum had reached a moment when its curatorial structure could evolve. Previously, RAM generally organized three exhibitions a year, with each exhibition occupying the entire building. One of my first changes was to allow two exhibitions to take place simultaneously. This created more opportunities to work with a younger generation of artists, rather than concentrating primarily on already established figures. We have also been able to reconsider how the institution operates, [including by] introducing an economic structure that includes free admission.
Your fall season consists of three exhibitions by two artists, Wong Kit Yi and Jota Mombaça, and your curatorial note says the idea tying them together is the voice once it leaves the body. Can you speak more about this theme and how it emerged?
I didn’t begin with the idea of making voice a common theme. I was interested in developing these projects because Jota Mombaça and Wong Kit Yi had their own very distinct artistic propositions, and I wasn’t bringing them together to illustrate a single curatorial argument. But as the works began to take shape, I noticed that both artists were making provocative suggestions about the human voice. They raised questions about conventional understandings of the voice as belonging to one body, one person or one identifiable source. I became interested in what happens to a voice when it moves beyond the body that produced it, and what it continues to carry with it.
This became particularly apparent as the exhibitions took shape in the galleries. You encounter voices singing, chanting, crying and speaking, often without a recognizable human presence producing them. The artists approach this from very different perspectives. In Jota’s newly commissioned opera, there are no live singers or conventional stage. The voices emerge from sound systems embedded in the earthen mounds that form the opera’s landscape and characters. The protagonist, She, has transitioned from a human into a geological entity. Her voice becomes part of this larger landscape, alongside her mourning for the humanity she can no longer inhabit.
Wong Kit Yi takes an entirely different approach. In “BANK-A-OKE,” visitors deposit their voices through specially designed karaoke ATMs. She proposes, speculatively, that a person’s voice carries their qi, or vital life force. The voice can be recorded, circulated and exchanged, but it remains connected to the person who produced it. Her companion exhibition, “TEM-PLE-OKE,” explores the other side of this proposition through spiritual obligation, the replenishment of qi and the figure of the jiangshi, who returns from the dead.
I think one interesting connection between these projects is their concern with what continues beyond the disappearance or transformation of the body. Both artists unsettle the idea of the voice as a transparent expression of an autonomous individual. A voice can travel, acquire new attachments and take on different meanings depending on where it goes and how it is received.
We often speak about a “museum’s voice” as though it belonged to a single institution. We also speak about the importance of “bringing more voices into the museum,” or giving voice to the marginalized. But perhaps these exhibitions ask us to go further. Rather than asking what the museum’s voice should be, or simply how many voices it can represent, we might ask what happens to voices as they enter, circulate through and leave the institution.
Both fall commissions are co-productions with institutions abroad. Wong’s Forgive Us Our Debts is made with the Migros Museum in Zurich; Mombaça’s opera is one of four chapters shared with Kunsthalle Bern, Sonsbeek in the Netherlands and Inhotim in Brazil. These shows arrive the same week MoMA, the Centre Pompidou and M+ announced an alliance to share their collections. Do you think international partnerships will become ever more important for Rockbund going forward?
Absolutely. But I think it’s important to distinguish between partnerships organized around the circulation of existing collections and those concerned with the production of new artistic work. At RAM, commissioning is one of our most important responsibilities. We commit resources to artistic propositions whose outcomes are not fully determined in advance. International collaboration allows institutions to share resources, knowledge and risks, but more importantly, it creates the possibility for an artistic practice to develop across different contexts.
Jota Mombaça’s opera is a good example. Its chapters have been developed through a collaboration involving Kunsthalle Bern, Sonsbeek and RAM. Each institution contributes to a larger artistic proposition, but the different chapters respond to their own particular circumstances. It’s not a finished exhibition that gets packed up and shipped from one museum to another.
Similarly, our collaboration with Migros Museum on Wong Kit Yi’s Forgive Us Our Debts extends the possibilities for producing and circulating an ambitious commission. There’s another aspect of this institutional ecosystem that I find meaningful. Many works commissioned by RAM have subsequently entered other museums’ collections. One institution might provide the conditions for a work to be produced; another might acquire it, preserve it and make it available to future audiences. We are all working on the same ecology.
You have said that when you arrived the museum had almost no archive, and that across Asia institutions prioritize new exhibitions over preserving what has been done. How have you been working toward a correction?
When I arrived at RAM, I was surprised by how little systematic archival material was available relative to the institution’s history. I think this problem extends beyond RAM. Across Asia, we have built extraordinary infrastructures for producing contemporary art, but there isn’t always the same attention and resources devoted to preserving the histories of the production. At RAM, we’ve been giving greater importance (and resources) to publishing, archiving, documentation and the production of critical discourse around our exhibitions and programs.