Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum Announces 2025 Programme
Highlights over spring and autumn include solo shows by Barbara Chase‑Riboud, Irena Haiduk, and Peng Zuqiang. Save to My Ocula
Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai has centred its 2025 programme, which features exhibitions and commissions by six artists, around the theme of ‘trans-national solidarity’. Must-sees include American sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud’s first exhibition in Asia.
Rockbund’s executive director and chief curator, X Zhu-Nowell, said the museum’s programme started from long-term discussions with artists about political ideologies and movements, which led to questions like: ‘How do histories of collapse shape our present?’ and ‘What does disintegration make possible that stability does not?’
Opening on 31 October, Barbara Chase-Riboud returns to China will revisit the artist’s legacy within the context of ‘transnational modernism and postcolonial exchange’, viewed through the experience of one of the few Black American artists to have visited Maoist China.
Conceived alongside Chase-Riboud’s exhibition, a research project by Zhu-Nowell and artist Kandis Williams’ publishing label, Cassandra Press, will explore Black Marxist traditions, Afro-Asian solidarity, and sonic resistance through diverse practices from spring onward.
From 2 May to February 2026, Irena Haiduk’s commission, Nula, will transform the museum into an immersive film set, exploring Yugoslavia’s 1990s political and economic turmoil. As part of her first institutional survey, Lanterns from the Unreturned, Cici Wu uses paper lanterns as ‘proto-cinema’ to explore alternative histories of the Cultural Revolution. Ash Moniz’s exhibition, A Crack in the Shape of Light Getting In (both until 28 September), will examine global supply chains and workers’ resistance, reclaiming spaces as sites of political rupture and solidarity.
Opening alongside Chase-Riboud’s exhibition, Chinese artist Peng Zuqiang’s show, Afternoon Histories, will present his research into Maoist-era 8.75mm propaganda films through a newly commissioned video installation. —[O]
Main image: Barbara Chase-Riboud in China (1965). © Marc Riboud. Courtesy Barbara Chase-Riboud.
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