X Zhu-Nowell’s Return to China: ‘I Saw a Zone of Urgency’

After working on Guggenheim shows including the controversial Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World and Wu Tsang's iconic Anthem, Zhu-Nowell has returned to Shanghai to serve as artistic director of arguably the city's most important contemporary art institution—Rockbund Art Museum.

With their bright orange nails and double denim sliced into an unparsable silhouette, X Zhu-Nowell looks too hip to be a museum director. Zhu-Nowell, who has the exuberance to match their outfit, brims with a sense of possibility at a time when many Chinese institutions seem to be struggling.

Born in Shanghai in 1990 to an engineer mother and a jeweller father, Zhu-Nowell attended high school in Japan, the University of California at Berkeley, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before studying the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art at MIT. During their studies, Zhu-Nowell started a gallery in their Chicago apartment focused on performance and worked with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev on the 14th Istanbul Biennial in 2015 before interning at Guggenheim under Assistant Curator Stephanie Kwai.

News X Zhu-Nowell Named Art Director of Rockbund Art Museum Sam Gaskin

Kwai left the museum during the development of its Chinese contemporary art spectacular Theatre of the World, and recommended Zhu-Nowell, then just 24, as her replacement. The exhibition was both fantastic and a firestorm, sparking protests over the use of live animals in several historical artworks. During the pandemic, Zhu-Nowell curated Wu Tsang's almost universally beloved video installation Anthem (2021)—a work The New Yorker called 'transcendent'.

In 2023, with their star rising in New York, and with many people in China leaving—myself included—due to pandemic restrictions and the sense that life there was only getting tougher, Zhu-Nowell was appointed artistic director of Shanghai's Rockbund Art Museum (RAM).

Financed by real-estate developer ROCKBUND, RAM organised many of China's most iconic exhibitions during the 2010s, including Cai Guo-Qiang's Peasant Da Vincis (2010), a self-titled show of work by Zeng Fanzhi (2010) that featured paintings and giant mammoth tusks carved from wood, and Zhang Huan's Q Confucius (2011), which included live monkeys and a 3.8-metre-tall animatronic sculpture of the Chinese political philosopher. French curator Larys Frogier, RAM's director from 2012 to 2022, later presented standout shows by international artists such as Paola Pivi, Mark Bradford, and Ugo Rondinone.

Under Zhu-Nowell, the museum is embracing a younger generation of artists, including the growing diaspora of Chinese-identifying practitioners. In their first year in the role, Zhu-Nowell has shown works by Chinese American WangShui, Rotterdam-based Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Zurich-based American Tosh Basco, Vietnamese American Diane Severin Nguyen, Mumbai-born Singaporean Shubigi Rao, and Guangdong-based Tan Jing.

SG: Let's start in New York. The first exhibition you worked on as Assistant Curator at the Guggenheim was the blockbuster survey Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World. What do you recall about that time?

XZN: There was a lot of controversy related to that show. Xu Bing's A Case Study of Transference (1994)—a video of a live performance in which a boar stamped with made-up English words mates with a sow stamped with fake Chinese characters—was criticised on animal rights grounds. The other work that made people really angry was Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other (2003).

SG: That's another video of a live performance, this time with eight pit bulls running towards each other on treadmills. The dogs want to fight, but ultimately wear themselves out. To me, It's a brilliant work that questions how our outrage and aggression might be used against us.

XZN: People thought we were going to restage the performance. That was never the intention. It's a historical piece that happened in a particular context. Unfortunately, people had a lot of strong reactions without even seeing the show because it was in The New York Times' preview. The reaction was also racist. There's a picture of me on Guggenheim's social media, and people thought I was the artist because I was one of the few Asian faces.

SG: They thought you were Sun Yuan and Peng Yu?

XZN: They had no idea. They just assume things because you're Asian. I was attacked on social media. I got called 'communist'. I got called all kinds of words. It got so crazy.

SG: Another show you worked on at Guggenheim, which received really good press, was Wu Tsang's Anthem (2021), a 14-channel 'sonic sculptural space' that featured an 84-foot-tall projection of trans singer Beverly Glenn-Copeland. Why do you think it was so beloved?

XZN: It was one of the first shows we opened at the museum after closing down for at least a year due to Covid-19. The whole thing was commissioned and produced during the pandemic. Wu Tsang quarantined for 17 days to go to Nova Scotia to film Beverly. Wu and I were actually working on a mid-career survey but when the pandemic hit, all of a sudden things got cancelled and we had these open slots. It was a good moment coming out of the Black Lives Matters reckoning that led us to rethink what an institution could be.

SG: Speaking of institutions, what was your impression of the Rockbund Art Museum before you started working there?

XZN: It is a very important museum, and one of my favourites. I'm friends with Larys Frogier, who built a vision for the institution that I really connect with. His vision is an institution that is very invested in its connections with Asia, Southeast Asia, and younger artists' practices. That's something he did, for example, by using the Hugo Boss Asian Art Prize to shape the discourse.

SG: RAM's beautiful art deco building opened as the Royal Asiatic Society building in 1933, and your current exhibitions—Hu Yun: Mount Analogue and Shanghai Palimpsest: Restaging the R.A.S. Library (both through 25 August) delve into that history of exploration and research, which I think speaks to your curatorial approach.

XZN: There's no such thing as a pure white cube. Every site has its own politics, history, and context. So in order for me to fully act here, I need to understand what I'm dealing with. And after leaving Shanghai and finally returning, I don't really understand Shanghai anymore. I also feel like the identity of Shanghai has been diluted a lot in the past 80 or 100 years. I'm not arguing for an essentialist perspective of Shanghai, I'm actually arguing for more diverse perspectives of Shanghai. But at the same time I feel like there's a certain kind of hegemonic narration that is happening around China that is flattening everything.

SG: Is that the sort of thing you can address through RAM, or is it too politically charged?

XZN: It depends on what the goal is when talking about it. This is not an activist exercise, but rather imagining a possible future in order to make this place more habitable. It's not about changing the direction the country is going because we don't have that much power in our hands. My goal is to create a visionary company of people—like a dance company—to move forwards together.

SG: In your exhibition programming, you're trying to introduce diverse perspectives. Can you give some examples?

XZN: Last year we organised six solo shows of mostly Asian diaspora artists who self-identify as women or femme or non-binary. These artists are dear friends and I consider them my extended cosmology. So bringing them here was a way for people to understand where I come from, rather than a statement about how I see this place. The word diaspora, in Chinese li sa, was not widely known here previously, but it became a major talking point over the last year.

SG: Now you're back in China, are you still li sa?

XZN: Yes, you and I both are, because we have a hybrid reality. The term describes people dealing with different kinds of geographical and social and racial accordance that you have to negotiate in different contexts constantly. A lot of people in my generation are conditioned by that existence.

SG: What will you show at RAM next?

XZN: In the fall we have Rindon Johnson's project, in which he travels from San Francisco all the way to Shanghai. His original idea was to build a sailboat and sail from San Francisco to Shanghai via Samoa, Hawaii, New Zealand, and the Philippines. Later on we realised he likely wouldn't make it, so we decided not to make an artist die for an exhibition.

SG: There's always more artists.

XZN: Only one Rindon, then! It's going to be a mixture of actual footage and a seven-month-long live rendering replicating the exact conditions on the Pacific Ocean. The piece will be seven months long, because it would take him seven months to cross the Pacific, and it will be exhibited on floors 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 of the museum.

SG: That's a lot of time and space to devote to one show! Do you think you're sacrificing audience by prioritising emerging artists, compared to those shows by mid-career artists we've seen at RAM in the past?

XZN: Maybe we are sacrificing a bit, but it's a grassroots way of thinking about audience building. Each artist has their own community and I think that's how we want to grow our community. We have a core of people who love us and we want to make that group bigger and bigger, but it's going to take time. We're running a very independently-minded institution that operates outside of the 'system'—both the educational system in China and the market. I call it a 'resistant institution' in that way, centering, independent thinking and research. —[O]

Main image: X Zhu-Nowell. Courtesy Rockbund Art Museum.