Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) Shanghai announces its 2025 program, celebrating the museum’s 15th anniversary. This landmark year features six exhibitions–including the first exhibition in Asia of the American artist Barbara Chase-Riboud–and a series of critical public programs that address issues of transnational solidarity from the perspective of Shanghai. The 2025 program centers on deep engagements with six artists: Irena Haiduk, Cici Wu, Ash Moniz, Peng Zuqiang, Barbara Chase-Riboud, and Kandis Williams. With solo exhibitions featuring newly commissioned works and Asia premiers, the program is divided into two seasons: spring and fall.
Established in 2010, RAM has been a beacon for contemporary art in the region since its founding, championing experimental practices and marginalized perspectives. As a “resistant institution,” it works with artists to reshape local histories while responding to global challenges. To mark its 15th anniversary, RAM will offer free public admission from May 2 to enhance accessibility and welcome broader audiences. RAM will also unveil a new public art library, offering a curated collection of rare books, contemporary art magazines, exhibition catalogues, publications, archives, and primary resources for art research – materials difficult to access in the city.
X Zhu-Nowell RAM’s Executive Director and Chief Curator comments: “Art institutions remain one of the few places where the improbable is possible, a space where alternatives can still be imagined and built. Over the past few years, we have engaged in probing conversations with the artists in our program about political ideologies and movements, such as different forms of Communism, internationalism, and solidarity formations. This dialogue has led us to ask: How do histories of collapse shape our present? What does disintegration make possible that stability does not? What new structures can emerge from the ruins?”
Irena Haiduk: Nula
May 2, 2025–February 8, 2026
Irena Haiduk (1982, Belgrade) will transform RAM into an immersive film set, casting visitors as actors in the artist’s debut feature film, which she will shoot throughout the exhibition. Set in 1990s Yugoslavia, the film draws from Haiduk’s own life, capturing a society unraveling, as civil war and international sanctions ignite a catastrophic freefall of value.
Cici Wu: Lanterns from the Unreturned (working title)
May 2–September 28, 2025
The first institutional solo exhibition of Cici Wu (1989, Beijing), this exhibition includes new and existing works and surveys Wu’s use of paper lanterns as a form of “proto-cinema”, invoking ways of seeing that foreground light and shadow as elemental to visual storytelling. Wu has created a site-specific commission for RAM’s East Staircase, a space embodying the building’s layered history. Through this project, alternative histories of the Cultural Revolution emerge – a story of erasure and survival—where enforced silence becomes a catalyst for unforeseen possibilities and new forms of remembrance and transmission.
Ash Moniz: A Crack in the Shape of Light Getting In (working title)
May 2–September 28, 2025
Ash Moniz (b. 1992, Wawa, Canada) is an artist, activist, and musician whose decade-long research interrogates the structural violence embedded within global supply-chain logistics. Their practice examines how representations of lost time are instrumentalized in labor management while simultaneously offering a means for workers’ resistance. This exhibition, spanning three floors, explores the overlooked voids, silences, and absences within supply chains—gaps that not only structure economic flows but also hold the potential for political rupture. Through installations, sculptures, and video works, Moniz reclaims these spaces of disappearance, reframing them as sites of negotiation, solidarity, and speculative reimagination.
Peng Zuqiang: Afternoon Histories
October 31, 2025–February 8, 2026
The exhibition of Peng Zuqiang (1992, Changsha, China) revolves around a newly commissioned multi-channel video installation that explores a little-known 8.75mm propaganda film from the Maoist era, unfolding through investigations into mnemonics that resist being remembered, recorded, or circulated. Through three semi-fictional narratives, the artist reimagines the transformation of such film into cinema.
Barbara Chase-Riboud returns to China
October 31, 2025–February 8, 2026
The first exhibition of Barbara Chase-Riboud (b.1939, Philadelphia) in Asia proposes a reassessment of her legacy beyond national or disciplinary boundaries, engaging with the broader discourse of transnational modernism and postcolonial exchange. An internationally celebrated sculptor, novelist, and poet, Chase-Riboud is renowned for her radical fusing of cast bronze or aluminum with supple materials like wool and silk. This exhibition foregrounds her 1965 journey to China, on which she accompanied her husband, the renowned French photographer Marc Riboud, re-examining how this encounter with a revolutionary political landscape, Buddhist sculpture and Chinese craftsmanship reshaped the Black American artist’s conceptual and material strategies. The exhibition will present some of her most iconic works, alongside unpublished poetry and archival materials.
Messy Things: A Think Bank at RAM
A project by Cassandra Press and X Zhu-Nowell
Spring 2025–Spring 2026
Messy Things: A Think Bank at RAM is a year-long research initiative that unfolds through online talks, a digital archive, research trips, a summer conference in Shanghai, and sculptural and performative interventions in the fall. Conceived in parallel with Barbara Chase-Riboud returns to China, the project explores Black Marxist traditions and Afro-Asian solidarity, centering on radical thinkers, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, who visited Maoist China in search of alternative political and aesthetic futures.
About Rockbund Art Museum
Inaugurated in 2010, the Rockbund Art Museum is a non-profit arts organization located in Bund, Shanghai. The historical architecture hosting the museum, characterized by its Art Deco design, was operated as the first natural history museum in China. Rockbund Art Museum is developing an oceanic vision of contemporary art. By supporting bold contemporary art practices, we aim to continually remake local histories, whilst also responding to global art challenges and social mutations.
International press
Sarah Greenberg, Evergreen Arts: sgreenberg@evergreen-arts.com / For images: ppanagopoulos@evergreen-arts.com
Chinese press
Natalie Niu, Communication Manager, Rockbund Art Museum, natalie.niu@rockbundartmuseum.org