X ZHU-NOWELL was appointed executive director and chief curator of Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) in January 2025, after serving as its artistic director since 2023. From 2014 to 2021, they were an assistant curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where they commissioned “Wu Tsang: Anthem,” 2021, and contributed to exhibitions such as “Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World,” 2017–18. Their curatorial practice centers on questions of geography, migration, and alternative institutional models—an approach that shapes RAM’s current trajectory, including the multiyear initiative “Complex Geo-graphies,” encompassing publications, public programs, and exhibitions such as “Rindon Johnson: Best Synthetic Answer,” 2024, and “Wan Hai Hotel,” 2024–26. Their most recent project, “The Great Camouflage,” cocurated with Kandis Williams (Cassandra Press), is on view at RAM through April 26, 2026.

Related

HOW WOULD YOU DEFINE CURATING? ** Now more than ever, it concerns relational authorship: deciding whereto act, with whom, and in whose service. To curate is to actively determine how to situate oneself within a historical, institutional, and political field.

**WHAT WAS THE LAST SHOW YOU TRAVELED TO SEE? ** When I was in Beijing recently, I saw the inaugural exhibition at Dazheng’s, which is both an exhibition space and the former home of Wang Dazheng, a local villager and educator. Her parents built the residence themselves in a courtyard in Luogezhuang Village, Shunyi District, in 1999. Several long-term tenants—mostly migrant workers—still live in the courtyard today. The exhibition tells the story of Wang Dazheng, her sister Wang Zifei, and their parents Wang Furong and Wang Xinglin. None of them had any formal art training; each made work from their own lived experiences in a variety of media, including video, wall painting, and installation.

I also visited the group exhibition “Les nourritures terrestres” (Fruits of the Earth, 2025) at Outsider Art Space. Founded during the pandemic by artist Chu Yun and curator Ding Ding, the gallery currently occupies a small three-story town house in a residential compound. Visitors enter through an inconspicuous door from the parking garage. Much like André Gide’s lyrical prose poem “Les nourritures terrestres,” 1897, from which the show takes its title, the exhibition reflects the artists’ relationships to their life at a specific moment in time. Each of them has, at times, continued to make work while stepping away from the art world or simply choosing to live outside its dominant rhythms.

**WHAT UPCOMING EXHIBITION (BESIDES YOURS) ARE YOU MOST EXCITED ABOUT? **

I’m always excited about what my friends are creating. Right now, that includes the current edition of the experimental performance triennial “Ghost” in Bangkok, initiated by Korakrit Arunanondchai. This year’s edition is called “2568: Wish We Were Here” and is curated by Amal Khalaf with Arunanondchai, Christina Li, and Pongsakorn Yananissorn. I also am looking forward to WangShui’s intervention at Fondazione Iris; Theatre Picasso at Tate Modern, staged by Wu Tsang, Enrique Fuenteblanca, and Lucie Rebeyrol; and the Venice Biennale in 2026, curated by Koyo Kouoh—I miss her presence in this world, tremendously.

**WHAT IS ONE SHOW THAT HAD A BIG INFLUENCE ON YOU? ** “Art for Sale” (1999), was an artist-instigated exhibition staged in one of Shanghai’s early shopping malls, partially operating as a functioning “art supermarket.” For several days, artists sold their own designed “products” directly to the public, enticing visitors into a back room where installations, videos, and performative works were on view. This landmark event became one of the most significant exhibitions in the formative years of Shanghai’s experimental art scene in the 1990s—a moment when the first waves of consumer capitalism were reshaping everyday life in the city. Although the police shut it down after just three days, it remains a striking example of how artists turned the logic of consumerism on its head.

**WHAT IS THE BEST PIECE OF CRITICISM YOU’VE READ RECENTLY? ** I return to Irena Haiduk’s essay “Against Biography,” 2013, again and again because it puts into words something I felt but hadn’t been able to articulate: that the dominant frameworks through which artists—especially those from “elsewhere”—are made legible to the West are fundamentally violent. Haiduk exposes how biography becomes a kind of colonial currency, a fixed narrative that first-world art institutions assimilate into an asset market. She shows how “identity” can be a trap—packaged, circulated, consumed. What stays with me most is her notion of the “impostor”—the figure who deserts visibility, who crosses over and becomes permanently “blind.”

IS THERE A PARTICULAR IDEA THAT IS INSPIRING YOUR WORK NOW? Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about forms and how they structure reality, power, and our sense of what’s possible. Forms organize life, and they’re always overlapping and colliding. No single form dominates, which means there is always some instability or excess in the system. I find that useful when thinking about institutions: They’re not just structures but sets of forms that can be bent, rerouted, or made to contradict themselves. I have been reading J. Kameron Carter, especially his thinking with Sylvia Wynter and Charles Long. There is a line of thought I’m trying to follow around the ellipse and the ellipsis. An ellipse describes a trajectory that is always in motion yet still bound to a gravitational relationship; the ellipsis evokes a similar sense of continuous movement, incompleteness, and a refusal of closure—a space where meaning, power, and form are always in flux. Can an art institution operate in an elliptical orbit? Meaning, instead of being a fixed center of power, could it move through multiple gravitational pulls—economic, political, cultural—without being captured by any of them? Could it be a place that produces meaning and relation without closure, that holds space for myth, for refusal, for “black light” in the moment of an eclipse?

WHAT DO YOU THINK IS THE MOST IMPORTANT CONVERSATION HAPPENING NOW WITHIN THE CURATORIAL FIELD OR IN THE ARTS MORE BROADLY? One theme that has been coming up a lot in my conversations, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the refunctioning—or, more precisely, the rescripting—of institutions. Not just in terms of content, but at the level of structure, form, and even attitude. Can art institutions function as spaces to prototype new, more just power structures and economies? Can we build and hold space for forms of life, thought, and relations that resist capture?

WHAT DO YOU WISH PEOPLE BETTER UNDERSTOOD ABOUT CURATING? Curating should not be a managerial job with a window seat, nor is it about reinforcing possessive individualism. It’s about sitting within an entangled social field.

WHAT PIECE OF ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE TO AN ASPIRING CURATOR? Know your forms; play by your own rules; traverse boundaries; and build real, reciprocal alliances.

WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING A CURATOR CAN DO FOR AN ARTIST? Create the conditions in which artists can act, especially to voice contradictions. Lately I’ve been thinking more about trust and consent. Not the way they are used in corporate-speak, but something deeper—the kind of trust that’s unwavering and maybe even a little irrational. I’m talking about an all-encompassing trust that is not about agreeing with everything, but about standing beside the artist, especially when things feel uncertain.