Youth Palace at Rockbund Art Museum Explores Socialist Pedagogy and Self-Making

The Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) in Shanghai presents "Youth Palace: or, some small acts of self-making," a group exhibition curated by X Zhu-Nowell that uses the socialist institution of the Youth Palace (Children's Palace) as a conceptual framework to examine how museums shape aesthetic knowledge and subjectivity. The show features works by over a dozen artists across five floors, including a boxing club by Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo) that repurposes physical training for self-defense against systemic violence; Ge Yulu's "Hall of the Use-Less," a collaborative installation critiquing productivity through non-productive play; Diego Marcon's video "Ludwig" (2018) depicting a solitary child singer; Nairy Baghramian's "Misfits" (2021), biomorphic sculptures that refuse to cohere; a documentation of the Hanoi Children's Palace, a site-specific project first presented at the 2024 Hanoi Creative Design Festival, including Nguyễn Trần Nam's "We Never Fell" (2010) roly-poly sculptures; and Li Ming's rope suspension bridge "The Path of the Brave" (2026) accompanied by videos with Lin Ke and Yang Junling. The exhibition runs in 2026 and asks whether a museum can tolerate opacity of meaning and lateral knowledge transmission. Louis Lu, associate editor at ArtAsiaPacific, reviewed the show.