SHANGHAI.- The Rockbund Art Museum announced Youth Palace: or, some small acts of self-making, a major group exhibition that transforms the museum into a provisional Children’s Palace—referencing the socialist extracurricular institutions that, beginning in China in 1953 with the Kadoorie family’s Marble Hall in Shanghai, requisitioned colonial-era estates and redistributed them to the children of workers as sites of music, dance, theatre, and technical training previously reserved for elites.

A state-led pedagogical apparatus common across socialist geographies, Children’s Palaces and their cognates were a product of international revolutionary educational theories that arose in the early 20th century. Through an invocation of what remains unfinished and unresolved in the Children’s Palace as a form, Youth Palace brings into view and questions its claim that aesthetic training, collective discipline, and organized after-school life could constitute a practice of freedom, and the failures that this claim produced.

Within the interior logics of Youth Palace, the concept of youth does not refer to biological age or status, but, as described by curator X Zhu-Nowell, “a radical figure and a methodology, a state of unmoored political subjectivity always on the cusp of becoming” that “(de)constructs the ossified structures of history and returns them to a process and a context.”

Unfolding across the entire museum, Youth Palace brings together new commissions, reconfigurations of existing works, and a re-adaptation of a project originally presented at the Hanoi Children’s Palace, alongside a four-month curriculum of artist-led workshops, sessions, and gatherings that makes the museum an active site of training, retraining, and de-training.

On the ground floor, a newly commissioned installation by Japanese-Puerto Rican (Taíno) artist Puppies Puppies / Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo converts the museum’s first-floor gallery into a participatory boxing club where audience members are invited to learn all forms of self-defense, highlighting the potentials of agency and resilience embedded in each person to protect themselves and their communities, particularly transgender and queer communities which are often structurally excluded from the protection and benefits of the state.

On the second floor, Beijing-based artist Ge Yulu has been commissioned to convene the Hall of the Use-Less, an artwork that takes the form of a social space for convivial non-productivity which stems from his embodied practice and exploration of use-less-ness as a mode of resistance against extractive, neoliberal logics of overwork. In the Hall of the Use-Less, samples of practices are gathered from across Ge’s community in a collective exercise on non-compliance with regimes of over-production as a nod to communal well-being.

On the third floor, a suite of moving image works by Italian artist and filmmaker Diego Marcon makes their Chinese premiere. Extending from his long-term explorations of structural cinema and film-making techniques, especially in relation to the formal and affective mediation of young people through cinematic forms, these works position the figure of the child as an entry point into considering how conditions of exhaustion have remain embedded within contemporary social and cultural imaginaries as a cyclical structure.

On the fourth floor, works by Iranian-German artist Nairy Baghramian and Korean filmmaker and artist Jeamin Cha situate play as a crucial choreographic register for understanding a body politics of alterity. These ideas are situated in conversation with works by Shanghai-based artist Xu Zhe and the Hanoi Children’s Palace project, a site-specific curatorial initiative originally presented as part of the 2024 Hanoi Creative Design Festival, that each reconsiders the relationship between space, body, and memory through explorations of socialist Modern architecture.

On the fifth floor, a newly commissioned installation by Hangzhou-based artist Li Ming takes the form of a suspended rope bridge over the air well between fourth and fifth floor of the museum. Inspired by the ‘Path of the Brave’, an obstacle course commonly found in the playgrounds of Children’s Palaces in China which are used to inculcate values of courage and agility, this installation is accompanied by video works collaboratively authored with fellow artists and China Academy of Art classmates Lin Ke and Yang Junling as part of an ongoing decades-spanning annual ritual to make a video documenting a non-productive day spent in each other’s presence.

Parallel to the exhibition is an artist curriculum led by invited artists and practitioners that encourages novel skills and knowledge acquisition through public programming that interrupts and subverts the programmatic conventions of museal pedagogies.

Drawing from but also reflexively subverting the post-modern impulses of institutional critique, Youth Palace is animated by a core logic that problematizes the premises and promises of the art museum as an institutional and discursive mode. By juxtaposing the museum, a bourgeois exhibitionary complex, with the Children’s Palace, an apparatus of mass education, Youth Palace proposes an alternate space and context within which a radical social potential of collective education and liberation can be rendered imaginable and enactable.

Exhibition and Curriculum Participants: Puppies Puppies / Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo; Ge Yulu; Diego Marcon; Nairy Baghramian; Jeamin Cha; Vân Đỗ, Lê Thuận Uyên, Phạm Minh Hiếu; Xu Zhe; Li Ming, Lin Ke, Yang Junling; Energy Waving Collective; Chen Qiheng, Dirty blackbbb, Rania Ho, Lin Yezi, Ou Feihong, Peng Xueying, Zhan Qi, Yong Xin, Ceb, Xiao Wu and Xiao Zhang, He Shan and JN, Zhang Jiuwo; Đỗ Văn Hoàng, Gian Giữa, Châu Hoàng, Lê Xuân Tiến, Nguyễn Hoàng Thiên Ngân, Nguyễn Trần Nam, Nguyễn Huy An, Như Lộc

“Youth Palace is like a child who, handed a toy, refuses to “fit it together perfectly” according to the instruction sheet, choosing instead to take it apart, to embrace error and the “misfit.” These gestures may appear minor; but when they occur on a body shaped at once by colonial history, the logic of capital, and the machinery of the state, that very smallness is the most explosive political register they possess.” —X Zhu-Nowell