Rockbund Art Museum Eliminates Admission Fees, Appoints New Director At 34

(MENAFN- USA Art News) The Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) in Shanghai has eliminated its admission fees as of May 2025, a decision made under the leadership of its new artistic director, X Zhu-Nowell. Zhu-Nowell, who joined RAM in 2023 at age 34 and was named executive director and chief curator in January 2025, is the youngest director in the museum's history.

Zhu-Nowell arrived at RAM from the Guggenheim in New York, where they commissioned“ Wu Tsang: Anthem” in 2021 and contributed to the 2017 survey“ Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World.” In their first year at RAM, the museum featured six solo shows of new work by women artists from the Asian diaspora, staggered to overlap. RAM, a non-profit, non-governmental institution, opened in 2010 on the Bund in an Art Deco building originally constructed for the Royal Asiatic Society in 1933 and later restored by David Chipperfield Architects.

On October 31, coinciding with Shanghai Art Week, the museum opened three new exhibitions:“ Kit Yi Wong: BANK-A-OKE,” which transforms the main entrance into a karaoke bank, and its companion piece“ TEM-PLE-OKE.” Also on view is“ Jota Mombaça: stuck in movement (in the tide),” the Brazilian artist's first solo exhibition in Asia, presented as an opera with sound systems concealed within earthen mounds. Zhu-Nowell has also initiated projects like“ Wan Hai Hotel,” which places exhibitions inside operational hotels, and“ The Great Camouflage,” a group show from last fall exploring Afro-Asian solidarity through W.E.B. Du Bois's 1936 and 1959 visits to China.

Speaking about the institution's unique structure, Zhu-Nowell explained,“Our particular institutional structure gives us more flexibility to be more adventurous in how we curate: how we allocate resources, how we build relationships with artists over time and how far we can push the forms an exhibition can take.” They added,“We have to constantly negotiate between artistic freedom, financial sustainability and our public responsibilities. So I wouldn't describe institutional freedom as something that's automatically guaranteed by our organizational structure.”

Source: Observer Arts

MENAFN11112026005694012507ID1111949926