Learning and the Agency of the Museum System as Seen from the Shanghai Rockbund Art Museum 'Youth Palace'
The Shanghai Rockbund Art Museum presents 'Youth Palace', reinterpreting socialist-era 'Children's Palaces' through a group exhibition.Summary
The Shanghai Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) is hosting the large-scale group exhibition 'Youth Palace: or, some small acts of self-making', curated by X (Zhu Xiaorui), who is set to become the museum's artistic director in 2023 and director and chief curator in 2025. The exhibition explores the socialist-era educational institution known as the 'Children's Palace' through new commissions and reconfigured works by artists from China, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, and Italy. Originating in the Soviet Union, the 'Children's Palace' served as an extracurricular facility for children and teenagers to learn music, dance, theater, art, and science, embodying the ideal of providing cultural education to the working class while fostering collectivism, discipline, and socialist values. Rather than treating the 'Children's Palace' merely as a nostalgic object, the exhibition reconsiders it as an apparatus containing contradictions surrounding education, training, freedom, and agency. According to X, 'Youth' in this context does not refer to biological age but to 'political agency that is always in the process of becoming and changing,' a methodology for deconstructing fixed history and institutions and reopening them to process. The exhibition is conceived as a space to question the institution of the museum itself. By viewing the entire museum as a 'Children's Palace,' alongside the displays, the exhibition runs a four-month program of workshops, lectures, and performances. X seeks to explore new possibilities for thought by questioning how institutions like the 'Children's Palace,' schools, and museums have shaped people.
(Source：美術手帖)