Shanghai Picnic at Rockbund Art Museum

Who doesn’t love a picnic? If such a curmudgeon exists, I’ve yet to meet them. But not every city lends itself equally to picnicking: not all have the public spaces or cultures to enable this very particular kind of baggy, informal, convivial gathering. In Australia we maybe take it for granted – all our major cities have high picnicability. You only have to stroll through Melbourne’s Edinburgh Gardens on a Sunday to see it elevated to an artform: your languid Aperol spritz crew lying heads on laps, your card game picknickers at play, your multi-family assemblages of dogs and kids. But it’s genuinely not so easy in other places.

Take Shanghai – it’s a buttoned-up city, closely surveilled and controlled, without a lot of green space. It’s also a city on the run, in constant acceleration, people atomised on their phones, eating as they commute.

All this means that Shanghai Picnic, the theme of RAM assembles (RAMa) – the second edition of the Rockbund Art Museum’s biennial festival of architectural thinking – offers a timely and place-specific provocation. The museum opened in 2010 as a rare thing in China: a privately owned, non-profit art museum offering free entry to the public. It’s also a progressive institution operating in a context of state censorship. X Zhu-Nowell has been director and head curator since 2023. An alarmingly fashion-forward personage, able to carry off calf-length grey socks and heeled sandals under a sheer lace skirt, they are matter-of-fact about how a cutting edge art gallery negotiates operating in China. “We submit a cultural bureau application and then they look at all your work and tell you some things you can show, some things you cannot show, and we deal with it, with artists … collectively we make decisions on how we show here,” they say. “I would say it’s better than censorship that’s not clear where it comes from.”

With architecture, Zhu-Nowell notes, it tends to be easier: “There’s not really much to censor here for architecture. It’s different.” Despite intense regulation, the government has been supportive of the Shanghai Picnic interventions, in part because they’re temporary.

The theme was defined by the invited artistic directors of this year’s festival: all(zone) architects, a Bangkok-based practice known for colourful textile installations, including the 2022 Melbourne MPavilion. All(zone) is interesting, as is co-founder Rachaporn Choochuey, who articulates a philosophy of “viewing South-East Asia as … a living laboratory where strategies for a warming world are tested in real time”. The practice is also notably relaxed and joyful – especially according to the self-serious standards of the architecture profession.

The main RAMa installation is by all(zone). Under a Common Sky, Sheltered to Gather is a series of fabric canopies covering much of the art museum courtyard. The folded, draped and stitched waffle design allows airflow while providing shade for a series of platforms beneath, set at different heights to form modular stages, benches and tables. It’s a light infrastructure for performances, programs and, you guessed it, picnics. On the opening days and nights of the festival, this new urban furniture was being used exactly as the architects hoped, but even they seemed surprised at locals’ willingness to loosen up so fast. There was even dancing.

Other exhibitors were solicited through an international open call for “Asia-based” contributors, to develop “programs, objects, props, tools, and site-specific interventions”. The picnic theme doubles as a curatorial strategy – a spread of disparate tidbits laid out side by side.

Of the four selected, Alkhemist Architects’ Ways to Roam, was my favourite: a jaunty set of mobile vendor carts facilitating the preparation and sale of food and drink. Able to be brought together or pulled apart according to the occasion, each has a characteristic roof form which, when together, forms the stylised geometric silhouette of a dragon. Tangent Essays’ In Search of a Loggia was a witty allusion to Superstudio’s Continuous Monument, a gridded blue platform stepping in, out and around the edge of one of the buildings facing the plaza.

Meanwhile WWWorks’ Pipe UP! came dangerously close to gimmickry, with its souped-up drinking fountain doubling as a light feature. It was saved by the fact that the provision of public water in stonkingly hot Shanghai really does feel like an essential service, even when you fetishise the plumbing. The least successful was A Gentle Reclaim by Studio Vapore, where an installation of living – soon to be dead – moss feels more like sacrificial decoration than a meaningful commentary on the necessity of nature in dense urban contexts.

Alongside the installations, an intense program of events took place over the two weeks of the festival, all outdoors in the museum’s forecourt. This plaza has a story of its own – RAM is part of the much larger Rockbund project comprising 11 historic buildings, in what was once the European concession of central Shanghai, just north of the Bund. It’s an impressive bunch of buildings, stylistically fascinating, with elements of early 1930s neoclassical, modernist, gothic and art deco fused with Chinese motifs. Architectural style is revealed as an index of soft power, showing Shanghai’s cosmopolitanism, and its centrality to European colonial ambitions, in the interwar period.

The architectural restoration of the Rockbund district was undertaken by David Chipperfield Architects – starchitects of choice for exquisite adaptations of internationally significant heritage buildings. It has taken a staggering 18 years to complete the restoration, extension and upgrade of the district into a mixed-use cultural precinct. The final stage of the Chipperfield firm’s work, after judiciously removing a century of accretions and extensions to the buildings, was to stitch together the whole site by connecting a network of skinny cross-site lanes, and joining up separate poky rear courtyards, into a new central plaza.

Some may be sniffy at an apparent lack of intellectual complexity and ambition in this, but that kind of disciplinary pretension … is such a monumental bore.

It’s a beautiful urban room, bounded by façades and open to the sky. But this space was also in need of some intervention. It was stark – lacking shade, with nowhere to sit or dwell. Pedestrians reportedly walked in, took pictures and continued on. Both Choochuey and Zhu-Howell see the RAMa installations as prototypes – experiments they hope will be adopted permanently.

Still, does the world need another architecture festival? Some say there are too many already – hundreds if you include all the biennales and triennales. From Venice to Vienna, Tbilisi to Tallinn, São Paulo to Seoul, you could spend your whole life pinging around the globe from one to the next, scarfing free drinks and elbowing your way to the swag. Critiques tend to be savage – condemning a version of architecture completely divorced from building or indeed from reality, its language entirely arcane, the exhibitions a cacophonous mess. But biennales are also a genuinely important part of disciplinary culture, providing a unique space for the testing and sharing of ideas, the foment of global discussion and speculation, the advancement of the art. Sometimes they really can say important things, show beautiful things, raise timely questions.

In comparison with its many equivalents RAMa is small, accessible, pragmatic, joyful and has a modestly specific goal: to offer basic amenities enabling people to be together in public space, in a particular context. Some may be sniffy at an apparent lack of intellectual complexity and ambition in this, but that kind of disciplinary pretension – competing to be the most clever and disparaging, upholding the idea that architectural discourse should always be difficult, that anything accessible or pleasurable marks itself immediately as both frivolous and “feminine”  – is such a monumental bore. While still depressingly common, that line says more about the vestiges of a particular hypercritical and patriarchal disciplinary culture than the work on display. Architectural discourse too often disappears up its own fundament and RAMa is refreshing and insightful precisely because it escapes such solipsism.

There’s nothing here we haven’t seen before, many times. It’s ordinary and that’s the point – both that the ordinary can have a sacred, ritual quality in its own right, and that the everyday is the stuff of human existence. As the wise woman said, the way you spend your days is the way you spend your life. 

Naomi Stead travelled to Shanghai with the assistance of the Rockbund Art Museum.

ARTS DIARY

FESTIVAL Melbourne Fringe Festival

Venues throughout Naarm/Melbourne, September 30–October 19

THEATRE We Keep Everything

Brown’s Mart Theatre, Gulumoerrgin/Darwin, September 30–October 11

VISUAL ART Cribb Island: Brisbane’s Lost Suburb

Museum of Brisbane, Meanjin, until June 14

EXHIBITION Kyoko Hashimoto: Eight Million Deities (Yaoyorozu no Kami)

Art Gallery of South Australia, Kaurna Yarta/Adelaide, until November 2

COMEDY Plied and Prejudice

His Majesty’s Theatre, Whadjuk Noongar Country/Perth, until October 26

LAST CHANCE

THEATRE The Talented Mr Ripley

Roslyn Packer Theatre, Gadigal Country/Sydney, until September 28

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
September 27, 2025 as “Life as picnic”.

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