{"id":172043,"date":"2025-09-27T05:14:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-27T05:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/172043\/"},"modified":"2025-09-27T05:14:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-27T05:14:09","slug":"shanghai-picnic-at-rockbund-art-museum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/172043\/","title":{"rendered":"Shanghai Picnic at Rockbund Art Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"

Who doesn\u2019t love a picnic? If such a curmudgeon exists, I\u2019ve 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 \u2013 all our major cities have high picnicability. You only have to stroll through Melbourne\u2019s 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\u2019s genuinely not so easy in other places.<\/p>\n

Take Shanghai \u2013 it\u2019s a buttoned-up city, closely surveilled and controlled, without a lot of green space. It\u2019s also a city on the run, in constant acceleration, people atomised on their phones, eating as they commute.<\/p>\n

All this means that Shanghai Picnic, the theme of RAM assembles (RAMa) \u2013 the\u00a0second edition of the Rockbund Art Museum\u2019s biennial festival of architectural thinking \u2013 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\u2019s\u00a0also a progressive institution operating in\u00a0a\u00a0context 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\u00a0cutting edge art gallery negotiates operating in China. \u201cWe 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 \u2026 collectively we make decisions on how we show here,\u201d they say. \u201cI would say it\u2019s better than censorship that\u2019s not clear where it comes from.\u201d<\/p>\n

With architecture, Zhu-Nowell notes, it\u00a0tends to be easier: \u201cThere\u2019s not really much to censor here for architecture. It\u2019s different.\u201d Despite intense regulation, the government has been supportive of the Shanghai Picnic interventions, in part because they\u2019re temporary.<\/p>\n

The theme was defined by the invited artistic directors of this year\u2019s 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 \u201cviewing South-East Asia as \u2026 a living laboratory where strategies for a warming world are tested in real time\u201d. The practice is also notably relaxed and joyful \u2013 especially according to the self-serious standards of the architecture profession.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019 willingness to loosen up so fast. There was even dancing.<\/p>\n

Other exhibitors were solicited through an international open call for \u201cAsia-based\u201d contributors, to develop \u201cprograms, objects, props, tools, and site-specific interventions\u201d. The picnic theme doubles as a curatorial strategy \u2013 a spread of disparate tidbits laid out side by side.<\/p>\n

Of the four selected, Alkhemist Architects\u2019 Ways to Roam, was my favourite: a\u00a0jaunty 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\u2019 In Search of a Loggia was a witty allusion to Superstudio\u2019s Continuous Monument, a gridded blue platform stepping in, out and around the edge\u00a0of one of the buildings facing the plaza.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile WWWorks\u2019 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 \u2013 soon to be dead \u2013 moss feels more like sacrificial decoration than a meaningful commentary on the necessity of nature in dense urban contexts.<\/p>\n

Alongside the installations, an intense program of events took place over the two weeks of the festival, all outdoors in the museum\u2019s forecourt. This plaza has a story of its own \u2013 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\u2019s 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\u2019s cosmopolitanism, and its centrality to European colonial ambitions, in the interwar period.<\/p>\n

The architectural restoration of the Rockbund district was undertaken by David Chipperfield Architects \u2013 starchitects of choice for exquisite adaptations of internationally significant heritage buildings. It has taken a staggering 18\u00a0years to complete the restoration, extension and upgrade of the district into a mixed-use cultural precinct. The final stage of the Chipperfield firm\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Some may be sniffy at an apparent lack of intellectual complexity and ambition in this, but that kind of disciplinary pretension \u2026 is such\u00a0a\u00a0monumental bore.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a beautiful urban room, bounded by fa\u00e7ades and open to the sky. But this space was also in need of some intervention. It was stark \u2013 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 \u2013 experiments they hope will be adopted permanently.<\/p>\n

Still, does the world need another architecture festival? Some say there are too many already \u2013 hundreds if you include all the biennales and triennales. From Venice to Vienna, Tbilisi to Tallinn, S\u00e3o 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 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 \u201cfeminine\u201d\u00a0 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing here we haven\u2019t seen before, many times. It\u2019s ordinary and that\u2019s the point \u2013 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Naomi Stead travelled to Shanghai with the assistance of the Rockbund Art Museum.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

ARTS DIARY<\/p>\n

FESTIVAL Melbourne Fringe Festival<\/a><\/p>\n

Venues throughout Naarm\/Melbourne, September 30\u2013October 19<\/p>\n

THEATRE We Keep Everything<\/a><\/p>\n

Brown\u2019s Mart Theatre, Gulumoerrgin\/Darwin, September 30\u2013October 11<\/p>\n

VISUAL ART Cribb Island: Brisbane\u2019s Lost Suburb<\/a><\/p>\n

Museum of Brisbane, Meanjin, until June 14<\/p>\n

EXHIBITION Kyoko Hashimoto: Eight Million Deities (Yaoyorozu no Kami)<\/a><\/p>\n

Art Gallery of South Australia, Kaurna Yarta\/Adelaide, until November 2<\/p>\n

COMEDY Plied and Prejudice<\/a><\/p>\n

His Majesty\u2019s Theatre, Whadjuk Noongar Country\/Perth, until October 26<\/p>\n

LAST CHANCE<\/p>\n

THEATRE The Talented Mr Ripley<\/a><\/p>\n

Roslyn Packer Theatre, Gadigal Country\/Sydney, until September 28<\/p>\n

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

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