Rockbund Art Museum Turns Five Floors Into a Hands-On ‘Youth Palace’

The Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai presents “Youth Palace,” an immersive exhibition curated by X Zhu-Nowell that reimagines the museum as a provisional Children’s Palace. The show spans five floors and encourages visitors to set aside traditional museum etiquette and interact directly with the spaces and works on display.

Public programming includes crocheting, lettering and boxing classes, part of an artist-led curriculum designed to interrupt and subvert the usual rules of museum teaching. The exhibition is only one layer of a larger experience that draws on the cultural structures and memories of the site itself.

“Youth Palace” takes as its starting point the history of China’s Children’s Palaces, after-school institutions that for decades were a shared national experience. The first such palace opened in Shanghai in 1953, inside a mansion built by the Kadoorie family and later lost to the socialist state.

The show does not aim to evoke nostalgia for that history, nor does it seek to undo it. Instead, it treats the building’s layers of memory as material for a new kind of discovery, making the act of exploring the museum an integral part of the artwork.