"The Great Camouflage" at the Rockbund Museum of Art (RAM) in Shanghai, curated by X Zhu-Nowell and Kandis Williams, is a multilevel exhibition that responds to global political and social exhaustion. Anchored in Black feminist thought and taking Suzanne Césaire's writings as a starting point, the show revisits revolutionary attitudes and builds new networks of solidarity across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, deliberately decentering Euro-American narratives. It features works by artists including Christine Tien Wang, Hao Jingban, and Wang Tuo, and highlights figures such as Amy Ashwood Garvey, Eslanda Robeson, Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Grace Lee Boggs.
The exhibition matters because it confronts anti-Blackness and revolutionary histories within China's specific sociopolitical landscape, navigating censorship while creating a space for transnational dialogue. By centering Black feminist perspectives and overlooked genealogies of revolutionary praxis, the show challenges dominant historical narratives and aims to generate a new public for critical conversations about race, solidarity, and imperialism in a contemporary Chinese art context.