A Show About Afro-Asian Exchange Explores Vital Solidarities

In an iconic snapshot of the pair, Mao Zedong and W.E.B. Du Bois laugh together like schoolboys. Taken during Du Bois’s 1959 tour of China, it illustrates the enthusiasm for Afro-Asian exchange that animated mid-20th-century revolutionary discourse. However, the wall-mounted timeline of the era in ‘The Great Camouflage’, at Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum, also carves out space for undersung feminist pillars of Afro-Asian discourse, like the writer, composer and activist Shirley Graham Du Bois. In doing so, curators Kandis Williams and X Zhu-Nowell topple the monumental nostalgias that define both political and art-world remembrance of the era. Their bold commentary on the history and afterlives of Afro-Asian exchange stages a reckoning with the shortcomings of solidarity and the variability of the stakes at play.

But what are these stakes? The exhibition opens with a subtle exchange. Chinese painter Hao Liang’s The Epitaph of Phaéthōn (2025), a portrait of the sun god Helios’s ill-fated son, allegorizes Chinese revolutionary aspiration. On the floor beside it is American artist Boz Deseo Garden’s après-coup 2 of 1,400 (2025), a sculpture comprising casts of two iron bars once used in slave ships to offset the lightness of the human cargo. In conversation, the works anchor the incandescent spirit behind revolutionary communism to parallel histories of revolutionary Blackness. Both pieces seem to assess the weight of something thwarted. However, Garden’s reflection on the burden that Black radicalism sought to shift grounds the show in an overarching consideration of the load that Black people still shoulder. It is in this direction that the scale of the exhibition tips. A distinct feeling emerges that, at its heart, this is a conversation about Blackness and the Black position in Afro-Asian exchange.

Accordingly, this show refuses the gung-ho optimism that colours much discourse on the subject; the exhibition’s itch to reality-check is palpable. The most powerful gestures direct attention to the human shortcomings that undermine true solidarity. Hao Jingban’s Opus One (2020) is a film that sticks uncomfortably in the exhibition’s craw. It follows two Beijing dancers as they obsessively work to nail the swing dances of 1930s Harlem. The film explores how and why people rush to throw themselves into gestures that originate outside their own context, ultimately demonstrating how such processes sever Black people from their own cultural and political histories. In a moment of sheepish self-awareness, Hao’s subjects ask how Black folk from back in the day might feel about this interpretation of their cultural legacy. But what about Black folks now?

An installation devoted to Williams’s Cassandra Press picks up the query. Working to retrieve Black radical thought from the domain of deified historical figures and institutional canonization, Cassandra Press publishes ‘lo-fi’ zines of experimental theory and readers, here presented on their signature slanted bookcase. These books are the cornerstones of a larger initiative inviting incarcerated people, community organizers and schoolchildren into the conversation about the cultural and intellectual heritage of Blackness.

Indeed, the exhibition is a stage for a chorus of conversations. We hear a tone of frustration, but also the conciliatory and hopeful voice that answers it – like a comrade soothing a disheartened revolutionary. Amid this tapestry of dialogues, it’s no wonder that the show embraces the spirit of theatricality to make its most rousing points. British artist Onyeka Igwe’s film A Radical Duet (2023) fictionalizes an intergenerational encounter between two anticolonial, women activists. In a meeting full of men, Igwe’s protagonist, Sylvie (after the Jamaican dramatist and scholar Sylvia Wynter), pleads with the room to recognize the power of a play to reimagine the world anew. It is a long, heart-wrenching beat as she turns from face to face, begging someone to write with her. Only auntie agrees. It is the poignant heart of a show that puts its faith in overlooked heroines to redefine vital solidarities.

‘The Great Camouflage’ is on view at the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai until 26 April 2026

^{Main image: ‘The Great Camouflage’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: © Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; photograph: Ling}