Rockbund Art Museum’s “The Great Camouflage” Reframes Afro-Asian Solidarity Through Black Feminist Histories
A single image sits quietly behind one of Shanghai’s most intellectually ambitious exhibitions this season: a well-known photograph of W.E.B. Du Bois and Mao Zedong, both beaming, impeccably dressed, and seemingly buoyed by the promise of political alignment. That photograph, and the 20th-century Afro-Asian alliances it has come to symbolize, helped spark “The Great Camouflage,” now on view at the Rockbund Art Museum through April 26.
Co-curators X Zhu-Nowell and Kandis Williams began with a shared preoccupation: the overlapping revolutionary histories that linked anti-imperialist movements across continents, and the ways Marxist thought circulated through struggles against racial capitalism. Those concerns remain central to the exhibition. But as the project developed, the curators’ research kept returning to a different kind of absence: the women whose intellectual and cultural labor was frequently eclipsed by the men around them.
The show brings forward figures including Shirley Du Bois, Eslanda Robeson, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Suzanne Césaire, and Grace Lee Boggs. Many are remembered primarily through their proximity to famous husbands or male comrades, yet their own work shaped the texture of political life. They were activists, but also cultural producers: Shirley Du Bois and Amy Ashwood Garvey wrote plays; Eslanda Robeson performed as an actress; Suzanne Césaire and Grace Lee Boggs worked as writers. Their attention was not limited to how revolutionary ideas become speeches, platforms, or policy. It extended to how those ideas are inhabited — felt in domestic spaces, relationships, and the daily negotiations that make movements possible.
Named after a text by Suzanne Césaire, “The Great Camouflage” is not organized as a didactic display of archival artifacts. Instead, it uses contemporary art to process revolutionary histories, often through explicitly feminist lenses. In this framing, revolution is stripped of its familiar heroic posture. The exhibition’s works repeatedly trade monumentality for vulnerability, and certainty for contradiction.
Near the entrance, American artist Pope.L (1955–2023) appears in a deliberately destabilizing key. His sculpture “Du Bois Machine” (2013) presents a body reduced to upside-down, flailing legs — an anti-monument that refuses stoicism. The work’s most disquieting turn is sonic: a little girl’s voice issues from a speaker placed at the figure’s groin, recounting a real episode from the late 1990s, when Pope.L received an envelope containing hair, skin, and dirt said to have belonged to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The story lands as both relic-like and repellent, collapsing reverence into something stranger and more bodily.
As visitors climb the museum’s five floors, the exhibition’s argument sharpens. A video by Tuan Andrew Nguyen introduces another set of entanglements, tracing the lives of Senegalese soldiers stationed in Vietnam by French colonial forces in 1954 — a moment when Vietnam was fighting for independence while Senegal remained under French rule. The film follows what happened when some soldiers married Vietnamese women and had children, only to abandon them or bring them to Senegal, where racial and cultural conflict often followed. The narrative underscores a recurring theme: imperial power can generate solidarities by producing a shared enemy, while also engineering divisions when alliances become too strong.
The show’s structure is cumulative, designed to be experienced before it is fully explained. At the top level, a timeline maps major events in Afro-Asian revolutionary politics with women’s work foregrounded. It includes what one caption calls “kitchen politics,” illustrated by a photograph of Jimmy Boggs, Grace Lee Boggs, and Ted Griffin in conversation at a table — a reminder that political strategy is often forged in ordinary settings. The timeline also points to more public flashpoints, including Paul Robeson’s 1956 testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the first Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference in 1957.
The exhibition’s tensions — between activism and art, thinking and feeling, grand gestures and everyday care — come into direct focus in a two-channel video installation by Onyeka Igwe. One screen stages a table conversation featuring characters based on Sylvia Wynter, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, and C.L.R. James. The other follows the screenwriters as they argue over how to tell their historical fiction: how the story should read, and how events actually unfolded. The doubled structure makes the exhibition’s larger point legible: history is not only what happened, but also how it is narrated, revised, and lived.
In “The Great Camouflage,” Afro-Asian solidarity is neither romanticized nor reduced to slogans. Instead, it is treated as a field of competing pressures — ideological, intimate, and institutional — where women’s labor has too often been rendered peripheral. By placing Black feminist thought at the center, the exhibition asks viewers to reconsider what counts as revolutionary action, and where it takes place.
“The Great Camouflage” is on view at the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, through April 26.
