The best way I can describe walking through Youth Palace, at Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, is that it felt less like touring an exhibition and more like exploring a building for the first time as a kid—the kind of exploring where you don’t yet know which doors you’re allowed through, so you just try all of them. The visit starts on the ground floor, where Puppies Puppies, the Japanese-Puerto Rican Taíno artist Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo, has converted the museum lobby into Defense, a working self-defense gym. Moving up, you get to Diego Marcon’s suite of video works, including Ludwig, an unsettling piece with a digital child singing alone in Latin, then past the fourth floor, where Nairy Baghramian and Jeamin Cha treat the act of play as a kind of choreography, before ending on the fifth, where you walk across a rope bridge that Hangzhou artist Li Ming has strung over the museum’s air well. It’s modeled on the “Path of the Brave,” an obstacle course once built into actual Chinese Children’s Palaces to test kids’ nerve.

It takes some time to distance yourself from the traditional idea of a museum, where you watch without touching, and let yourself interact more with the work, but that hesitation is probably also part of the “training” this modern Children’s Palace is giving its visitors.

The exhibition is really just one layer of a bigger, more immersive experience. What’s just as interesting is how it pulls the cultural structures and memories of the site itself into the museum, which means you can’t really get the show without learning about Children’s Palaces, something that, for decades, was a shared national experience in China. The first one opened in Shanghai in 1953, inside a mansion the Kadoorie family had built and lost to the new socialist state. It was handed over to the children of factory workers, a place to learn music, dance, and craft that had, until then, belonged to the colonial and merchant elite.

But what I felt walking through Youth Palace wasn’t nostalgia for that history. It isn’t really about undoing it, either. Turning the museum into a provisional Children’s Palace comes with a full artist-led curriculum: public programming like crocheting, lettering, and boxing classes that interrupt and subvert the usual rules of museum teaching. The point is to build a space of “counter-formation,” one that rethinks the relationship between space, body, and memory through a new lens.

These are just some of the topics I discussed directly with the curator, X Zhu-Nowell, Executive Director and Chief Curator of Rockbund.

RADII/Emma Drocco: The idea of an experience that asks visitors to use their body instead of their eyes, to punch, kick, climb, sit around, clashes with the usual museum requirements of safety, no-touch, and supervision. How do those two things actually manage to coexist in this show?

X: This tension lies at the heart of Youth Palace. While museums traditionally organize encounters via the gesture of looking, visitors observe, interpret, and maintain a certain distance, we wanted to shift the museum toward participation and embodied knowledge through the form of the exhibition instead. To this end, we removed much of the conventional didactic system commonly found in museums and exhibitions, such as long wall texts and extended labels, and opted for in-person instruction. What this revealed, however, was that removing these systems does not remove the rules already lodged in the visitors’ bodies. This exhibition creates situations in which bodies must negotiate inherited structures, limits, and one another. This allows us to ask: What kinds of bodies, behaviors, and relations does a particular arrangement make possible?

A Children’s Palace sent kids home with an actual skill; you could play the accordion or use a lathe. A museum sends people home with an experience. Do you think autonomy needs a skill attached to it, or is that the part worth letting go of?

I am not sure I would separate skill from experience so quickly. I think the more interesting question is: What do we recognize as a skill? The Children’s Palace taught very tangible things: music, craftsmanship, and technical knowledge. Youth Palace asks whether other capacities might also be understood as skills: listening, collaborating, adapting, negotiating, resisting, or becoming attentive to situations that do not have predetermined outcomes.

Throughout the process of conversing and discussing with artists while making the show, I have consistently observed a capacity for building counter-formations. I would argue that this is a very important skill for developing capacities associated with autonomy.

The four-month curriculum is short compared to the years someone spent in one of these places. Can something like de-training happen on an exhibition schedule, or is the show more of a proposal for it?

Obviously, four months cannot undo years of education, socialization, and institutional conditioning, and I do not think a complete “de-training” would even be desirable; I am much more interested in making our training perceptible. Many of the behaviors that organize everyday life no longer feel like training because they have become habits: how we move through institutions, how we respond to authority, how we understand productivity, and even how we imagine learning should look. Although I am deeply interested and invested in the history of alternative pedagogies, Youth Palace is not a project about that. It is intended to create temporary situations during which familiar arrangements can first be recognized and then put to different uses. How might the structures that formed us also become materials for our transformation?

Plenty of visitors, me included, never set foot in a Children’s Palace. What do you want the show to give someone who arrives without that memory to lose?

The Children’s Palace is a historical point of departure. As this is a show made in Shanghai, my primary interest is to reterritorialize the site by bringing the cultural structures and memories of this place into new relations. Although I can imagine that many members of our audience, across different generations, will have some connections to a Children’s Palace, this personal experience is not essential. What matters is that, in a city where these educational histories exist, we cannot imagine or practice the museum simply as has been done in a Western context. I hope audiences understand that while they have entered a space of contemporary art, this space is not neutral in relation to its infrastructural history, and therefore cannot be the same across different geographies.

All of us have been trained by institutions, schools, families, and workplaces, but also increasingly by interfaces, platforms, algorithms, and images. I hope the exhibition can transmit an attitude of counter-formation: a recognition that the ways through which we have been formed are not necessarily the only ways we can be. That is also why “youth” here is not really an age category. I think of it as a condition of remaining unfinished, a capacity to encounter the structures that have shaped us, without assuming that they have already determined what we can and will become.

Youth Palace runs till September 20 at Rockbund Art Museum, 20 Huqiu Rd, Waitan, Huangpu, Shanghai.

All images via Rockbund Art Museum.