RAS Art Focus

Integrating China's Artistic Heritage

From RAS (Royal Asiatic Society) to RAM (Rockbund Art Museum)

Sunday, 14 September 2025

2:45 pm Registration

3:00 pm to 5:00 pm

Organized and curated by Julie Chun, Art Historian and Art Focus Convener, we invite you to our new 2025-2026 series Integrating China's Artistic Heritage. The launch of this series will consist of scholarly talks, discussions and museum and gallery sessions that aim to expand our understanding of the ways in which China's rich artistic heritage is being interpreted and integrated in our present era. Building upon our 2024-2025 series that introduced thematic topics and studies in China's Arts and Aesthetics of the Past, this year's series will examine how China's legacy of artistic tradition continues to remain relevant and inspirational to current generation of artists in China and those from abroad.

We begin our series on site at the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM), which was formerly the headquarters of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. For the benefit of our new and returning members, Julie Chun will provide the historical context of the formation of the RAS as well as a brief history about the architecture. We will then be joined by Karen Wang, Curatorial Assistant & Researcher at RAM, who will guide us through the exhibitions of two highly regarded contemporary artists:

• Irena Haiduk: Nula

Irena Haaiduk is a Serbian artist, who engages the Rockbund Art Museum as a hybrid apparatus as a camera, not a passive display space but a chamber for accumulating, projecting, and transmitting images and gestures. RAM's first and second floors will serve as live production sites, with visitors witnessing and participating in the ecology of the film through layering the expected role of audience, actor, and accomplice.

• Ash Moniz: A Crack in the Shape of Light Getting In

This exhibition serves as the artist's first survey exhibition in Asia, spanning three floors of RAM and tracing a decade of research into the complex operatives embedded in supply-chain logistics. Born in Canada in 1992 and based between New York and Cairo, Moniz works across video, sculpture, performance, and installation, drawing on life in the SWANA (Southwest Asian/ North African) region, China, and Canada. The exhibition moves from the museum space that recounts labor to another realm of silence to another floor of transnational solidarity, revealing how logistical systems govern not only goods but also bodies, speech, and time.

The museum walk-through will be a combined process of knowledge-accumulation about the artists and their practices, as well as an open-ended discussion and interactive Q&A as we move through the diverse spaces of the exhibition.

Please join us as we traverse from 1857 to 2025 within this historical architecture that embodies a unique time - space continuum in Shanghai.

For more information about the exhibition, please visit: https://www.rockbundartmuseum.org​

About the Speaker:

Karen Wang is an Assistant Curator & Researcher at the Rockbund Art Museum. She curated Shanghai Palimpsest (2024) and co-curated Cici Wu: Lanterns from the Unreturned (2025) with X Zhu-Nowell. She has also contributed to solo exhibitions of Trinh T. Minh-ha, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Diane Severin Nguyen, and Shubigi Rao. Karen holds a B.A. in Art History from the University of Toronto and an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Yale University.