上海外滩美术馆 Rockbund Art Museum

“因此，超现实主义非但不抵触、削弱或转移我们对生命的革命情感，反而对其起到支撑作用。它在我们心中培育出一种急切的力量，持续不断地为这支庞大的“否定之军”注入动力。

而我也开始想到未来。”

——苏珊·塞泽尔（Suzanne Césaire）

上海外滩美术馆将呈现展览“伟大的掩饰”（ The Great Camouflage），汇集16位当代艺术家和团体，作品涵盖电影、录像、绘画、剧场、织物和及档案研究实践，探讨跨国黑人激进思想的物质与审美流通以及革命政治的边界。展览回应作家苏娜·塞泽尔维系 “否定之军”的号召，将当代艺术实践置入革命运动的遗产中考量。

加勒比作家苏珊·塞泽尔（Suzanne Césaire ，1913—1966）是本次展览的核心人物，展览的标题正源自她关于异议的论述。她的诗性创作和理论研究将超现实主义视作紧迫的艺术、智识和政治介入，探讨如何将殖民的效仿行径与和强加的西方框架重构为激进而具有解放意义的创作模式。正如塞泽尔在其重要文集《伟大的掩饰》（The Great Camouflage）中所指出的，她所属岛屿的自然美景掩饰了殖民暴力的残酷现实。本次展览的艺术家通过多样的美学劳动实践，揭示美、图像与表象如何与政治斗争及历史迁移紧密交织。如同黑人意识（Negritude）与超现实主义传统将诗歌、图像与梦境用作抵抗工具，参展艺术家亦将美学本身用作掩饰，由此唤醒、动员、并揭露权力掩盖真实的手段。

与此同时，本次展览聚焦多位黑人女性革命先驱，她们的生命轨迹在数十年间交织，构建起跨域大陆与时代的对话网络、团结形式及艺术-政治实验。其中，埃米·阿什伍德·加维（Amy Ashwood Garvey，1897—1969） 建立的泛非洲沙龙（Pan- African salons）与草根关系网是美学与政治实验的重要空间；埃斯兰达·罗伯逊（（Eslanda Robeson，1895—1965) 游走于好莱坞、外交领域与泛非网络，创作跨越国界的文化与政治作品；雪莉·格雷厄姆·杜波依斯（Shirley Graham Du Bois，1896—1977）将歌剧、电视及文化形式融入其国际主义行动；陈玉平（Grace Lee Boggs ，1915—2015）则将女性主义团结理念和基于社群的第三世界主义组织模式发扬成为关怀、知识生产与行动主义的集体形式。

这些历史人物及其精神遗产嵌入二十世纪中叶更广阔的地缘政治图景——那是一个不同发展模式在“僵持的冷战世界”中互相博弈的时代。全球非裔思想奠基人W·E·B·杜波依斯（W. E. B. Du Bois，1868—1963）曾于1959年与1962年两度造访毛泽东 （1893—1976）领导的中国。他所见证的革命图景为黑人激进主义者提供了一种“有色人种”的第三世界马克思主义范式，并让人们相信，无需等待有利的“客观条件”即可采取革命行动。此后，毛泽东领导的中国在1963年与1968年通过官方声明确立了对非裔解放斗争的支持。1959年，作家、政治家郭沫若（1892—1978）策划安排了杜波依斯与毛泽东握手的标志性照片，促成了此次会面在象征意义和实际层面的条件，这也成为关于激进团结的持续文化想象中重要的一章。与此同时，新获解放的加纳首任总统克瓦米·恩克鲁玛（Kwame Nkrumah，1909–1972）也积极推动着亚非第三世界主义团结。这些联结既彰显了国际反帝国主义事业的志愿、张力与局限，也揭示了全球父权制地缘政治压力下跨国关系网络的脆弱与坚韧。

“伟大的掩饰”聚焦影像、织物与戏剧语言，将上述探索延伸至历史与虚构交织的政治和美学领域。织物作为一种迁移物质，是媒介，也是隐喻。它既追溯全球黑人群体与亚裔激进想象的触觉印记、离散群体的劳动迁徙与团结记忆，又反思种族化与阶级化的基础设施，以及等待着这些印记的”否定之军”。正如展览标题所提示的，我们既当审视种族化生存的物质条件，亦需关注反抗知识的代际传承。

上海外滩美术馆馆长及首席策展人朱筱蕤（X Zhu-Nowell）邀请来自边缘群体与多元背景的艺术家在这场展览相聚。朱筱蕤的实践根植于海外旅行者在中国的形象。朱筱蕤与艺术家、作家坎迪斯·威廉姆斯（Kandis Williams）的密切对话促成了本场展览的成型。坎迪斯·威廉姆斯是卡珊德拉出版社创始人，致力于将当代艺术实践与激进政治遗产以及黑人女性主义思想进行互文解读。二人共同将展览构筑为一个充满张力的空间，审视帝国主义如何破坏、割裂并重构了革命进程的各个阶段。

艺术家： 博茲·迪西奧·加登（Boz Deseo Garden）、本吉·拉（Bhenji Ra）、蕾妮·格林（Renée Green）、郝敬班、郝量、奥涅卡•伊圭（Onyeka Igwe）、尤里迪斯·扎伊图纳·卡拉（Euridice Zaituna Kala）、埃里克•麦克（Eric N. Mack）、阮俊（Tuan Andrew Nguyen）、Pope.L、考琳·史密斯（Cauleen Smith）、王恬（Christine Tien Wang）、王拓、张卓加（Charlotte Zhang）、卡珊德拉出版社（Cassandra Press）和44月报。

“So, far from contradicting, diminishing, or diverting our revolutionary feeling for life, surrealism shored it up. It nourished in us an impatient strength, endlessly sustaining this massive army of negations.

And then I think also to tomorrow.”

— Suzanne Césaire

Rockbund Art Museum presents The Great Camouflage, an exhibition brings together sixteen contemporary artists and groups working across film, video, painting, and textiles, alongside archival and research-based practices, to explore the material and aesthetic circulations of transnational Black radical thought and the limits of revolutionary politics. Drawing on Suzanne Césaire’s call to sustain an “army of negations,” the exhibition situates contemporary artistic practice within the afterlives of revolutionary movements.

The Caribbean writer Suzanne Césaire (1913-1966) appears as a central figure, whose writings on dissent give the exhibition its title. Her poetic and theoretical work offered surrealism as an urgent artistic, intellectual, and political intervention. She explored how colonial mimicry and imposed Western frameworks could be reworked into radical, emancipatory modes of creation. As Césaire observes in her important essay The Great Camouflage, her island’s natural beauty camouflages its harsh realities of colonial violence. The artists in this exhibition engage in forms of aesthetic labor that reveal how beauty, image, and surface are bound to political struggle and historical displacement. Drawing from traditions of Negritude and Surrealism—where poetry, image, and dream became tools of resistance—they use aesthetics itself as camouflage: a means of circulating awareness, mobilizing influence, and uncovering what power works to conceal.

In parallel, this exhibition presents Black feminist revolutionary figures whose lives intersected across decades, creating networks of dialogue, solidarity, and artistic-political experimentation that spanned continents and generations. Amy Ashwood Garvey (1897-1969) cultivated Pan-African salons and grassroots networks that became vital spaces of aesthetic and political experimentation. Eslanda Robeson (1895-1965) navigated Hollywood, diplomatic, and Pan-African circuits, producing cultural and political work that traversed borders. Shirley Graham Du Bois (1896-1977) brought operatic, televisual, and literary forms into her internationalist activism. Grace Lee Boggs (1915–2015) extended feminist solidarity and community-based, Third Worldist organizing into collective forms of care, knowledge production, and activism.

These historical figures and their legacies are situated alongside the broader geopolitical entanglements of the mid-twentieth century, an era characterized by struggles between competing developmental models in a "stalemated Cold War world". W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), a foundational figure in global African-American thought, traveled to Mao Zedong’s (1893-1976) China in 1959 and again in 1962. Du Bois met a revolutionary horizon that offered Black radicals a "colored" or Third World, Marxist model, which inspired belief in revolutionary action without waiting for favorable "objective conditions". Mao’s China later formalized its support for the African-American struggle in statements issued in 1963 and 1968. The iconic 1959 handshake photograph of Du Bois and Mao was staged by the Chinese writer and political figure Guo Moruo (1892-1978), mediating the symbolic and material conditions of this encounter as part of an ongoing cultural imaginary of radical solidarity. Concurrently, Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), the first president of a newly liberated Ghana, cultivated Afro-Asian Third Worldist solidarities. These connections illuminate the ambitions, tensions, and limitations of international anti-Imperial projects, revealing the fragility and resilience of transnational networks under global patriarchal geopolitical pressures.

The Great Camouflage focuses on video, textile, and theatrical languages to extend these inquiries into political and aesthetic worlds—both historical and fictional. Textiles act as migratory materials, as both medium and metaphor, tracing the tactile inscription of global Black and Asian radical imaginaries, diasporic movements of labor, memory, and solidarity, while reflecting on the racialized and classed infrastructures and the “army of negations” that await these inscriptions. As the title suggests, the exhibition prompts reflection on the material conditions of racialized life and the transmission of insurgent knowledge across generations.

The exhibition emerges from X Zhu-Nowell’s curatorial invitation to center artists from marginal and diverse origins at the Rockbund Art Museum, where they are Executive Director and Chief Curator. Their tenure is marked by an immersion in the figure of the foreign traveler in China. The exhibition is developed in close intellectual and curatorial dialogue with artist and writer Kandis Williams, founder of Cassandra Press, a platform where contemporary artistic practices are read alongside the afterlives of radical politics and Black feminist thought. Together, they frame the exhibition as a space of oscillation—recognizing how revolutionary stages have been disrupted, fragmented, and reconfigured by imperialism.

Artists: Boz Deseo Garden, Bhenji Ra, Renée Green, Hao Jingban, Hao Liang, Onyeka Igwe, Euridice Zaituna Kala, Eric N. Mack, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Pope.L, Cauleen Smith, Christine Tien Wang, Wang Tuo, Charlotte Zhang, Cassandra Press, and 44 Monthly.