In 2024, as part of its ongoing collaboration with the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, Roll designed the exhibition layouts for two solo shows featuring artists Hu Yun and Rindon Johnson, as well as an archival exhibition tracing the history of the Royal Asiatic Society (R.A.S.) and the legacy of the building that now houses the museum.
Hu Yun: Mount Analogue
The exhibition Hu Yun: Mount Analogue draws inspiration from René Daumal’s unfinished novel, which tells of a spiritual journey toward a mystical mountain, a symbol of transition between the material world and transcendence. Echoing this odyssey, the exhibition design resists linearity: the works, fragmented and scattered across the museum’s floors, reflect Hu Yun’s vision of history as shifting, plural, and constantly being rewritten.
Hu Yun: Mount Analogue
Tree-like forms made of stretched fabric, imagined by the artist, rise through the atrium and link the exhibition’s two levels. All the plinths and platforms were subtly designed in reference to the original woodwork details found in shelving, vitrines, and cabinets of curiosity that once filled the building when it housed the Royal Asiatic Society (R.A.S.), creating a dialogue with the exhibition Shanghai Palimpsest: Restaging the R.A.S. Library on the floor below.
Shanghai Palimpsest: Restaging the R.A.S. Library
Shanghai Palimpsest: Restaging the R.A.S. Library explores the history of the Royal Asiatic Society through the institution’s archives and the memory of the building that housed it, particularly its third floor, once described as “the most beautiful library of Oriental studies in China.” The exhibition features five key figures from the early 20th century associated with this study library. They are represented by a series of pavilions designed as lanterns, constructed from wooden studsslats and wrapped in paper, serving as both allegorical portraits and archival displays. Visitors are invited to explore these structures, discovering videos, dioramas, photographs, and period documents. The installation is further enhanced by works from artist Zhang Ruyi and a slide projection by Chen Ronghui, crafted from a collection of materials that has since been lost.
Shanghai Palimpsest: Restaging the R.A.S. Library
Best Synthetic Answer is an evolving project by American artist and poet Rindon Johnson, designed as an immersive, critical, and temporal journey. Central to the installation, a monumental LED screen displays a digital avatar of the artist swimming in real time from San Francisco to Shanghai, tracing a path marked by destructive American interventions in the Pacific. A large, modular platform invites visitors to lie down at any time of day and follow this voyage beneath a canopy imagined by the artist, transforming the atrium into an underwater landscape suspended in time.
Rindon Johnson: Best Synthetic Answer
