In 2023, Roll began its collaboration with the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai by designing a series of six solo exhibitions dedicated to the artists WangShui, Tosh Basco, Diane Severin Nguyen, Shubigi Rao, Tan Jing, and Evelyn Taocheng Wang.
WangShui: poiesis
For WangShui’s first museum exhibition, titled poiesis, we collaborated with the New York-based artist to design an architectural intervention spanning two floors. This dreamlike chamber is constructed from a multilayered semi-translucent fabric that captures and reflects both interior and exterior light, evoking a state of transition and liminality.
WangShui: poiesis
No Sky is the first museum exhibition of Tosh Basco, a Filipino-American artist known for their performances and research on movement across various mediums.
Tosh Basco: No Sky
The exhibition transforms the fourth-floor gallery of the RAM into a blue stage, evoking both the performance space and the artist’s studio. In a scenography that echoes the famous glass easels designed by Lina Bo Bardi for the Museu de Arte de São Paulo in 1968, the works are displayed in an open space without partitions or a fixed route. They can be viewed from multiple perspectives, freed from any predefined narrative or hierarchy. These glass installations reinforce the performative aspect of Basco’s work, emphasizing the instability of viewpoints and the presence of the body in space.
Tosh Basco: No Sky
Known for her kaleidoscopic approach to photography, cinema, and installation, Diane Severin Nguyen presents In Her Time, a commissioned work and her first feature film. The film is projected in a space draped with curtains made of torn pink silk strips. Three beds covered with satin sheets, placed directly on a red tiled floor, welcome visitors and introduce an incongruous intimate dimension within the gallery. The glossy floor acts as a mirror surface, extending and doubling the projected image.
Diane Severin Nguyen: In Her Time
Shubigi Rao: These Petrified Paths is the artist’s first retrospective in China, centered around a film intertwining Armenian narratives, memory, and the transmission of knowledge. The exhibition, conceived as a layering of symbolic spaces, explores the connections between marginal storytelling, forgotten knowledge, and energy infrastructures. Through immersive installations, it questions the foundations of knowledge and how the margins can offer paths of resistance and renewal.
Shubigi Rao: These Petrified Paths
Inlet of Arid Dreams is the first institutional exhibition by Tan Jing, a Shenzhen-based artist known for her sculptures and installations that blend organic materials, folk narratives, and personal memory. Presented on the museum’s second floor, the exhibition explores the links between reality and fiction through sensory works where scent interacts with visuals. Visitors are invited to experience a new four-channel video installation, Nook of a Hazy Dream, projected onto textured and frosted glass screens distributed throughout the space, designed as windows opening onto a dreamlike landscape. The floor is covered with tiles whose gradual fragmentation, activated by visitors’ footsteps, releases a scent evoking Southeast Asian cuisine, enveloping the gallery in a familiar and immersive fragrance.
Tan Jing: Inlet of Arid Dreams
An Equivocal Contrast marks the first solo museum exhibition of artist Evelyn Taocheng Wang outside of Europe and North America. Born in China and now based in Rotterdam, Wang constructs a multifaceted practice that spans painting, drawing, writing, and performance, where fragmented narratives, irony, and autobiographical reflection intertwine. Bringing together eighteen works, the exhibition is structured around two central figures in Wang’s artistic constellation: painter Agnes Martin and writer Eileen Chang. Through an imagined dialogue between Chang and Martin, Wang probes questions of individuality, authenticity, and self-representation. By approaching these cultural figures as conceptual ready-mades, Wang deliberately subverts the modernist ideals of purity and truth, favoring instead an unstable, ever-questioned notion of authenticity, one that resists resolution and embraces contradiction.
Evelyn Taocheng Wang: An Equivocal Contrast
