Youth Palace

_Youth Palace_ is a major group exhibition that transforms the museum into a provisional Children's Palace — referencing the socialist extracurricular institution that once granted working-class children access to music, dance, theatre, and technical training previously reserved for elites.

Unfolding across all five floors, the exhibition brings together new commissions, reconfiguration of existing works and a project originally presented at Hanoi’s Children’s Palace. At its heart is a four-month curriculum of artist-led workshops, sessions, and gatherings that make the museum an active site of training, retraining, and de-training.

Drawing on the layered and unresolved legacies of its namesake, Youth Palace interrogates what remains unsettled in the premise of the Children's Palace: the fantasy that a better society can be engineered by training bodies, attention, and aspirations. Rather than producing "new socialist humans" or "resilient neoliberal subjects," the exhibition asks whether art can host counter-conduct without converting it into culture—whether an institution can cultivate capacities for autonomy, refusal, and collective coordination without fabricating new norms of the "good subject.”

Participants: Nairy Baghramian, Jeamin Cha, Châu Hoàng, Chen Qiheng, Chen Yun, Cheng Shaochan, Dirty blackbbb, Vân Đỗ, Đỗ Văn Hoàng, Energy Waving Collective, Ge Yulu, Gian Giữa, Rania Ho, Lê Thuận Uyên, Lê Văn Lân, Lê Xuân Tiến, Li Ming, Li Shude, Lin Hai, Lin Ke, Lin Yezi, Joanna Lyu, Diego Marcon, Nguyễn Hoàng Thiên Ngân, Nguyễn Trần Nam, Nguyễn Huy An, Như Lộc, Ou Feihong, Playfool, Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo), Phạm Minh Hiếu, Peng Xueying, Xu Zhe, Yang Junling, Zhan Qi, Zhao Yufeng.

Youth Palace is curated by X Zhu-Nowell, Executive Director and Chief Curator of Rockbund Art Museum, with the support of Karen Wang, Assistant Curator and Researcher.