Shanghai's Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) made history this year by becoming one of the only private museums in China to offer free admission as part of its 15th anniversary celebrations. According to RAM's executive director and chief curator, X Zhu-Nowell, the decision has proven to be a meaningful statement of the institution's core values, though it has brought unexpected challenges including visitor complaints about long wait times and inappropriate staff responses.
The free admission policy launched in May 2025 alongside three exhibitions featuring works by Ash Moniz, Cici Wu, and Irena Haiduk. Initially, visitors were required to reserve timed entry slots through the museum's WeChat social media channel. However, on June 11, the museum eliminated its pre-booking system in response to what Zhu-Nowell describes as city-wide guidance encouraging cultural institutions to remove access barriers, allowing visitors to arrive without advance reservations.
The policy change quickly created operational difficulties, with social media posts from visitors documenting extensive wait times. The museum frequently reached its daily capacity limit of 500 people several hours before its 8 p.m. closing time. According to China Youth Daily, one visitor who was denied entry later contacted the museum through social media seeking clarification about the entry system. The visitor reported receiving an inappropriate response from the museum's official account stating: "We don't have to do that. Please don't come back."
The museum's official account issued a public apology on June 17 for the inappropriate comments, followed by a personal apology from Zhu-Nowell several days later. Shortly after the incident, RAM implemented a hybrid system combining day-ahead WeChat reservations with same-day walk-in availability. The Art Newspaper reported experiencing no wait time during a July weekday visit and only a brief, fast-moving queue the following weekend.
Reflecting on the challenges, Zhu-Nowell explained: "As a small, independent kunsthalle, we suddenly found ourselves receiving the kind of foot traffic typically reserved for larger, state-funded institutions. It was, as they say, a good problem to have—but a real one. Our front-of-house team faced immense new pressures, and we had to quickly rethink how to preserve the quality of experience for every visitor." Zhu-Nowell, who uses they/them pronouns, also identified positive aspects of the controversy.
"Yet this moment also became an opening: not only to broaden access, but to raise a public conversation about the responsibilities of an independent, privately funded museum that serves a wide and unpredictable public," they said. "As a non-profit contemporary art institution, we see our role not just as an organizer and presenter of exhibitions and ideas, but also as a space to prototype new, more just power structures and economies."
RAM's free admission policy stands out in China's cultural landscape, where government-backed institutions commonly offer free entry but private museums rarely adopt this practice. Zhu-Nowell emphasized that implementing free admission requires fundamental institutional restructuring, affecting everything from staffing and visitor flow management to programming decisions and economic models.
"In China, conditions vary widely depending on funding structures and local governance, but a shared challenge remains: how to sustain artistic and intellectual ambition while expanding public access," they explained. "My advice is to treat free admission not as an endpoint, but as a beginning...to imagine new institutional forms that are not merely responsive to public life, but capable of shaping it."
For RAM, the decision to eliminate admission fees was driven more by ideological principles than by goals to increase visitor numbers, according to Zhu-Nowell. They report that the policy has significantly transformed the museum's audience composition. "We believe that cultural institutions should remain among the few public arenas where alternative forms of value, access, and participation can be modeled," they said. "We now see more first-time visitors, more intergenerational groups, and more people who come not only for art but to rest, think, or simply inhabit the space."
