Unlicensed Goods is a major survey exhibition of Asian and Asian diasporic artists exploring the ad hoc networks and shadow economies that accompany the global movements of manufactured goods and migrant communities.
Unlicensed Goods engages with the friction, co-dependence and short circuits between formal and informal systems of production. Through the lens of immigrant experience and resilience, Unlicensed Goods traces overlooked histories and alternative concepts of authorship that continue to shape contemporary art.
Inspired by the proximities and overlaps between underground and mainstream circulations of manufactured objects and stories, Unlicensed Goods surveys practices and initiatives at the intersection of art, design and fashion. The exhibition marks the first major group survey since the opening of YDP. Occupying the entirety of the building with a combination of site-specific commissions, spatial interventions and existing works, the exhibition reflects on the material realities of globalised production. It examines questions of cultural access and exclusion, collaborative and collective forms of production that challenge singular authorship and modes of immigrant survival within environments that remain indifferent to—or actively erase—the visibility of outsiders.
Curated by Billy Tang, Artistic Director at YDP
Exhibition public programme
Saturday 13 June, 3–6pm Lecture performance Ion Drift: Postscripts on the Move by Merve Ertufan & Mochu Salon-style conversation with Anthea Hamilton, Ruoru Mou and A Sai Ta Saturday 27 June, 2–7pm Guided game session Liquid Dependencies with Yin Aiwen Tuesday 30 June, 6:30–7:30pm Guided tour with Billy Tang, Artistic Director Wednesday 15 July, 6:30–7:30pm Guided tour with Billy Tang, Artistic Director Saturday 1 August, 4–5pm Guided tour with Erin Li, Curator (Public Programmes and Residencies) Saturday 15 August, afternoon Zine launch & Finissage Graphic Design and Exhibition Scenography by Studio Manuel Raeder
Studio Manuel Raeder is a multi-disciplinary design studio based in Berlin and Mexico City, known for its innovative approach to graphic design, editorial projects, research, exhibition design, textile design, and visual communication. Recent permanent display and exhibition architecture projects include: Nicola L.: I Am The Last Woman Object, Museion, Bolzano; Rose Lowder: Bouquets, Kunsthalle Zürich; CARA (Center for Art, Research and Alliances), New York; and Kurimanzutto, libros, Mexico City. Studio Manuel Raeder comprises Eglė Petraškaitė, Cecilia Murgia, Andrew J. Beltran and Manuel Raeder.
About the Artists
Yuji Agematsu (b. 1956, Kanagawa) is an artist who works across various media, including sound, photography and the arrangements of objects—not exactly sculpture. Active in experimental music for many decades, Agematsu often performs abstract compositions in conjunction with the presentation of images from multiple slide projectors. His photographic practice focuses on the effects of time and change on New York City, where he emigrated from Japan in 1980. He is primarily known for his zips, elegant and obdurate collections of found debris placed into cellophane cigarette wrappers.
Enzo Camacho (b. 1985, Manila) and Ami Lien (b. 1987, Dallas) are an artist duo whose collaborative practice weaves together research, political engagement and experimental material processes. Working between Berlin, New York and the Philippines, they focus on forms of resistance within globalised economies of labor, particularly in relation to the histories and afterlives of plantation agriculture in Southeast Asia.
Lien and Camacho work across film, installation, works on paper and collective workshops. Positioning their work as part of a lineage of cultural resistance, Lien and Camacho approach art-making as a form of propaganda, solidarity and pedagogy. They are active in transnational networks of artists and activists, aligning their practice with broader movements for land and labour justice. While their work circulates within museums and biennials, they emphasise that its primary context is the collective processes, exchanges and solidarities built alongside communities in struggle.
Canal Street Research Association was founded in 2020 in an empty storefront on Canal Street, New York’s counterfeit epicenter. Delving into the cultural and material ecologies of the street and its long history as a site that probes the limits of ownership and authorship, the association repurposes underused real estate as spaces for gathering ephemeral histories, mapping local lore, and tracing the flows and fissures of capital. They have occupied storefronts, empty office buildings, and storage units—and are currently located in a basement under Canal Street.
The fictional office entity is operated by Shanzhai Lyric (Ming Lin and Alex Tatarsky), a poetic research and roving archival unit that take inspiration from 山寨 (shanzhai or counterfeit) goods to examine how bootlegs use mimicry, hybridity, and permutation to both revel in and reveal the artifice of global hierarchies. They occupy both official and unofficial spaces including MoMA PS1, Sculpture Center, Artists Space, Storefront for Art & Architecture, and Abrons Arts Center.
Ivan Cheng (b. 1991, Sydney) works with genres, languages and their readings. Interested in the ambient and implicit, his performance work incorporates the site of presentation into a system for formatting text and historic references, often using the video camera as a structuring device. The process of making the work is related to accumulation and caching of information—memory between performance terms and machinic terms. His practice is variously represented by video, installation and publications.
His work has recently been presented at MUDAM, Luxembourg; UNAM Casa de Lago, Mexico City, MX/Immaterial; Art Gallery of NSW; Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, London; Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna; Shedhalle, Zurich; Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; UKS, Oslo, among others. He was the 2025 recipient of The Mondrian Prize.
Chu Ming Silveira (b. 1941, Shanghai, d. 1997, São Paulo) was a Chinese-Brazilian architect and designer, and the creator of the orelhão. Graduated from the Faculty of Architecture of the Mackenzie Presbyterian University in 1964, she became famous for designing telephone booths, popularly known as orelhinha and orelhão. Icons of Brazilian design and world urban furniture, the telephone booths were named Chu I and Chu II by the Companhia Telefônica Brasileira when they were launched, respectively, in honour of their creator. The starting point of her successful project was the egg shape, which according to her was, 'the best acoustic shape'.
Simplicity and respect for the forces of nature also characterised her residential projects on the coast of São Paulo, especially in the municipality of Ilhabela, where she developed a unique style, which she called 'Post-Caiçara', in which she used contemporary materials and techniques in harmony with traditional Caiçara culture.
Throughout her professional career, in addition to architecture and design, Chu dedicated herself to visual programming.
Epoxy Art Group was a New York City artist collective founded in 1982 by six Hong Kong immigrant artists: Jerry Kwan, Kwok Mang Ho, Bing Lee, Ming Fay, Kang Lok Chung, and Eric Chan. The name ‘Epoxy’ is a reference to epoxy resin. This name was selected by the collective in order to, in their own words, ‘represent the strong bonding power of good adhesiveness’. The artists believed that through experimentation and collaboration, they could create works that would be more than a singular contribution and would reflect their unique cross-cultural perspectives. Epoxy had its first show in 1983 at the Kwok Gallery and continued to exhibit at various venues such as the Sabrina Fung Gallery, Basement Workshop, New Museum and Asian American Arts Centre until the early 1990s.
Merve Ertufan (b. 1985, Istanbul) makes installations, videos, sound-arrangements, texts and objects. Her practice engages with what might be called the microphysics of the mind, observing inconsistencies, gaps and dead-ends in language and habit. Speech, written text and gestural detours of the body frequently combine to form game-like relationships, with compulsive paradoxes, stories, questions and riddles informing their play.
Merve's works have been featured in museums and institutions such as Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (2026), Thailand Biennale Phuket (2025), Serendipity Arts Festival (2025), Liquid Architecture (2025), Arter (2013), Tanas (2014), Zilberman Gallery (2022), Bahar, the Istanbul off-site project of Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017), with two solo exhibitions—at at Depo (2020), and Bilsart (2022). She was part of the SAHA Studio program in Istanbul (2023), and a fellow at the Home Workspace Program, Ashkal Alwan in Beirut (2016).
Ming Fay (b. 1943, Shanghai, d. 2025, New York) was a New York City-based artist known for his installations of immersive sculptural gardens and public art. Working primarily in papier-mâché over a wire armature, Fay drew from his life-long engagement with Chinese and American horticulture and mythologies to create sculptures of large-scale botanical forms and invented imaginary species. He focused on the concept of the garden as a symbol of abundance or a utopia—a metaphorical location for humankind's desirable state of being. He was also a co-founder of Epoxy Art Group.
Born in Shanghai to two artists and raised in Hong Kong, Fay moved to the United States in 1961 to attend the Columbus College of Art and Design. He received a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Taipei Fine Arts Museum and M+ Museum among others.
Ha Bik Chuen (b. 1925, Xinhui, d. 2009) was a self-taught Hong Kong artist renowned for his diverse artistic practices, including sculpture, printmaking, photography and collage. Born in Xinhui, Guangdong, he relocated to Hong Kong in 1957. In the 1960s and 70s, Ha and his family sustained themselves by manufacturing paper flowers and other crafts. Despite financial challenges, he remained committed to his art and became a full-time artist in 1976, primarily through selling collagraphic prints. Two years later, he secured a prestigious sculpture commission for Hong Kong’s Aberdeen Square with his work Sailing in the Sun, a testament to his growing recognition in the local public art sphere.
Beyond his creations, Ha was an avid documentarian of the art world. He photographed exhibitions he attended and amassed a vast collection of art-related materials. This extensive archive, now known as the Ha Bik Chuen Archive, offers invaluable insights into Hong Kong's art scene from the 1960s to the 2000s.
Anthea Hamilton (b. 1978, London) makes surreal, large-scale installations that the viewer can step into and wander around. She uses a variety of different materials and techniques combining performance, sculpture, painting, video and fashion design. Hamilton’s work is visually playful and thoughtful and her sculptures feature collage-like images which reuse images from her previous work.
She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2016. Large-scale solo exhibitions have included The Squash at Tate Britain, Anthea Hamilton Reimagines Kettle’s Yard at The Hepworth Wakefield, and Lichen! Libido! Chastity at the SculptureCenter in New York.
Steph Huang (b. 1990, Yuanlin City) is a London-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores themes of labour, value and commerce through the cultural biographies of everyday objects and spaces. Working across sculpture, installation, film and sound, she transforms mundane materials into minimalist yet poetically resonant installations. Her work uncovers the historical and transcultural narratives embedded within consumer culture while critically examining its environmental and human costs.
Recent solo exhibitions include at Perrotin, Tokyo (2025); Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei (2025); Hong Foundation, Taipei (2024); Tate Britain, London (2024); Standpoint, London (2024); E-WERK Freiburg, Freiburg (2024); Public Gallery, London (2023); Goldsmiths CCA, London (2022).
In 2023, Huang was awarded the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award and was a recipient of the Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award. In 2022, Huang was awarded the Grand Prize at the Taipei Art Awards.
Reena Saini Kallat (b. 1973, New Delhi) currently lives and works in Mumbai. Kallat works across drawing, photography, sculpture and video to explore ideas held in states of tension—mobility and obstruction, memory and erasure, hybridity and national narratives. Shaped in part by her family’s experience of the Partition of India, her practice engages with political and social borders and the ways they divide land, people and ecosystems. Through research into histories of migration, the contestation of shared natural resources and archives of the disappeared, Kallat reflects on the violence embedded in state structures and the fragility of the legal documents meant to sustain them.
Kallat has presented solo exhibitions at the Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai (2025, 2013); Kunstmuseum Thun (2023); Compton Verney (2022); the National Museum of Asian Arts – Guimet, Paris (2020); the Manchester Museum (2017); and the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Offsite programme (2015).
Özgür Kar (b. 1992, Ankara) lives and works in Amsterdam. He is a graduate of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam.
Kar’s works assemble in space to function as scenes from theatre pieces: each serves as a character playing its part within a non-linear score and script. Working with voice actors and instrumentalists, Kar produces multi-part soundscapes that unfold through solemn repetition, forging existential dread mixed with cartoonish macabre. Stoic in their contemplation, his minimally animated drawings are set in imperceptible loops that turn videos into sculptures confined within the edge of television screens. Beyond the camp-ness of macabre, or the grotesque anxiety of death juxtaposed with cartoonish figures, the theatricality of Kar’s work is set in tonal displays of contemporary existentialism.
Firenze Lai (b. 1984, Hong Kong) interrogates the social, political and spatial subtexts that influence individual and collective psyches through her painting practice. Her paintings regard the human condition as a liminal state, one in which there is constant mediation between the external and the internal. Considering physical realms as well as virtual or digital ones, Lai’s paintings address human behaviour, passages through space and ideas of self-consciousness; longstanding concerns that connect the individual to a wider milieu. Elastic and endlessly reconfigurable, figures appear alone or in groups across her canvases, a means by which Lai '[studies] the visible and invisible parts of life’.
Solo exhibitions of Lai’s work have been held at PRÉCÉDÉÉ, Hong Kong (2021); MAMC+, Saint-Étienne(2019); Mirrored Gardens, Guangzhou (2015); and Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong (2014).
Lai’s work has been featured in group exhibitions including M+, Hong Kong (2024); Centre Pompidou Málaga, Andalusia (2023); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2022); Kadist, San Francisco, California (2020); BWA Wrocław (2020); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020); Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2019), among others.
Over the past three decades, Phillip Lai (b. 1969, Kuala Lumpur) has developed a sculptural language which explores approaches to the ubiquitous materials and experiences that derive from a techno-industrial culture. Its basis refers to our psychological interactions in this culture, as well as an intermingling with it. Transfers or retentions of energy are envisioned, through materials and objects that often suggest the support of basic daily functions, needs and the sustaining of human life.
In 1997, Phillip Lai presented his first solo exhibition at The Showroom, London. His work has been the subject of subsequent solo exhibitions at Kiang Malingue, Hong Kong (2023); Modern Art, London (2021); Galleria Franco Noero, Turin (2019); Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong (2018); Camden Art Centre, London (2014), among others. In January 2026, Spike Island presented a major solo exhibition of new work by Phillip Lai.
Dan Lie (b. 1988) lives and works in Berlin. For the past twelve years they have been developing a practice that comprises drawing, sculpture, and large-scale installations based on long-term research into topics around time, our fraught understanding of death, and its underlying binaries and taboos. Collaborating as well with ‘otherthan-human’ entities: bacteria, fungi, and insects which transform the organic matter that constitutes their installations.
Lie has had solo exhibitions at venues including Spike Island, Bristol; Pinacoteca de São Paulo; Art Sonje Center, Seoul; Kunstverein Braunschweig; Zwingli-Kirche, Berlin; New Museum, New York; Casa do Povo, São Paulo; and Jupiter Art Land, Edinburgh.
Ghislaine Leung (b. 1980, Stockholm) is a British conceptual artist. Her work uses score-based instructions to radically redistribute and constitute the terms of artistic production. For Leung, limitations, felt as personal, institutional, structural or systemic to the parameters of industry, are engaged in as means to institute differently. She received a BA Fine Art in Context at the University of the West of England in 2002 and a Masters in Aesthetics and Art Theory at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University in 2009.
Leung has had solo exhibitions at Kunstahlle Basel; Renaissance Society, Chicago; Simian, Copenhagen; Maxwell Graham, New York; Ordet, Milan; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; Cabinet, London; Netwerk, Aalst; Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart; Chisenhale, London; Reading International, Reading; Cell Project Space, London and WIELS, Brussels. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2023.
Liu Chuang (b. 1978, Tianmen) currently lives and works in Shanghai. In 2001, he received his BA from the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts.
Liu Chuang works primarily with film, sculpture, readymade and installation. His works often integrate long-term history and ecological arc for imagination, tracing the social, cultural and economic transformations of contemporary China. Weaving narratives that connect the micro and macro, past and present, fiction and reality, Liu Chuang explores how vast and complex changes in nature, tradition, demographics, cutting-edge technology, and socio-economic systems affect individuals and their engagements with the world as a whole.
David Medalla (b. 1938, Manila, d. 2020) lived an eventful life between London, Paris, New York, Marseille, Manila and Berlin. Over the course of seven decades he created a multifaceted body of work, including drawings, paintings, collages, sculptures, neon works, kinetic art, performances and participatory art.
Medalla’s prominent exhibitions include ‘White on White’ (1966) and ‘When Attitudes Become Form’ (1969), Kunsthalle Bern; documenta 5 (‘Individual Mythologies’, 1972), Kassel; and Bonner Kunstverein/Museion Bozen (‘Parables of Friendship’, 2022). Medalla has participated in the 57th Venice Biennale; the 14th Lyon Biennale; the 8th Asian Pacific Triennial, Brisbane; the 9th Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre; the 16th Sydney Biennial; Performa 07, New York; and the 2nd Johannesburg Biennial.
Mochu (b. 1983) works with video and text, arranged as installations, lectures and publications. Technoscientific fictions and subcultural formations feature prominently in his practice, often modulated with anxiety, futurity and weird selfhoods. Recent projects have explored ideas around neurohistory, deep time, the ruins of cyberpunk, and the conjunction of natural philosophy and political thought.
Mochu is the author of the books Bezoar Delinqxenz (Edith-Russ-Haus + Sternberg Press, 2023), and Nervous Fossils: Syndromes of the Synthetic Nether (Reliable Copy + KNMA, 2022). He is a recipient of fellowships from Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst (2020-22), Ashkal Alwan (2015-16), India Foundation for the Arts (2012-15) and The Sarai Programme (2012).
Exhibitions include those at Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Thailand Biennale Phuket (2025), RMIT Melbourne (2024), 9th Asian Art Biennial (2024), 9th Asia-Pacific Triennial (2018), 4th Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2018), 13th Sharjah Biennial (2017) and transmediale:BWPWAP (2013), and a solo show at Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst (2022).
Ruoru Mou (b. 1997, Florence) is an artist based in London and Amsterdam. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, Mou’s process-led practice reconfigures organic material, industrial forms and by-products alongside cinematic tropes to question how we assign value and navigate excess. Her works often transform over time, reflecting the contingent systems that shape production, circulation, and material politics.
Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Fortunate’, Cell Projects Space, London (2025); ‘Leftover Linings’, San Mei Gallery, London (2024). Mou recently completed a two-year residency at De Ateliers, Amsterdam (2024–25).
Recent group exhibitions include ‘Life After Life’, 15th Kaunas Biennial, Kaunas (2025); ‘OFFSPRING 2025’, De Ateliers, Amsterdam (2025); ‘Big Fortune’, Woonhuis De Ateliers, Amsterdam (2024); ‘Ceremonial Weight’, April in Paris, Aerdenhout (2024); ‘On Feeling’, The Approach, London (2024); and ‘Cozzie Livs’, Des Bains, London (2023).
Rie Nakajima (b. 1976, Yokohama) is a sculptor living in London. She creates sounds using motorised devices and everyday objects in the context of installations and performances. Her art exists on the borderline of sculpture and music, open to improvisation, chance and the influence of others. Solo exhibitions include IKON Gallery (Birmingham) and she has also worked with Museo Vostell Malpartida (Cáceres), Association Le Cyclop (Milly la Forêt), Donaueschinger Music Festival (Donaueschinger) and Cafe OTO in London, among many others. Frequent collaborators include Pierre Berthet, Angharad Davies, David Cunningham, Keiko Yamamoto, Max Eastley, Miki Yui, Hans W. Koch, Marie Roux, Billy Steiger, David Toop and Akira Sakata.
Christian Kōun Alborz Oldham with Kosen Otsubo
Christian Kōun Alborz Oldham is an artist, writer and ikebana practitioner who continues Flower Planet, a studio founded by their teacher Kosen Ohtsubo, a pivotal figure in the avant-garde ikebana movement since the 1970s. The studio hosts lectures and workshops and produces writings and exhibitions on various elements of ikebana from antiquity to the present.
Kosen Ohtsubo (b. 1939, Ashio) is an ikebana artist. He has taught traditional ikebana in the Ryuseiha school while creating his own works that embody his thoughts. He uses a wide range of materials, including not only flowers but also vegetables, discarded materials, and even his own body.
in the 1960s, Ohtsubo began studying Ikebana under Kasen Yoshimura, the third head of the Ryuseiha school. Around 1970, he started presenting works in magazines and exhibitions, and also began teaching. He moved to Beijing in 2005 and returned to Japan in 2013. He now continues to work and teach at his home studio.
Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966, Honolulu) recasts the visual language of pop spectacle to investigate how media images shape our perception of the world and ourselves. Working in video, photography, sculpture, and sound, he is drawn to moments intended for mass audiences (live sports events, stadium concert tours, televised game shows, celebrity glamour shots), which he meticulously samples and re-edits to expose an uncanny emptiness underneath.
From the hyperreality of photo retouching and digital erasure to the endless repetition of video loops, his mastery of postproduction allows him to magnify the surreal aspects of contemporary existence. Bodies become sites of saturated observation, and violence-as-entertainment flirts with nationalism, religion and ancient myth. While he also experiments with the format and scale of his works, immersive audiovisual installations often cohabit with portable fetish objects in his exhibitions. Throughout his practice, Pfeiffer seeks to reflect and heighten the existential condition of the viewer as consumer by perversely blurring the boundary between voyeurism and contemplation.
Gala Porras-Kim (b. 1984, Bogotá) lives and works in Los Angeles and London. The Colombian-Korean-American artist received her Master of Fine Arts from CalArts, Valencia, CA (2009). She was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Cambridge (2019), an Artist in Residence at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2020–22) and a Fellow at the Museo delle Civiltà, Rome in collaboration with MAO – Museo d’Arte Orientale, Turin (2023–25).
Her work has been exhibited at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2026); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2025); Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2024); MoMA, New York (2023); Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul (2023); MMCA, Seoul (2023); MUAC, Mexico City (2023); Liverpool Biennial (2023); Gwangju Biennial (2021); São Paulo Art Biennial (2021); and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2019, 2017).
Lin May Saeed (b. 1973, Würzburg, d. 2023, Berlin) had a Jewish-German family background on her mother's side and an Iraqi family background on her father's side. Saeed studied sculpture at the Düsseldorf Art Academy from 1995 to 2001. There, she became interested in animal rights and took part in corresponding actions.
Saeed dealt for almost two decades with the relationship between humans and animals. Her works deal with the exploitation of animals, their liberation, the utopia of a peaceful coexistence between animals and humans, and the self-seeking meanness of the latter. Saeed works are mostly made of so-called ‘poor materials’ such as Styrofoam, cardboard or tool steel. Her iconographic references include Egyptian statuary, Greco-Roman sculpture and natural history museum displays, among other things.
Recent solo shows include at Kunsthalle Bern (2026); Sapieha Palace, Vilnius (2025); Buitenplaats Kasteel Wijlre (2025); GAMeC, Bergamo (2024); Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin (2023); The Clark, Williamstown (2020); Studio Voltaire, London (2018).
Hassan Sharif (b. 1951, Bandar Lengeh, d. 2016) made a vital contribution to conceptual art and experimental practice in the Middle East. Sharif started creating his Objects in the 1980s using found industrial materials or mass-produced items purchased in markets around the UAE. In his Semi-Systems, he invented a set of rules, following this system to create line drawings that transform within a grid and colour studies on paper. Sharif revelled in the mistakes and errors that naturally occur in the monotonous creation of the work, believing that 'art is a result of errors.'
Sharif staged the first exhibitions of contemporary art in Sharjah, as well as translated art historical texts into Arabic to engage a local audiences in contemporary art discourse.
His work has been shown in solo exhibition in international public and private institutions, including: Misk Art Institute, Riyadh (2023); MAMC Saint-Étienne (2021); Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2020); Malmo Kunsthalle, Malmo (2020), among others.
Shanzhai Lyric is a body of research focusing on radical logistics and linguistics through the prism of technological aberration and nonofficial cultures. The project takes inspiration from the experimental English of shanzhai t-shirts made in China and proliferating across the globe to examine how the language of counterfeit uses mimicry, hybridity, and permutation to both revel in and reveal the artifice of global hierarchies. Through an ever-growing archive of poetry-garments, Shanzhai Lyric explores the potential of mis-translation and nonsense as utopian world-making (breaking) and has previously taken the form of poetry-lecture, essay, and installation.
In the fall of 2020, Shanzhai Lyric founded the fictional office entity Canal Street Research Association.
Sine Screen is a London-based emerging screening collective dedicated to showcasing independent cinema and moving image works from across East and Southeast Asia. Sine Screen contributes to more nuanced discussions around East and Southeast Asian cultures and histories through diverse curated programmes.
Su Chang Design Research Office brings together design, research, and action to rebuild architecture's relationship with the environment. The Office work innovates familiar-seeming elements through contemporary cultures. The projects embrace multiple senses of materiality and cultures of living within the clear formal language of architecture. The Office take a hands-on, collaborative, and open design approach to work on projects across disciplines and scales. The Office's design collaboration with contemporary art and cultural institutions has built a reputation for its sensitivity to emerging cultures, new economies, and the expanded notion of sustainability.
A Sai Ta is a London-based British-Vietnamese-Chinese fashion designer and the creative force behind the cult label ASAI.
A graduate of Central Saint Martins, Ta honed his craft at luxury houses including The Row and Kanye West's YEEZY before launching his eponymous brand in 2017 with the backing of talent incubator Fashion East. He is globally celebrated for creating the iconic 'Hot Wok' top—a form-fitting, patchwork mesh separate featuring vibrant, nuclear-hued tie-dyes and heavily overlocked, exposed seams. His design philosophy embraces an 'anti-perfectionist' aesthetic that deliberately rejects traditional Western luxury finishes. Instead, Ta uses raw edges, deconstructed silhouettes, and subverted Eastern iconography to critique race, class, and the British-Asian immigrant experience.
A recipient of the British Fashion Council’s NEWGEN scheme, Ta’s avant-garde vision has earned partnerships with Rihanna’s FENTY and a loyal following among global style icons.
Sung Tieu (b. 1987, Hai Duong) lives and works in Berlin. Tieu’s work takes place at the intersection of her personal experiences, global history, and the cultural incursions of European art traditions. Her immersive installations result from her research of the dynamics of hegemonic globalised capitalism, working through and with spatial dislocation while paying heed to the cultural testimony of the Vietnamese diaspora communities in Germany. Through the personal lens of post-colonial identity and cultural membership, she upsets the status of objective narrative and of proof when science works at the service of sociopolitical agendas. While addressing social and cultural class divides in both contemporaneity and recent history, Tieu’s work foregrounds the ways evidence is manipulated in imperialist violence both of physical and psychological nature.
Wang Xu (b. 1986, Dalian) is based between New York and China. Recent solo exhibitions include 'Weathering', 47 Canal, New York (2025); 'a garden has feelings', 47 Canal, New York (2022); 'Overtime Gift', 47 Canal, New York (2019); and 'Garden of Seasons', Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA (2018).
He has participated in exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of Chile, Santiago (2025); Taikang Art Museum, Beijing (2024); SPRINGS Projects, Brooklyn, New York (2024); Studio Route 29, Frenchtown (2023); and 4th Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art, Hangzhou (2022).
He was a 2018 resident of The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and The Socrates Sculpture Park, New York. His work is held in public collections at Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; KADIST, Paris; and Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing.
Yuyan Wang (b. 1989, Qingdao), currently based in Paris, is a filmmaker and video artist. Her works involve recycled materials from the industrial sphere of image production, tracing their mutation and proliferation within the digital frameworks and representations. Through the editing process, Wang deconstructs and recontextualises the intricate hierarchies and inherent meanings in materials—whether found, processed, and produced—striping symbols of their conventional paths of perception and turning them into immersive sensory experiences.
Wang completed her studies at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2016 and later at Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains in 2022. Her work has been showcased at Tate Modern, Palais de Tokyo, UCCA Beijing, the 12th Berlin Biennale and various festivals, such as the Berlinale International Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMa Doc Fortnight, CPH:DOX, the European Media Art Festival.
A 'documenter of the constellation of social life', Martin Wong (b. 1946, Portland, d. 1999) developed innovative approaches to technique and form, creating rich surfaces and intricate details from astrology, architectural space, and various modes of language. Wong studied ceramics at Humboldt State University, graduating in 1968. Wong was active in the performance art groups The Cockettes and Angels of Light before moving to New York in 1978. He exhibited for two decades at notable downtown galleries including EXIT ART, Semaphore and P·P·O·W, among others, before his passing in San Francisco from an AIDS related illness.
His work is represented in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; and Tate, London; among others.
Tobias Wong (b. 1974, Vancouver, d. 2010, New York) was a designer whose sendups of luxury goods and witty expropriation of work by other designers blurred the line between Conceptual art and design.
Carrie Yamaoka (b. 1957, Glen Cove) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work ranges across painting, drawing, photography and sculpture. She engages with the topography of surfaces, materiality and process, the tactility of the barely visible and the chain of planned and chance incidents that determine the outcome of the object. Her work addresses the viewer at the intersection between records of chemical action/reaction and the desire to apprehend a picture emerging in fleeting and unstable states of transformation. Her material engagement and rule-breaking strategies embrace accidents and dissolve binaries.
Carrie Yamaoka’s work has been exhibited at major art institutions, including the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; MoMA PS1, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Ricard, Paris; Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle; Artists Space, New York; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Participant Inc., New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, among others.
Amy Yao (b. 1977, Los Angeles) lives and works between New York City and Los Angeles. She received a MFA from Yale University School of Art, New Haven in 2007. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘AZN Clam', 47 Canal, New York (2025); ‘AZN Clam', The Power Station, Dallas (2023); 'Authorized Personnel', NYU Institute of Fine Arts, New York (2019), among others.
Yao’s work has been exhibited in '2025 California Biennial: Desperate, Scared, But Social', Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA (2025); Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2024); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2018); Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2017) and others.
Yao’s work is held in public collections at FRAC Aquitaine, Bordeaux and SYZ Collection. She was a member of Emily’s Sassy Lime (ESL).
Trevor Yeung (b. 1988, Guangdong Province) lives and works in Hong Kong. He uses botanic ecology, horticulture, aquarium systems and installations as metaphors that reference the emancipation of everyday aspirations towards human relationships. Yeung draws inspiration from intimate and personal experiences, culminating in works that range from image-based works to large-scale installations. Obsessed with structures, he creates different scales of systems which allow him to exert control upon living beings, including plants, animals, as well as spectators.
Yeung represented Hong Kong at the Venice Biennale in 2024 and has participated in the 2022 Singapore Biennale. Yeung has exhibited internationally, including at Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Tai Kwun Contemporary; Singapore Art Museum; Jameel Arts Center, Dubai; M+ Museum; Shanghai Power Station of Art; Para Site; Stiftung Skulpturenpark Köln; HOW Art Museum; Taikang Space; Museum of Modern Art; esea contemporary and OCAT Shenzhen.
