SHANGHAI.- In a cultural landscape that constantly competes for attention, what is the role of the pop-up? Is it a celebration, a satire, or a form that has become content in itself?
When a notification appears on a phone, it arrives as an alert loaded with content. Increasingly, there is more content about content than content itself. Streams of gameplay, reaction videos, reviews, and commentary all function as forms of para-content: content that circulates around other content. A Pop-up of A Pop-up becomes a form of para-content IRL. It invites participation, disrupting the binary between consumption and production. Rather than producing a stable object of attention, para-content continually redirects attention through circulation, response, and reproduction. Meaning is generated not solely through the original content itself, but through the relations, interpretations, and forms of participation that accumulate around it.
A Pop-up of A Pop-up is a monthly summer activation occupied with dialogical movement within a curatorial programme by bringing together an exhibition, a pair of artists-in-residence, and a "low-res" summer MFA to respond to questions of collectivity, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and alternative pedagogy. Inherently dynamic and resistant to permanence and standardisation, the programme offers experiences that are local, contingent, and responsive to their surroundings. If para-content generates meaning through circulation and participation, then the programme treats exhibitions, residencies, and pedagogical encounters as sites through which new social, creative, and intellectual relations can emerge.
The programme unfolds as a series of “Events” in the Deleuzian sense: not as discrete happenings, but as transformations in relations, meanings, and possibilities that emerge through what happens. The “Event” is not located in any single exhibition, residency, or public programme, but in the encounters produced between them. A Pop-up of A Pop-up features local associate Zhao Chenxi's exhibition Pop Down; summer artists-in-residence AD HOC by Constança Entrudo and Marie Hazard; and Shanzhai MFA, a nomadic theatre school run by Dongcun Xinfu Experimental Theatre. A Pop-up of A Pop-up asks how cultural value might be produced, circulated, and sustained through collective forms of making, learning, and living.
June 13–August 22, exhibition
Chenxi Zhao: Pop-down
Pop-down begins with a reversal. If a pop-up is a temporary retail format through which brands redefine relationships, test new concepts, and engage with consumers in novel ways, Zhao's exhibition turns this logic upside down. Developed during his month-long residency at CHERUBY following the closure of his label fabric qorn—a brand known for embracing and humorously reclaiming styles often deemed tasteless or unfashionable—Pop-down asks what remains after a brand comes to an end.
In response to the continued enthusiasm of fabric qorn's community, Zhao transforms the pop-up from a site of consumption into one of participation. Through collective screen-printing sessions, he creates moments of shared experience that extend the social life of the brand beyond its commercial lifespan. Alongside the collective activities, the exhibition also turns inward. Works drawing from passing thoughts and doubts that arise in moments of reflection reveal the private and often mundane mental landscapes that accompany everyday life. Together, these gestures move between collective participation and personal introspection, proposing forms of value rooted not in metrics or visibility but in creativity, lived experience, and collective potential.
Pop-down blurs the distinction between fashion as an object and fashion as an exhibition, shifting attention from what is produced to social and value relations that persist after production ends.
June 26–July 26, Artists-in-residence
Constança Entrudo and Marie Hazard: AD HOC
Since 2024, Paris-based artist Marie Hazard and Lisbon-based fashion designer Constança Entrudo have collaborated on AD HOC, a textile project that positions itself at the intersection of textile art and fashion, operating in the territory where artistic research meets the worn garment. Translated from Latin, ad hoc means "for this"—something devised for a specific situation rather than according to a permanent or predetermined plan. The project embraces this condition of responsiveness, unfolding through a sustained exchange of materials, techniques, and references between the two practitioners.
Anchored in a shared interest in textiles, AD HOC seeks not simply to bring art and fashion together but to unsettle the hierarchies that have otherwise separated them. Neither discipline is positioned in service of the other. Instead, the collaboration treats the textile as a common ground through which both practices can be rethought. Though distinct in approach, Hazard's tactile compositions and Entrudo's digitally layered textiles each investigate weaving as a language, probing the relationship between craft, technology, and material knowledge.
Central to the project is attention to time. Both Hazard and Entrudo consider the labour embedded within textile production and how contemporary technologies have transformed its temporal rhythms. Following a residency and exhibition at Studio2M in New York, AD HOC continues its development through their residency at CHERUBY, where contextual research, material experimentation, wearable sculpture, and performativity unfold simultaneously.
August 8–22
Drifting Chaoshan Theatre School Shanzhai MFA: Dongcun Xinfu Experimental Theatre
Building on the survival wisdom of traditional Chaoshan opera troupes, “Shanzhai” is Dongcun Xinfu Experimental Theatre's core methodology. They learn from Chaoshan opera, a centuries-old Chinese theatrical tradition whose travelling, semi-nomadic performers carried their costumes, instruments, and stage props in a handful of trunks, moving from village to village and constructing temporary stages wherever they arrived. While shanzhai is often understood through the lens of imitation or copying, Dongcun Xinfu approaches it as a grassroots spirit of adaptation, resourcefulness, and collective self-organisation. Like forms of para-content that circulate around, reinterpret, and extend existing content, the shanzhai troupe treats performance not as a fixed original but as something continually remade through movement, encounter, and local participation. This mobile way of life remains a vital link connecting contemporary descendants with histories of maritime migration and cultural exchange.
