This October, Chinese collector and philanthropist Yan Du will open a new non-profit space supporting artists from Asian backgrounds in London’s Bloomsbury district. Called Yan Du Projects (YDP), it is located in a huge, Grade 1-listed, 18th-century Georgian townhouse in Bedford Square.
YPD will host site-specific commissions, exhibitions, artist residences, artist-led experiments, and public events.
London-based Du, who was born near Beijing, said she wants to develop “transcultural dialogues.” “Originally, I was just looking for a space for a pop-up, but then I found this building on Bedford Square, and I thought, ‘this is beautiful and it’s the best location, why don’t I take it,” she told The Art Newspaper. “So that’s how it happened, very organically.”
YDP will host up to three interdisciplinary shows each year. Du said she plans to keep the program flexible and to encourage artists to curate their own exhibitions. The opening show will feature works by Chinese painter Duan Jianyu from Zhengzhou, whose practice – which is often overlooked outside of China – represents the “transcultural dialogue” YDP will promote, Du explained.
The building’s listed status has restricted the scope of the ongoing renovation, but Hong Kong-based BEAU Architects designed a modular “suitcase project,” which is a “temporary structure within a structure.”
“We cannot make any structural changes, so we have to build up everything internally,” Du said. “But the suitcase project also reflects the diasporic experience of nomadic homemaking… in the future, I’m thinking about traveling exhibitions, so we can also take our suitcase identity with us.”
YDP’s first artist-in-residence is Bangkok-based Harit Srikhao, who will be given a space in the coach house behind the institution’s main building, from September to November. Du said she wants artists to “take risks or make mistakes.”
This is not the first non-profit she has launched in London. In 2019 she founded Asymmetry to promote Chinese and Sinophone (someone who speaks at least one variety of the Chinese language) curators. It is headquartered in East London.
