Chen Yun: Curating As Mutual Aid and The Infrastructure of Minor Histories

In this episode, we follow Shanghai-based curator and organizer Chen Yun 陈韵 and ask what happens when curating stops being an exhibition format and becomes a way of living with neighbors under demolition pressure. The story begins in Dinghaiqiao 定海桥, a working-class neighborhood shaped by redevelopment, where Chen and collaborators turned a modest rented apartment into the Dinghaiqiao Mutual-Aid Society 定海桥互助社(DMAS): a small commons for talks, shared meals, study, community research, and everyday support. The episode frames DMAS as curatorial work built from maintenance and reciprocity—an infrastructure of attention that treats minor histories as worth holding onto when the city’s ground rules are shifting.

The second movement widens to the 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016–17) and Chen’s coordination of 51 Personae, a city-wide series of gatherings that reposition cultural authority away from the museum and toward encounters on chosen ground. We then follow the project’s afterlife into publishing, where books and process-based documentation become portable infrastructure for minor histories that would otherwise be erased by redevelopment and the speed of urban change. The episode also stays with a hard reality: DMAS’s physical venue could not last under rising rents and urban renewal pressures, sharpening the question of what it means for regenerative artivism to persist after a room closes. 

Keywords
Chen Yun 陈韵, Dinghaiqiao 定海桥, Dinghaiqiao Mutual-Aid Society 定海桥互助社, DMAS, mutual aid, commons, socially engaged art, curating as infrastructure, neighborhood knowledge, redevelopment, demolition pressure, migrant urban life, minor histories, 51 Personae, Shanghai Biennale, infra-curatorial, publishing as artistic practice, archives, regenerative artivism, regenerative aesthetics

Key references 

Biennial Foundation. “The 11th Shanghai Biennale full list of artists and exhibitions.” Biennial Foundation, September 13, 2016. https://www.biennialfoundation.org/2016/09/11th-shanghai-biennale-announces-full-list-artists-exhibitions/.

Chen, Yun. “Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society: Negotiating the Common with/by/through the Urban Daily.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 19, no. 3 (2018): 480–93.

Chen, Yun. “West Heavens: India-China Cultural Exchange Program.” The Newsletter 76 (Spring 2017). International Institute for Asian Studies. Accessed January 10, 2026.

Gu, Peng 顾芃, and Zhu Libing 朱骊冰. “Dinghaiqiao shantytown: A group of young people’s mutual-aid jianghu” [定海桥棚户区：一群年轻人的‘互助’江湖]. The Paper [澎湃新闻], October 11, 2021. https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_14831931.

Jackson, Shannon. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. New York: Routledge, 2011.

Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Raqs Media Collective. “51 Personae.” Works: Raqs Media Collective (project page), 2017. 

Spade, Dean. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). London: Verso, 2020.

Zhou, Yanhua. “When Public Art Becomes the ‘Mass Line’: A Case Study of Dinghaiqiao Mutual-Aid Society.” In Socially Engaged Public Art in East Asia: Space, Place, and Community in Action, edited by Meiqin Wang, 149–80. Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2022.

My academic website: http://csun.academia.edu/MeiqinWang

Transcript

You are listening to Regenerative Artivism: Asian women’s creative strategies for social and ecological futures. I am your host, Meiqin Wang, an art historian working in contemporary Asian art and the environmental humanities. In each episode, we explore how Asian women artists, curators, and community organizers use creative, place-based practice to confront social and environmental injustice and cultivate more livable futures. Thank you for joining me. Let us begin.

If you have ever lived through a demolition notice, you already know the mood I want to begin with today.

It is not only fear, and it is not only anger. It is something slower and harder to name: the quiet unmaking of everyday certainty. The staircase still creaks in the same place, the alley still smells like frying oil at lunchtime, the neighbor still pauses to talk. And yet, the future has been rewritten without you. Demolition markings appear on walls. New fencing arrives. A rumor becomes a schedule. A schedule becomes an order.

So today, I want to take you to Shanghai, to a working-class neighborhood called Dinghaiqiao, and to a curator and cultural worker named Chen Yun (陈韵). This episode asks: what happens when curating stops being an exhibition format and becomes a way of living with neighbors under demolition pressure?

To answer that question, we’re going to start in one small place: a rented apartment that turns into a spot for talks, cooking, classes, archives, and everyday collaboration. Then we’ll zoom out to a much bigger scale, the 11th Shanghai Biennale, and see how Chen’s project 51 Personae stretches that apartment method across the city. Finally, we’ll look at what happens after the biennial, when 51 Personae moves into publishing and becomes a more lasting kind of infrastructure for minor histories. And we will also stay with a harder reality that sits inside this arc: the fact that the apartment ultimately had to close, even as its methods traveled on.

In cities built through redevelopment, some histories become official. They receive plaques, guided tours, and museum-friendly narratives. Other histories remain small, dispersed, and easily erased: the history of a shop that kept a street alive; the history of a housing block where people learned how to survive with little; the history of migrants whose names never enter archives; the history of relationships, favors, borrowed tools, shared meals, and informal economies. These minor histories are not minor because they are unimportant. They are minor because institutions rarely treat them as worth preserving.

Like episode one of season two, this episode is about what makes regenerative artivism last, not only as an ethic but as a material practice that keeps going after the opening, after the grant cycle, after the institutional spotlight has moved on.

In Chen’s case, the answer isn’t a single heroic gesture. It is infrastructure, built out of very ordinary forms.

So let’s get to Chen’s practice by taking the path that led her there. Born in 1981 in Shanghai, Chen studied journalism at Fudan University and later earned a master’s degree in communication studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She entered the contemporary art field in the late 2000s and became a key organizer of West Heavens, a long-running platform for intellectual and artistic exchange between India and China.

West Heavens matters here because it questioned the default habit of taking Euro-American institutions as the mirror and the measure. It proposed intra-Asian exchange as a different compass for thinking, translating, and convening.

That background matters because Chen did not arrive at Dinghaiqiao as a naïve believer in community art. She arrived with a strong sense of curating as knowledge production: building platforms where ideas can form and circulate.

But she also arrived with a sense of the limits of platforms. A forum can be brilliant and still fail to change what it feels like to live in a place undergoing erasure.

This is the pivot Dinghaiqiao makes visible.

Dinghaiqiao is a historical working-class neighborhood in Shanghai with a vibrant migrant population. It is also a neighborhood under demolition pressure. To say that is not merely to say buildings are old. It is to say the ground rules of living are unstable. Rental relations, local economies, kin networks, and daily routes all become uncertain at once.

If we zoom out, we can name the larger structure: redevelopment as governance. In post-1990s urban China, demolition and redevelopment have been central to land finance, housing policy, and the remaking of urban citizenship. They do not only remove structures; they reorganize who can remain in central space, who is displaced outward, and which forms of life are treated as disposable.

But it is one thing to describe these dynamics in the language of policy, and another to meet them at the level of everyday life. In a demolition zone, politics shows up as dust, noise, paperwork, rumors, waiting, and the emotional labor of deciding what to do next.

This is where Chen’s practice becomes instructive for regenerative artivism.

Her work in Dinghaiqiao begins with a curatorial project titled Dinghaiqiao: Art Practice Into History in 2014. But the exhibition is not the most important part of the story. What matters is what followed: Dinghaiqiao Mutual-Aid Society, often shortened to DMAS. DMAS grew directly out of long-term engagement with Dinghaiqiao, treating workers’ housing and everyday histories as a field for sustained attention rather than a one-time event.

DMAS describes itself as a self-organized group and a physical place for learning, proposing, inviting, reflecting, organizing, and creatively working together. In practice, it functioned as a small, shared resource: a room where neighbors, students, artists, and visiting researchers could gather, study, and collaborate with local life, rather than simply represent it.

That description may sound broad if you are used to curatorial statements that declare a theme and then illustrate it. But DMAS is structured against that habit. It refuses to begin with a predetermined issue statement that risks turning people into examples.

Instead, it begins with presence. And it begins with a space. A small apartment.

Let me describe why that matters.

If you have ever done community-based work, you already know that the hardest question is often not what you want to talk about, but where you can reliably gather. In a demolition zone, gathering is not neutral. It is already a claim: that relationships still matter; that a neighborhood is not only real estate; that something here is worth paying attention to.

This is where the word commons becomes useful, as long as we do not romanticize it. A commons is not just a shared resource. It is a set of practices that make sharing possible, and that have to be maintained.

DMAS turns a rented apartment into a small commons of attention and action. Not because it is open in the abstract, but because it is continually organized: invitations sent, meals prepared, chairs rearranged, discussions facilitated, conflicts handled, time coordinated, trust earned and repaired. It is care at a micro scale.

Now let’s take the phrase mutual aid just as seriously.

Mutual aid is not charity. It is cooperation as survival: people building collective capacity because institutions do not protect them, or because protection comes with coercive conditions. Contemporary activist scholarship, especially Dean Spade’s work, argues that mutual aid is not a supplement to politics but a way of organizing everyday life so that people can survive and struggle collectively.

In Shanghai, mutual aid also carries other echoes. It resonates with socialist collectivist histories, but DMAS does not simply revive socialist forms. It reworks them. Scholar Yanhua Zhou, writing about DMAS, frames it through the concept of the mass line, but as something transformed: everyday life and local knowledge treated as sources of theory and practice, without collapsing into top-down instrumentalism.

So what does DMAS actually do?

If you walk into that apartment, you do not enter a white cube. You enter a space that can feel like a living room, a classroom, a kitchen, and an archive all at once. DMAS hosts talks and discussions, offers classes, collaborates with residents, collects neighborhood materials, and circulates documentation. It also builds rhythm through formats like Dinghai Talks—informal lectures and discussions—alongside community research and small-scale archiving.

Aesthetic practice here is not only a matter of images, objects, or performances. It is a matter of shaping the conditions of encounter. It is what Grant Kester has called dialogical: constituted through conversation and collaboration, unfolding over time. It is also what Shannon Jackson pushes us to see: social practice depends on support systems, and those systems involve labor that is often feminized, undervalued, and hidden.

DMAS makes that labor central.

Think about cooking, which appears often in this story.

Cooking is not simply hospitality. In a neighborhood under demolition pressure, cooking is a technique for holding space. It brings bodies together, creates a shared rhythm, and makes the apartment feel like life, not like bureaucracy. Cooking is also knowledge: technique, memory, taste, economy, and care. When a project begins with cooking, it begins with social reproduction, the daily labor that keeps a public alive.

You will hear sustainability far more often in planning and museum talk. Regeneration is a newer term, unevenly adopted, but increasingly used when people want to signal moving beyond doing less harm. Here, regeneration is not a branding promise. It is the practice of repairing relationships and building capacity in damaged systems.

In Dinghaiqiao, regeneration is not the city’s redevelopment plan. It is the stubborn work of keeping people connected, keeping memories accessible, and keeping a shared space of thought alive.

At this point, a question usually arises, especially from listeners trained in art history or curatorial studies.

Is DMAS activism, or is it art?

My answer is that it is both, but it refuses the usual division of labor between them. It does not ask art to decorate activism. It does not ask activism to provide art with content. It asks how aesthetic practice can become a form of social inquiry and collective life. I also hear in it what I call regenerative aesthetics: an aesthetics that trains our senses toward repair rather than spectacle. In Dinghaiqiao, that does not look like a finished artwork. It looks, instead, like the texture of a room that can hold people—chairs pulled close, food prepared and shared, documents handled and re-handled. You could even say that the calendar, the process book, and the small publications that travel hand to hand are part of this aesthetic language: portable, durable, and designed for continuity.

This also helps clarify why DMAS matters for curatorial thinking.

In the last few decades, curating has expanded from exhibition-making toward research, public programs, publishing, education, and institution-building. But much of that expansion still assumes an institutional center. DMAS flips that assumption. It positions the neighborhood as a primary site of knowledge production, and it treats convening in a precarious place as a core curatorial gesture.

It also forces a sobering lesson: a commons can be carefully made, and still be structurally undermined when rents rise, redevelopment accelerates, and autonomous public gathering becomes harder to sustain.

Now we need to widen the frame, because the second movement of this story is where the scale shifts dramatically.

In 2016 and 2017, the 11th Shanghai Biennale took place at the Power Station of Art, curated by Indian artist group Raqs Media Collective under the title Why Not Ask Again? Arguments, Counter-arguments and Stories. Within that structure was a section called 51 Personae.

Working with DMAS, Chen coordinated 51 Personae as a city-wide series of gatherings that took place across Shanghai between November 2016 and March 2017.

On paper, this could sound like a familiar institutional gesture: a biennial reaches out to the city and adds a socially engaged component. But 51 Personae is more specific than that. It is a proposal about where cultural authority lives.

It unfolded as 51 events across the city. These were not primarily staged inside the museum. They were encounters on chosen ground: in places and with people who already had their own routines, their own micro-worlds, and their own stakes in Shanghai’s transformations.

That phrase chosen ground matters. It implies that the museum is not the default site of encounter, and that expertise is distributed. It also implies that what counts as culture includes ways of living that might never enter art institutions unless someone builds a bridge.

There is something methodologically consistent here: 51 Personae did not begin at the museum. It was initiated with a daylong cooking session in the studio of DMAS, with Boss Miao, also known as Miao Yi, alongside the release of a process book-calendar.

This detail is not quaint. It shows how DMAS functioned as an infrastructural base. The biennial did not simply hire a curator and outsource community engagement. It plugged into an existing neighborhood practice that already had routines, trust, and a working definition of reciprocity.

This is exactly where the question of longevity becomes sharp. Because DMAS itself would later confront the most basic question of all: what happens to mutual aid when the room that holds it is taken away?

Too often, biennials extract local stories as temporary content. They generate attention and then leave. Local people become atmosphere: authenticity for the global art world. When that happens, the city is consumed as an image.

51 Personae offers a different model, even if it still operates under constraints. It aims less for spectacular images and more for encounters—forms of attention that do not compress easily into a single photograph.

One example helps make this concrete.

In 2019, the Institute of Contemporary Arts at NYU Shanghai hosted a talk by Chen that revisited Jingyunli No. 7, a three-story traditional shikumen house and its inhabitant, Ms. Cheng. The story entered Chen’s field of vision through 51 Personae. The point was not to turn a person into a symbol, but to show how individual life becomes complex inside massive urban transformation.

This matters because it pushes against a familiar failure mode of socially engaged art: treating people as representative cases. Here, the individual is treated as irreducible: a knot of memory, property relations, affect, labor, and belonging.

And there is another layer.

The 11th Shanghai Biennale emphasized infra-curatorial platforms and layers. In this framing, curatorial work can operate beneath display: a supportive system, a distributed platform.

This is precisely where Chen’s work becomes a bridge between the neighborhood and the biennial without allowing one to simply absorb the other. DMAS offers grounded practice and daily presence. 51 Personae translates that practice into a city-wide series of gatherings, and frames those gatherings not as outreach, but as the biennial learning how to behave differently.

Now we arrive at the part of the story that is easiest to overlook if you measure impact only through attendance and press.

Publishing.

A small book associated with 51 Personae was produced in relation to the biennial, but more importantly, 51 Personae has continued beyond it as an independent art publishing initiative. It describes publishing as an urgent artistic practice, with attention to lived experience in Asia and the Third World, and to marginalized voices under suppression.

If DMAS is a local commons of attention, then 51 Personae becomes a mobile infrastructure. Publishing preserves and circulates minor histories that might otherwise be erased by redevelopment, censorship, or the speed of urban change. A publication can sit on a table, circulate hand to hand, and last outside official channels.

It can also become one answer to the pressures that closed the Dinghaiqiao venue itself. When a neighborhood space is hollowed out by rising rents and urban renewal, documentation and publishing can help carry relationships, memories, and methods into new sites.

In environmental terms, regeneration is not only about restoring a damaged system. It is also about building resilience, which often means redundancy and multiple pathways. A single channel is fragile. A braided river is resilient. A single institutional channel for cultural memory is fragile. A distributed network of publishing, small gatherings, archives, and shared spaces is more resilient.

Now I want to return to the opening question and answer it in three ways.

First, when curating becomes a way of living with neighbors under demolition pressure, it becomes care.

Not care as sentiment, but care as practice: holding space, feeding people, organizing gatherings, creating access to knowledge, and building a room where people can remain in relation even as their built environment becomes unstable. This is close to what we might call maintenance as art.

Second, curating becomes a method of research.

In a 2023 talk in Shanghai, Chen describes an approach that works without predetermined issues or problems, moving through the limitedness of a path and its exclusions rather than through grand frameworks. The world does not always present itself as a clear problem. Sometimes it presents itself as scenes, routines, and small pressures. The work is to stay with them long enough for better questions to emerge.

Third, curating becomes infrastructure.

DMAS provides a base in a neighborhood. 51 Personae extends that method into a city-wide set of encounters. Publishing carries those encounters beyond the biennial’s timeline, building a durable support system for minor histories.

And then, the test: DMAS’s physical site wound down in late 2020 and early 2021, under the combined weight of rising rents, urban renewal, and the shrinking space available for autonomous organizing. But the infrastructure did not simply disappear. It re-formed as a more decentralized, nomadic network of people who continued to publish, convene, and collaborate elsewhere.

At this point, it is reasonable to ask: where is the ecological dimension?

Dinghaiqiao is not a forest or a farm. It is a dense city neighborhood. But ecology is not only about wilderness. Ecology is about relationships, dependencies, and the conditions that make life possible, including in cities.

Urban political ecology helps us see cities as metabolic systems: flows of energy, materials, labor, water, and waste, organized through power. Demolition is not only the destruction of buildings. It is the disruption of social ecologies. It severs neighbor networks, disperses informal economies, and breaks the everyday infrastructures that make life livable for working-class and migrant residents.

From that perspective, DMAS can be understood as a small act of ecological repair. It does not restore a wetland. But it restores relational capacity. It makes it possible for people to recognize one another as neighbors and collaborators, rather than as isolated individuals negotiating with the state or market alone.

This is why Chen’s work is so valuable for thinking about regeneration. Regeneration is not only about more-than-human systems. It is also about regenerating the social conditions that allow people to advocate for their environments and their futures.

But we should not romanticize this work.

There are tensions and limits, and naming them is part of taking the practice seriously.

One limit is scale. A small apartment can do a great deal, but it cannot stop a bulldozer by itself. DMAS operates in a space where direct confrontation can be risky, and where politics often has to be indirect: built through relationships, knowledge, and careful tactics. And even when confrontation is not the aim, macro projects like old neighborhood renovation can still erase the ground where everyday collaboration happens, displacing the community a space is trying to serve.

Another tension is class. Contemporary art worlds, even when socially engaged, often remain elite. The challenge is not only to invite working-class and migrant residents into art. It is to shift what counts as knowledge, what counts as cultural value, and who gets to set agendas.

A third tension is documentation. Social practice disappears quickly unless it is documented, but documentation can also flatten lived experience into consumable narratives. Publishing can extend a project’s life, but it can also be absorbed into market logics.

What I find compelling in Chen’s trajectory is that she treats these tensions as reasons to build better infrastructures, not reasons to retreat. And the closure of DMAS’s physical venue only sharpens that point: the end of a site can become the beginning of a more mobile, more distributed strategy for persistence.

Now let me close by returning to the feeling we started with: the slow unmaking of everyday certainty under demolition pressure.

In a city like Shanghai, where redevelopment can be swift and decisive, what can a rented apartment do?

It can become a room where people remember together, and where memory becomes a shared resource rather than a private burden.

It can become a room where people learn together, not only about art, but about the city, about policy, about their own histories, and about the tactics of living through uncertainty.

It can become a room where people cook together, and where cooking becomes a way of holding time open in the face of displacement.

And if that room can connect to a biennial without being swallowed by it, and if that biennial project can turn into a publishing infrastructure that keeps circulating minor histories, then we begin to see what longevity might look like in cultural work. And if the room itself is eventually lost—as DMAS was—then longevity may also mean learning how to carry the practice forward without denying the loss: converting a rooted commons into a portable one.

Regenerative artivism, in this episode, is not a spectacle. It is not a single artwork. It is a set of infrastructures for staying with others in a damaged urban world.

As we move through Season 2, keep this in mind: the most radical work is not always the loudest. Sometimes it is the work that builds a table, keeps a room open, and learns how to keep going. Sometimes it is also the work that learns how to keep going after the room closes—insisting that mutual aid is not only a place, but a practice that can move.

Thank you for listening to regenerative artivism: Asian women’s creative strategies for social and ecological futures. If this episode brought someone or some place to mind, I invite you to continue that reflection in your own conversations and practices. You can find a short summary and a few references in the episode description in your listening app. Until next time, take care of yourself, and take care of the places that sustain you.