What does it mean to remember across distance?
In an increasingly mobile world, the relationship between people and place is being continuously reshaped. Memory is no longer anchored to a fixed geography, but shaped through movement and temporal overlap. As bodies traverse space, can experience itself take on new forms of continuity?
Earlier this year, New Spring | Lines, curated by Fanglin Luo (lead curator), Coco Shunshun Qi and Jade Xiaojing Gu, was presented at Safehouse2 in London. Bringing together 18 artists from different countries, the exhibition draws on Northeast Asian contexts—rooted in the curatorial team’s own backgrounds—to explore diasporic experience and non-linear memory through a range of immersive and participatory works.
Approaching the subject through both spatial and temporal perspectives, the exhibition takes Northeast Asia as a point of departure. Rather than offering a singular narrative, the works construct parallel temporalities shaped by personal memory and affect, unfolding alongside broader historical structures. Viewers are invited to engage with these fragmented yet familiar sensibilities, opening up new experiences within the specific context of London.
Participation and presence are central to the exhibition’s methodology. Through performance, moving image, workshops, panel discussions and installation, audiences shift from passive spectators to active participants. Notably, members of the curatorial team also contribute as artists, blurring the distinction between organising and making. Fanglin Luo, for instance, presents Spinning (2026), a workshop based on a traditional handkerchief dance from her hometown. Participants are invited to rotate the handkerchief while sharing their own memories and lived experiences in London, forming new connections in the present moment.
Several works engage directly with sensory memory. Kyra Zhang’s workshop on Northeast Chinese food culture uses taste to activate personal and collective memory, while Alice Shuyi Wang uses rice as a carrier of intergenerational memory, combining scent and live performance. Rikuto Fujimoto’s installation transforms electricity, sound and heat, evoking the embodied experience of gathering around warmth, and Evey Sun’s wearable jewellery works, made from bone, rope and wood, draw on tactile and ritualistic memories rooted in Northeast Asian shamanic traditions.
Spanning painting, performance, moving image, sound and installation, the exhibition foregrounds an open and fluid structure of experience. Rather than fragmentation, it proposes gathering as a continuous process of connection and reconfiguration. Through personal memory, it gestures towards broader marginal and non-central identities and shared human conditions.
The “lines” in the exhibition’s title refer both to the visual traces of cold, post-industrial landscapes and to the weaving of non-linear memory—threads that extend, intersect and connect individuals across space and time.
In a global city like London, diasporic experience unfolds through connections across different times and communities. New Spring | Lines traces these connections as they continue to take shape.
Dates: 31 January – 3 February 2026
Venue: Safehouse2, London
Curators: Fanglin Luo (lead curator), Coco Shunshun Qi, Jade Xiaojing Gu
Artists: Bomin Kim, Coco Shunshun Qi, Evey Sun, Fanglin Luo, Jade Xiaojing Gu, Jiaqi Lyu, Jungyun Lee (Gimachim), Kyra Zhang, Rikuto Fujimoto, Sihong Liu, Shuyi Alice Wang, Xiaoze Zhang, Yiwen Liang, Yizheng Liu, Yusuke Kuriki, Zengbo Qi, Zhenghang Fu, Ziyan Liu
*All images courtesy of the artists. Photography by Ziyan Liu(Image 1), Haitian Liu(Image 2), Etienne Leung (Image 3), Zhenghang Fu (Image 4)
