Best Before
Group Exhibition — Whiteshepherd Gallery in collaboration with D Contemporary Curator: Ziyan Xu | Koppel Collective, 157 Regent’s Park Road, London NW1 8BB
A date on a label was never a deadline, only a suggestion. Over three evenings in October, Best Before made that argument in a room, and it was held.
Whiteshepherd Gallery’s latest group exhibition, presented at Koppel Collective in Chalk Farm, gathered twenty artists working across painting, installation, and performance around a deceptively simple question: what happens in the interval between ripe and expired? Not the moment of peak freshness, but the moment just after, when something is still becoming something else. Fermenting. Softening. Sweetening. The exhibition treated this interval not as failure but as the most generative space available.
The works arrived from varied directions but shared a quality of sustained attention to surface, material, and time. Paintings that accumulated rather than declared. Installations that asked to be approached slowly. A table laid for tasting. What connected them was less a shared aesthetic than a shared willingness to remain in the threshold rather than resolve it.
Curator Ziyan Xu structured the exhibition around the idea that ripeness is a way of keeping time: not linear, not absolute, but relational, dependent on what you bring to the encounter. Alongside the visual works, two food artists set their pieces on an actual table, completing a proposition the exhibition had been building toward. Part of Best Before was only finished once it had been consumed.
“not only the sugar, but the days” Li-Young Lee, From Blossoms
Exhibiting Artists: Alice d’Apolito, Zijing Deng, Beverley Duckworth, Deep Food, Nelson Hernández, Chujun Hu, Xingxin Hu, Kairos Huang, Sophie Keith, Na Young Lee, Yuexuan Li, Zhenzhen Ma, Siyu Man, Jennifer Louise Martin, Ling Miao, Finn James, Ismail Ucci, Mou In Yao, Jiayi Xu, 00 Zhang
Food Art
Part I: The Table by Paola A. Sánchez
On the opening night, Paola A. Sánchez laid a table of guavas: some ripe, some wrapped in newspaper to hurry them along, some left to sit. Among them, handmade bocadillos, a traditional Colombian guava sweet, sealed in bijao leaves and stamped with best-before dates that had already passed. The instruction was simple: look, choose, taste. The work asked visitors to trust their senses over the label, and in doing so placed the act of choosing at the centre of the piece. What was eaten and what was left behind became part of the work itself. In Best Before, Sánchez’s table operated as both still life and social proposition. The bocadillo had not expired; only the date had. What ripened on that table was not the fruit alone but the moment of decision.
Part II: A Plan for Eating by Tony Li
The following evening, Tony Li took a single ingredient, pear, and drew its life as a 1:1 architectural plan. Visitors moved through the table in groups of six, passing from zone to zone as the pear transformed:
Threshold · Before: nashi pear, cucumber, celery
Promenade I · Becoming: fresh pear, shiso, cultured cream
Promenade II · Becoming: jasmine-poached pear, sunflower seed miso
Pause · Best: ripe pear, jasmine cream, osmanthus
Beyond: roasted pear, fermented pear, aged cheese
Courtyard · Gathering: sourdough and pear, shared
Departure · After: pear pâte de fruit, warm Pu’er tea
The work sat precisely at the boundary between architecture and cooking: one disciplines the body through space and movement, the other through time and transformation. Li, founder of Moonlight Collective, brought both instincts to a tasting that was as much about sequence and attention as it was about flavour. Within Best Before, the installation extended the exhibition’s central inquiry from the visual to the edible. Each zone marked a moment in time, not a countdown but a passage. To move through the table was to experience ripeness not as a fixed state but as a direction of travel, which is precisely what the exhibition asked of all its works.
About the Organisers
Whiteshepherd Gallery, founded by Xu Ziyan, is a London-based nomadic gallery and curatorial platform working with emerging artists from the earliest stages of their practice. Its programme centres cross-cultural inquiry, with particular attention to feminism, migration, and identity politics, operating actively across Asia and the United Kingdom. www.whiteshepherdgallery.com
D Contemporary is a London gallery committed to bringing newly emerging artists into the commercial art world earlier than conventional gallery structures permit, and to championing contemporary art from international communities underrepresented in the London art scene.
Best Before was presented in partnership with Our Culture Magazine and JustArt Newspaper Club.
Over three days, Koppel Collective welcomed hundreds of visitors, with the opening night especially alive. Artists and audiences gathered between works and around the table, together completing an experience about ripeness and passing. Thank you to every visitor who came, and to all the artists whose work made Best Before what it was.
