The Longlati Collection Committee is jointly organized by Gwendoline Cho-ning Kam, Liang Chen, Lu Yu and Ben Xia Tian, all long based in Shanghai. The Committee aims to cultivate Shanghai’s local art community and, through an interdisciplinary perspective, to foster interaction among collecting, research, and the practices of young artists. Taking Shanghai as its primary site, the Committee will regularly visit exhibitions at galleries, museums, institutions, and alternative spaces across the city. It will focus on young artists residing in Shanghai or maintaining an enduring connection to the city, with particular attention to practitioners working consistently in installation, moving image, and related media.
The Committee will research each artist’s practice, examining the trajectory of their work, critical concerns, engagement with media, and consistency in their artistic development. Through viewing works in person, studio visits, artist interviews, and internal discussions among members, the Committee will formulate phased collection proposals. Beyond the acquisition of works, the Committee also hopes to provide more concrete support within the artist’s creative process: on the one hand, assisting with the use of materials, technical solutions, craft realization, and spatial presentation; on the other hand, helping artists, through research, discussion, and textual work, to situate their personal experiences within a broader local cultural and contemporary context. Members will each make proposals, evaluate one another’s recommendations, and, after thorough discussion, collectively decide which works will enter the collection of Longlati.
L: Nabuqi, A View Beyond Space No. 5, 2015, coloured stainless steel, 220 × 156 × 18 cm；M: Yuanwei Liang, 2017.29, 2023, oil on linen, 250 × 200 cm；R: Xiaoyuan Hu, Carpel III, 2025, marble, rosewood, Xiao (raw silk), ink, steel wire, iron wire, thread, 116.5 × 230 × 62 cm
Longlati Collection Committee (A–Z)
Gwendoline Cho-ning Kam
Curator, Artist and Ethnomusicologist
Gwendoline Cho-ning Kam (b. Hong Kong, 1986) is a curator, artist and ethnomusicologist. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Music from The Chinese University of Hong Kong and pursued further studies in ethnomusicology at the University of Hawaii at Manoā. Kam’s work revolves around how multi-sensory interactions in auditory narratives affect people’s everyday experiences, perceptions, and expressions of thingness. In her contemporary art practices, Kam uses ” noise ” as both a self-referential concept and a creative theme, continually seeking to bridge the gap between academic discourse and cultural societies. By exploring dimensions of time, space, and material, Kam reveals the publicness of sound and scrutinizes how the medium is manipulated to imagine, shape, define, and perform cultural identities.
As a curator, Kam was shortlisted for the OCAT Institute’s “Research-Based Curatorial Project” (2021) and the JIMEI x ARLES Curatorial Award for Photography and Moving Image (2023). In 2022, she became one of the inaugural curatorial fellows of the De Ying Foundation and published her research paper “The Missed Rendezvous: Returning to the Expanded Field of Sound”. In 2023, she was selected for the XINTIANDI × UCCA “RanRan” Artists-in-Residence Program. Her writings and exhibition critiques have been published in The Thinker, Brooklyn Rail, and ARTnews (China), etc.
Liang Chen
Architect, Artist
Liang Chen was born in Dandong, Liaoning, China, in 1987. He graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture from Jilin Jianzhu University. From 2011 to 2015, he worked as an associate and senior project architect at Vector Architects, where he completed projects including the Aranya Seashore Library. In 2017, Liang established his independent architecture and art studio, Aleph-Liangchen (www.aleph-liangchen.com). His representative architectural projects include Singer House and Innerflow Gallery. His solo exhibitions include 1976/2020, DRC No. 12, Beijing (2020), and Liang Chen: Aleph, A4 Art Museum, Chengdu (2019). As a curator, Liang’s curatorial projects include Space Discipline, OCAT Shanghai, Shanghai (2020); From Antung to Dandong, Wind H Art Center, Beijing (2022); Edges as the Center, G Museum, Nanjing (2023); and Endless Annotation, Yalu River Art Museum, Dandong (2023–present).
Liang Chen explores the possibility of paradox through his research-based practice in architecture and art, particularly the idea of infinity within the finite. He takes boundary spaces as the subject of his study and engages in interdisciplinary practices grounded in architecture and infrastructure. Drawing on nearly a decade of spatial research into his hometown of Dandong, a border city, as both a foundation and point of departure, he has connected a series of broader definitions of boundaries and spatial perspectives, including geological fault lines, boundary rivers, coastlines, the Ming Great Wall, the willow-bordered areas of the late Qing dynasty, the Eastern Road, and the Anfeng Railway. Through exhibitions and research practices over the past several years, he has sought to explore new definitions of the relationship between centre and periphery. The border is not merely a transport endpoint situated at the relative centre of a map, but a closer and more integrated centre formed in relation to the opposite shore. It is not merely a spectacle resembling the “end of the world” as perceived by travellers, but a hybrid, everyday landscape that facilitates cultural exchange and integration. Nor is it simply a geometric line on a map, but an axis from which a vast, continuous, and layered border space extends on both sides. This space, therefore, should be observed and studied as a whole: a global border space.
Lu Yu
Artist
Lu Yu, born in Chengdu, Sichuan in 1997, currently works and resides in Shanghai. In 2019, she graduated from Pratt Institute with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) degree. In her practice, Lu Yu adopts the analytical approach of medical science to dissect social ailments, employing mixed media to translate the “abnormality” into tangible visual expressions. She has been selected as the Longlati Foundation resident artist for 2025–2026.
Ben Xia Tian
Curator
Ben Xia Tian is a PhD in Philosophy, curator, and writer, currently teaching at Donghua University in Shanghai. His research and practice span curating, writing, and teaching, with a sustained focus on the intellectual history of art and design, as well as the mechanisms, conditions, and historical trajectories of production, mediation, and display in contemporary Chinese art.
