Making Space

Peach Trees Bear Fruit
Fabric, botanical rubbing, felt, old fruit knife, photographs | 280 × 250 cm | 2026 Part of Seeds in the Wind, Hong Mengxia’s long-term project shaped through more than ten years of fieldwork in leprosy rehabilitation villages, this work begins with a night-time conversation under a peach tree in a leprosy village in Honghe, Yunnan. Through fabric, plant traces, and photographs, Hong returns to the story of a Yi woman who, in the 1980s, gave birth in the absence of medical care. Refused by local clinics and left with little support, she survived by cutting open her own vaginal opening with a small fruit knife, holding onto a sentence once told to her by her grandmother. The next day, peaches were peeled beneath the same tree with the same kind of small, worn knife. In this work, the green peach becomes a metaphor for the female body — marked by pain, shaped by isolation, and carried through survival. The knife, dangerous in ordinary life, becomes here a tool of courage and self-rescue. Rather than reconstructing that night as evidence, Peach Trees Bear Fruit asks how another person’s pain can be imagined, felt, and allowed to move through us. Currently on view in
THE RIVER FLOWS, THE SERPENT SHADOWS
Artist: Hong Mengxia
Curator: Xu Binghuang
Curatorial Assistant: Fu Situi
Making Space, Guangzhou
7 Feb – 20 May 2026 #HongMengxia #MakingSpaceGuangzhou #GuangzhouExhibition #leprosy #contemporaryart

The local Deity and Snake in Xiangyu’s Dream Bamboo, cotton thread, mother-of-pearl, fabric | 50 × 150 cm | 2026 Part of Hong Mengxia’s long-term project Seeds in the Wind, developed through more than ten years of fieldwork in leprosy rehabilitation villages, this work begins with a woman’s insistence on how she wanted to be addressed. When Hong met Xiangyu in 2016, Xiangyu asked not to be called “Mu” (“mother”), because she had never married. From that unspoken wish, the artist built a dream: a parallel life in which Xiangyu was healed when she first showed symptoms of leprosy as a teenager, went to school, learned to read and write, kept the full use of her hands and feet, and lived the life that illness, isolation, and stigma had taken from her. Yet within this tender dream, a strange snake appears — moving between dream and reality. Xiangyu once said, “Leprosy is like a snake. It doesn’t bite, but everyone is afraid of it.” In this work, dream becomes both comfort and question: how do we move through fear, and see what has been made untouchable in its true form? Currently on view in THE RIVER FLOWS, THE SERPENT SHADOWS Artist: Hong Mengxia Curator: Xu Binghuang Curatorial Assistant: Fu Situi Making Space, Guangzhou 7 Feb – 20 May 2026 #HongMengxia #MakingSpaceGuangzhou #GuangzhouExhibition #leprosy #contemporaryart

Curating as Conditions for Emergence 走 着说 
April 5 (Sun), 2:30 PM
Making Space, Guangzhou This Sunday, curator and art historian Eléonore Varone @secantspace will share her long-term curatorial practice, reflecting on site-specific work, buried histories, public space, and how curating can create conditions for forms and positions to take shape. The talk follows her short-term research residency in the Pearl River Delta and will also include a conversation with Cora Yubin Luo @coraluoluo . Eléonore is the founder of Secant Space in Istanbul and has previously worked across Switzerland and internationally, including Bex&Arts 2023, CACY, and other institutions and festivals.
Cora Yubin Luo is an independent curator based in Guangzhou, whose work focuses on individual expressions obscured by dominant histories and social structures. Hosted/curated by Ziyun Wang @zyunzyunw , Chao Wang @hard_work_workshop , and Binghuang Xu @binghuang_yun 
Supported by Pro Helvetia Shanghai, the Swiss Arts Council @prohelvetia Fig 1, poster designed by Sirui Fu @forthreerui Fig 2, Rémy Bender & Basile Richon Vivement demain! Setting up Bex&Arts, 2023, ©Gabriel Monnet Fig 3, Emanuele Resce Artist talk and workshop Urban Cafe Istanbul 2025, Courtesy of Eléonore Varone Fig 4, In situ project and performances, Heresies, 2021, ©Gentiane Kadrijaj Fig 5, Archive of the 17th Century, On witchcraft in the Alpine Region, Courtesy of the curator Fig 6, Eléonore Varone, ©Blaise David Fig 7, Cora Yubin Luo, Courtesy of the Cora #MakingSpace #EléonoreVarone #CoraYubinLuo #SecantSpace #ProHelvetia

Welcoming Eléonore Varone to Making Space From March 26 through the coming two weeks, we are happy to welcome Eléonore Varone for a research residency. Eléonore Varone is a curator and art historian whose practice is deeply attentive to space, context, and site-specific encounters. Since 2024, she has founded Secant Space @secantspace in Istanbul as a curatorial platform and artist residency that prioritizes research, archival work, and long-term artistic development. During her stay, her research will focus on independent and alternative art spaces in the Pearl River Delta. Starting from Making Space, we will travel with her through Guangzhou and nearby areas, visiting artist-run initiatives, small-scale cultural platforms, and self-organised spaces to understand how local art ecologies are built, sustained, and negotiated over time. This residency is supported by Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council @prohelvetia . And hosted by Wang Ziyun @zyunzyunw , Wang Chao @hard_work_workshop ,and Xu Binghuang @binghuang_yun . Fig 1, ©Blaise David Fig 2, Yusuké Y. Offhause_Vivement demain!_2023_Bex&Arts Triennal_©Gabriel Monnet Fig 3, Fragmentin_Vivement demain!_2023_Bex&Art Triennal_©Gabriel Monnet Fig 4, Simon Deppierraz_Vertigo_2022_Oblique Gallery_©Tonatiuh Ambrosetti Fig 5, Emanuele Resce and Ferhat Tunç_In Transformation_2025_Secant Space_©Barış Özcetin Fig 6, Ziyun&WangChao_Moving Park_2026_Secant Space ©Barış Özcetin #MakingSpace #EléonoreVarone #SecantSpace #ProHelvetia #Guangzhou

Seeds in the Wind A long-term project by Hong Mengxia Currently on view in The River Flows, The Serpent Shadows Artist: Hong Mengxia Curator: Xu Binghuang Curatorial assistant: Fu Situi Making Space, Guangzhou 7 Feb - 19 Apr 2026 Developed through more than 10 years of fieldwork in over twenty leprosy rehabilitation villages in Guangdong, Yunnan, and beyond, Seeds in the Wind centres on the lives of women shaped by leprosy, village life, segregation, and the long afterlife of social stigma. The exhibition marks the first presentation of this series, bringing together three works from Seeds in the Wind. Its first work, Flowing Through Time, traces three moments of separation in the life of Xu He through embroidery, photographs, and moving image. Across nearly a century, the work speaks of leprosy, women’s lives, memory, and the historical forces that keep pulling people apart. Through fabric, thread, weaving, and plant-based processes, Hong Mengxia turns long-term listening and research into a visual language of tenderness, pain, anger, and survival. #MakingSpaceGuangzhou #GuangzhouExhibition #leprosy #women #diseasediscrimination

Audience Invitation | The Reality Here and Female Creativity Jin Yiyi × Duan Yu — Talk & Live Set The Sound of Wildness Vol.1 🗓 Sunday, Feb 8, 19:30 📍 Making Space, Guangzhou This evening is built around a simple but difficult question: how can singing stay with reality, without turning reality into a symbol? In the “warm inertia” of everyday life, and in the noise of workshops, factories, and urban villages, music can be more than expression. It can be a method: to listen, to witness, to resist being spoken for, and to hold what is often forced into silence. Curated by Chang Le @oooooyaya_seong and Yang Yang @springorabbit , The Sound of Wildness invites two musicians whose positions are very different, yet whose attention is equally grounded in lived experience: Jin Yiyi @zoeychild writes from the fissures of industrial landscapes and social structures. She works with metaphor, distance, and precision—letting overlooked imprints of existence surface through melody, and turning private feelings into something we can share without simplification. Duan Yu brings a field-honed practice shaped by migration and labour. From assembly-line work to community music, and from collaborating with the New Workers’ Art Troupe to founding Jiu Ye Band in 2016 (China’s first band dedicated to singing about women, female workers, and children’s rights), her singing is not only a voice—it is a container for collective life, a way to transform suppressed cries into a form of healing and action. ℹ️ More info via the link in our bio. Two creative methodologies will meet and reflect each other: — the observer’s poetic distance — the activist’s working method #MakingSpace #GuangzhouLiveMusic #WomenInMusic #FemaleCreativity #FeministArts

Project Announcement | The Flow of the River, the Shadow of the Serpent Artist: Hong Mengxia Curator: Xu Binghuang Curatorial Assistant: Fu Sirui Exhibition: 07 Feb – 19 Apr 2026 Opening: Sat, 07 Feb 2026, 19:00 📍 Making Space (Guangzhou) At the margins of modernity’s grand narratives, leprosy is not simply an “old problem” solved by medicine—it is a social wound inscribed by power: isolation, stigma, and long-standing mechanisms that produce distance and exclusion. In Yi Bimo ritual narratives, the “serpent” names both taboo and survival: coiling in the dark, shedding its skin, continuing to live. This exhibition presents three works from Hong Mengxia’s long-term project Seeds in the Wind: Flowing Through Time, The Local Deity and the Snake in Xiangyu’s Dream, and Peach Trees Bear Fruit. Through fabric, embroidery, and handwork, Hong confronts a form of everyday, diffused violence—while centring women’s bodies and life narratives: pain, tenderness, anger, desire, and the insistence on dignity. For the full curatorial text, please check the link in our bio. Image 2-4, Courtesy of the artist. #MakingSpace #Guangzhou #ContemporaryArt #HongMengxia #XuBinghuang

Happy New Year from Making Space ✨ Thank you to the artists, researchers, neighbors, and partners who walked with us this past year—near and far. Your care, courage, and everyday practice keep our small space alive. In 2026, we’ll continue weaving socially engaged and ecological projects across archives, family histories, rural–urban ties, and community learning—slowly, collaboratively, and with love. Here’s to gentler infrastructures, shared knowledge, and more room for overlooked voices. Stay with us—field notes, residencies, and gatherings ahead. 🌱 #MakingSpace #Guangzhou #SociallyEngagedArt #EcologicalArt #Diaspora

This Friday at Making Space 💫 Like Water Over Stone: Soft Power in Practice
Film screening & conversation with artist Charmaine Poh Singaporean-Chinese artist Charmaine Poh (@psxcharmaine ) will be sharing a selection of moving-image works made since 2021, tracing soft, persistent forms of power across technology, the body, queer kinship and diasporic histories between Guangdong, Fujian, Singapore and Berlin. We’ll start from her ongoing series THE YOUNG BODY UNIVERSE (rooted in her experience as a child actress on Singapore TV in the early 2000s), and move towards more recent works such as The Moon is Wet and What’s softest in the world rushes and runs over what’s hardest in the world, before opening up to her current research on women’s migration and spiritual/geographical “departures” from South China. After the screening, Charmaine will share what she’s been thinking and looking for during her residency at Making Space, and we’ll open the floor for questions and conversation. Time: Fri, 19 Dec 2025, 19:30 Venue: Making Space, Xinzao, Panyu, Guangzhou
Artist: Charmaine Poh Moderator: Binghuang Xu Language: English & Chinese
Free entry, donations welcome Images courtesy of the artist fig. 2 Charmaine Poh; fig. 3 GOOD MORNING YOUNG BODY; fig. 4-5 What’s softest in the world rushes and runs over what’s hardest in the world; fig. 6-7 The Moon is Wet. #CharmainePoh #MakingSpace #FilmScreening ArtistTalk DiasporaStories FeministArt SoftPower AlternativeKinship SouthChina SingaporeArt

Making Space x BAFNET Asian Diaspora and beyond - 4 short films from Germany.
 Curated by writer, director Dieu Hao Do, this special screening in collaboration with the Berlin Asian Film Network (BAFNET) will take place at Making Space, showcasing four shorts by Asian diasporic filmmakers. Moving between Vietnam, Iran, Indonesia, and Germany, the program looks at migration, family memory, and identity. Post-screening online Q&A with filmmakers. About BAFNET: The Berlin Asian Film Network @berlinasianfilm connects audiences interested in films about Asia and the Asian diaspora, raising awareness of under-/misrepresentation in German media and supporting young independent filmmakers through open meetups and short-film screenings with talks. Program (4 films)
 • Xanh (by Thi Dang An Tran @thi_dang_an ) — A daughter challenges her father’s “quiet endurance” after racism, uncovering how a boat-people past reshapes what injustice means. 
• As if Mother Cried that Night (by Hoda Taheri @hoda___taheri ) — An Iranian couple in Berlin navigates a fraught, unconventional path to residency through the maze of bureaucracy.
 • From a Distance (by Hoang Quynh Nguyen @livingquynh ) — A German-born daughter confronts her father’s 1992 Sunflower House trauma, and her own feelings, across cultures.
 • My therapist said, I am full of sadness (by Monica Vanesa Tedja @monictedja ) — A filmmaker braids archives from a devout Indonesian family and a chosen queer kinship to ask what acceptance and love can hold. fig. 3 Director Thi Dang An Tran fig. 5 Director Hoda Taheri fig. 7 Director Hoang Quynh Nguyen fig. 9 Director Monica Vanesa Tedja Images courtesy of the directors #MakingSpace #BAFNET #ShortFilm AsianDiaspora DiasporaCinema Guangzhou CommunityScreening FamilyHistory Migration QueerKinship IndependentFilm CuratorialPractice GoetheInstitut

Roundtable - Drifting and Dreams: The Diasporic Asian Experience in Cinema Sat, Dec 13, 14:30–16:30 As resident filmmaker Dieu Hao Do @dieuhaodo concludes his six-week residency at Making Space, this conversation brings together Hao, residency researcher & film scholar Yue Pan, and writer Runting Chen @javqhc to think with—rather than merely about—the residency. Beginning from Hao’s fieldwork across Guangzhou–Hong Kong–Shenzhen–Shantou and visits to ancestral sites in Huadu/Tianmei, we ask how memory is activated through place, family traces, and community encounters. We’ll reflect on what residencies can catalyze—grounded encounters, site-based looking as method, and dialogues that stitch family memory into the texture of place—while considering how cinema carries diasporic Asian voices across languages and geographies. Speakers
 Yue Pan — Postdoctoral researcher at Shenzhen University; PhD (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne). Specializes in Chinese diaspora cinema across the U.S. and the global Francophone sphere, with a background in screenwriting (Beijing Film Academy). Runting Chen — Fiction writer and researcher (PhD in Literature), based in Guangzhou. Works on memory, space, and diasporic imagination; author of The Adventures of Super Mary (Shanghai Literature & Art Publishing House, 2024).
 Dieu Hao Do — Berlin-based writer, director and BAFNET @berlinasianfilm co-organizer. Explores Asian-German diasporic lives and intergenerational memory; First Steps Award 2023 for HAO ARE YOU; Berlinale Talents alumni, Villa Aurora Fellow. Poster design Sirui Fu fig. 5 Yue Pan（潘越）, fig. 6 Runting Chen （陈润庭）, fig. 7 Dieu Hao Do(杜耀豪) #makingspace #AsianDiaspora FamilyHistory

Residency Fieldwork & Encounters ✨ Since early November, writer, filmmaker Dieu Hao Do @dieuhaodo has been tracing Cantonese family histories across Guangzhou–Hong Kong–Shenzhen. Along with the program researcher Pan Yue, they met local artists/researchers and visited sites from everyday neighbourhoods to exhibitions on Overseas Chinese. As host, we’re grateful to the friends and artists who welcomed Hao and shared knowledge: @matthopestudio @weixiang_lin_ @zx_xylia @yangyang_malan @goldtogreen @binghuang_yun @forthreerui From Hao: “Three and a half weeks have passed since I arrived in Guangzhou. I have had many overwhelming impressions and experienced dimensions that I had only imagined before. I am deeply grateful for the encounters and exchanges with local artists during the first few days and the conversations and meetings that resulted from them. It is exciting for me to get a small glimpse of the rich and diverse culture and history of Guangdong, to visit historical sites and modern buildings, to experience a piece of everyday life, and to reflect on my Cantonese identity. I had the opportunity to visit parts of my family in Hong Kong, who were able to support me with important information and clues in my research into my family history (on my father’s and mother‘s side). It was also impressive for me to visit the works of the Overseas Chinese at the He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen. I feel excellently supported and cared for by @makingspace and am looking forward to the second part of my residency, in which, in addition to further deepening my research on site, I will also be able to contribute more of my work as a filmmaker and community organizer @berlinasianfilm and my knowledge from Germany. Images courtesy of the artist, Sirui Fu, Binghuang Xu #MakingSpace #ArtistResidency #Guangzhou AsianDiaspora Cantonese FamilyHistory Migration CommunityScreening DocumentaryFilm CuratorialPractice GoetheInstitut BAFNET