TENG WANG STUDIO
Curators: Sinan Wang, Teng Wang, Jialu Shen
London, 2025
Curators:
SInan Wang, Teng Wang, Jialu Shen
Street study group:
Sinan Wang, Teng Wang and Jialu Shen
Artists:
Adriette Myburgh @adriettemyburgh_art, Amos Yi Huang,
Annie Colloby @riffygal_29, Beatriz Santos @beatrizsantosart,
Bill Aitchison @infinite_biscuit, Crystal Wu @wuchenmo_, Deyu Zeng
@zeng.deyu, Don't Matter Labs (Chew Yunging) @dontmatterlabs,
Feliz Yuan, Shuhan Zheng and Ziyu Zhang @quailindaeyo,
Henryk Terpilowski @henrykterpart,
Hongil Yoon@and_the_raven,
Indianna Solnick@indsolnick, Jialu Chen
@vvlula_cjl, Jiani Gu @fragrant.metal, Jingwen Li
@lihasnoname, Lisa Tustian @walking.magpie, Lola Luk @luk_lola, Max Livesey,
Minghao Wu @minghaowuu, Qinru He @river_invasion_, Ricardo lacono
@riccardoiacono_art, Rob Herbert@sheriff.bones, Xiaohua Liu,
Yang Liu @thelittlemuseum_, Yanting Zeng @yanting_zenggg,
Yibin Liu @l_aaurua, Yunchao Ke @yc_k996799, Yunxi Wu
@yunxi.works, Zitong Hao @suskie.925
Exhibition Photographer:
Jialin Yan，Dashen Zhang，Teng Wang，Jialu Shen
Poster Cinematographer:
Jiali Shao
Photo and video Editing:
Teng Wan，Jialu Shen
Plant a Lamppost: Tactics of Appropriating the Street
By Sinan
Plant a Lamppost in the Exhibition, curated by Sinan Wang, Teng Wang, and Jialu Shen, opened at London’s Bold Elephant on 26 August 2025. Bringing together 31 artists across installation, sculpture, photography, painting, film, and performance, the exhibition extends the Street Study Group’s recent research: Street furniture as a place-making tool: public appropriation and political conflict in Kensington and Chelsea, UK. Drawing on British sculptor Arnold Machin’s now-mythic 1956 act of chaining himself to a Victorian lamppost—and later “planting” it in his garden—the show reanimates the street as a terrain of agency, imagination, and contestation. Machin’s gesture, at once a protest and a performance, is redeployed here as method and metaphor: a provocation to reconsider how we inhabit, appropriate, and reconfigure urban space in an era defined by privatisation, commodification, and control.
At the heart of the exhibition lies appropriation—what Henri Lefebvre framed as the lived production of space and what Michel de Certeau theorised as the tactical, improvisational practices of everyday life. Across installations, interventions, and performances, the show articulates two entwined modes of appropriation: the instinctive gestures that quietly re-script the everyday, and the negotiated acts that expose and challenge the power geometries embedded in public space.
The instinctive appropriations are disarmingly playful yet conceptually rigorous. Max Livesey’s The Promise of Happiness recodes the banality of urban signage into a promise forever deferred, hinting at the quiet absurdities that structure the choreography of movement and expectation. Adriette Myburgh’s Dear Grid, I gave your Son Unicorn Muffs. He’s Mine Now anthropomorphises the mute rigidity of a London bollard, collapsing the distinction between infrastructure and intimacy. Feliz Yuan and collaborators’ Q transforms a bus stop bench into a precarious seesaw, undoing the authority of functional design in favour of contingent, collective play. Lisa Tustian’s Some Found Objects treats urban detritus as a quiet archive of gestures and absences, reframing what is discarded as a material vocabulary of belonging. Together, these works suggest that even the most modest acts of re-use and re-imagination carry a radical charge: an embodied reclaiming of the everyday from the abstractions of capital and planning.
By contrast, the negotiated appropriations speak in sharper tones, confronting the logics of control that structure the contemporary street. Jialu Chen’s The Protected "Illicit Messages" intervenes in the sanitisation of Manchester’s visual landscape, asking what forms of expression are preserved and what forms are erased in the name of urban order. In doing so, the work exposes the hidden infrastructures of censorship and value that underpin “clean” public spaces. Don’t Matter Labs’ Space_Object_3: plant a Sitting_Lamp post extends Machin’s action into the present, reconfiguring the lamppost as a site of use and rest, and, in its mobility, a metaphor for the shifting, elusive dynamics of power in the public realm. These works, like de Certeau’s “tactics,” trace alternative grammars of presence—quiet but insistent claims to a more democratic and porous urban commons.
What distinguishes Plant a Lamppost in the Exhibition is its structural reflexivity. This is not merely a show about the city; it is itself an act of appropriation. By translating academic research into an embodied, spatial register, the exhibition collapses the divide between scholarship and practice. The gallery becomes a provisional street—an occupied space—where art is mobilised as a mode of inquiry and urban theory is enacted, rather than simply cited.
This reflexive gesture lends the exhibition its critical weight. By resisting spectacle in favour of provisionality and dialogue, the curators position the show as an open-ended proposition rather than a didactic statement. The street is not romanticised nor reduced to dystopia; instead, it is treated as a living archive, dense with contradictions, tensions, and latent possibilities.
In this sense, Plant a Lamppost in the Exhibition is less a resolution than a rehearsal—a staging of how art can inhabit and extend the political imagination of the everyday. To “plant a lamppost,” the show suggests, is to reclaim space incrementally: through acts of use, care, and improvisation that challenge the abstractions of policy and the alienations of capital.
At a moment when public space is increasingly surveilled, regulated, and enclosed, this exhibition reads as both critique and proposition. It reminds us that resistance often begins in the smallest gestures: in a sticker on a sign, a bench tilted out of alignment, or a lamppost quietly claimed as one’s own. In doing so, it not only reimagines the politics of the street but also the role of the exhibition itself—as a tactic, a commons, and a form of thinking made spatial.
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Curating/Fine Art/ Architecture
tengwangart@gmail.com