Chen Yun: Curating As Mutual Aid and The Infrastructure of Minor Histories

In this episode, we follow Shanghai-based curator and organizer Chen Yun 陈韵 and ask what happens when curating stops being an exhibition format and becomes a way of living with neighbors under demolition pressure. The story begins in Dinghaiqiao 定海桥, a working-class neighborhood shaped by redevelopment, where Chen and collaborators turned a modest rented apartment into the Dinghaiqiao Mutual-Aid Society 定海桥互助社(DMAS): a small commons for talks, shared meals, study, community research, and everyday support. The episode frames DMAS as curatorial work built from maintenance and reciprocity—an infrastructure of attention that treats minor histories as worth holding onto when the city’s ground rules are shifting.The second movement widens to the 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016–17) and Chen’s coordination of 51 Personae, a city-wide series of gatherings that reposition cultural authority away from the museum and toward encounters on chosen ground. We then follow the project’s afterlife into publishing, where books and process-based documentation become portable infrastructure for minor histories that would otherwise be erased by redevelopment and the speed of urban change. The episode also stays with a hard reality: DMAS’s physical venue could not last under rising rents and urban renewal pressures, sharpening the question of what it means for regenerative artivism to persist after a room closes. KeywordsChen Yun 陈韵, Dinghaiqiao 定海桥, Dinghaiqiao Mutual-Aid Society 定海桥互助社, DMAS, mutual aid, commons, socially engaged art, curating as infrastructure, neighborhood knowledge, redevelopment, demolition pressure, migrant urban life, minor histories, 51 Personae, Shanghai Biennale, infra-curatorial, publishing as artistic practice, archives, regenerative artivism, regenerative aestheticsKey references Biennial Foundation. “The 11th Shanghai Biennale full list of artists and exhibitions.” Biennial Foundation, September 13, 2016. https://www.biennialfoundation.org/2016/09/11th-shanghai-biennale-announces-full-list-artists-exhibitions/.Chen, Yun. “Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society: Negotiating the Common with/by/through the Urban Daily.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 19, no. 3 (2018): 480–93.Chen, Yun. “West Heavens: India-China Cultural Exchange Program.” The Newsletter 76 (Spring 2017). International Institute for Asian Studies. Accessed January 10, 2026.Gu, Peng 顾芃, and Zhu Libing 朱骊冰. “Dinghaiqiao shantytown: A group of young people’s mutual-aid jianghu” [定海桥棚户区：一群年轻人的‘互助’江湖]. The Paper [澎湃新闻], October 11, 2021. https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_14831931.Jackson, Shannon. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. New York: Routledge, 2011.Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.Raqs Media Collective. “51 Personae.” Works: Raqs Media Collective (project page), 2017. Spade, Dean. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). London: Verso, 2020.Zhou, Yanhua. “When Public Art Becomes the ‘Mass Line’: A Case Study of Dinghaiqiao Mutual-Aid Society.” In Socially Engaged Public Art in East Asia: Space, Place, and Community in Action, edited by Meiqin Wang, 149–80. Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2022.My academic website: http://csun.academia.edu/MeiqinWang