October 2–December 19, 2026
YDP presents true names, a group exhibition that considers naming as an ethical practice that can call forth and safeguard identities while opening a space for social and political negotiation. Centred on works emerging from contexts marked by struggles and overlapping concerns, the exhibition explores how relations among identity, spirituality and power are mediated and regenerated.
A true name often carries the magical power to mark a crossing between person and spirit, desire and fate. It is therefore guarded—held close, spoken in trust and shared selectively. Across many traditions, naming practices foreground historical and material conditions that constitute situated knowledge and generate relations between self and community, past and future. In a world saturated with name-based bias and discrimination, naming also demands deliberate negotiation. Diasporic and Indigenous communities have long histories of adopting, concealing, translating, reclaiming or modifying names under conditions of displacement, assimilation and political violence.
In the tension between concealment and revelation, true names opens a political and aesthetic field where colonial and imperial epistemologies and capitalist regimes of value can be disarmed. When administrative, scientific and market classifications fix identities into binary and essentialist categories and compel names, bodies, histories and knowledge into visibility, extraction is made to appear legitimate. Concealment thus becomes an ethical act that protects dignity and preserves what would be transformed by being made fully available.
true names features a wide range of works, including a spine-shaped incense clock, a site-specific poppy flowerbed, Indigenous and scientific botanical drawings, a monument for extinct species, wartime photojournalism, trapunto textiles, the traces of ca trù performance and an anarchic video installation for collective trance. Together, these works chart a journey through shifting political and aesthetic states of perception and imagination. In true names, different magics, languages, histories, and worlds brush against one another and remain in relation—without being fully translated, possessed or made the same.
true names is conceived and guest-curated by Yuan Fuca, in collaboration with YDP curator Jun Shen.
Artists: Pacita Abad, K Allado-McDowell, alyene, Bernice Bing, Chen Zhe, Stephanie Comilang, Sara Flores, Gauri Gill, Pao Houa Her, Hanna Hur, Dorothea Lange, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Georgia O'Keeffe, Natalia Papaeva, Julia Rometti & Victor Costales, Shao Fan, Võ An Khánh, Anh Vo, Zeng Xiaolian, Tuguldur Yondonjamts
About Yuan Fuca
Yuan Fuca is a curator-researcher and writer based in New York and Beijing. Informed by feminist thought, Indigenous philosophies, and ecological fieldwork, her recent curatorial practice explores the material conditions of collective life, chosen kinship, and the entanglements of empire. Her environmental initiative, Ceremonies for the Future, undertakes expeditions with artists and scientists to biodiversity hotspots, sacred sites, and borderlands, testing artistic protocols for contemporary belonging.
About YDP
YDP is a London-based project space for Asian and Asian diasporic contemporary art. Born as a personal project of arts philanthropist Yan Du, YDP is part of her overarching vision to facilitate transcultural dialogues.
Address: 19 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3JA
Website: www.ydp.co
Instagram: @ydp_space
For media enquiries, please contact:
Cindy Ziyun Huang, cindy@ydp.co
