A Pop-up of A Pop-up: Para-Content, Pedagogy and the Politics of Circulation

When the Pop-up Becomes the Content

In a cultural landscape saturated with notifications, reaction videos and commentary layered upon commentary, the pop-up has shifted form. No longer simply a temporary retail format or a brief institutional gesture, it has become something closer to what the organisers at CHERUBY call "para-content": material that circulates around other material, generating meaning not through the stability of an original object but through the relations, interpretations and forms of participation that accumulate around it.

A Pop-up of A Pop-up, running from 13 June to 22 August 2026 at CHERUBY, takes this condition as its starting point. The programme is structured as a monthly summer activation that brings together three distinct yet interconnected strands: an exhibition, a pair of artists-in-residence, and a "low-res" nomadic theatre school. Rather than presenting these as discrete happenings, the programme treats them as what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze called "Events"—transformations in relations, meanings and possibilities that emerge through encounter rather than residing in any single component.

The central questions are deceptively simple: how might cultural value be produced, circulated and sustained through collective forms of making, learning and living? And what happens when the pop-up format turns its own logic inside out?

Pop Down: What Remains After a Brand Ends

The first chapter belongs to local associate Zhao Chenxi, whose exhibition Pop Down opens the programme on 13 June. The work begins with a reversal. Where the conventional pop-up serves brands seeking to test concepts and engage consumers, Zhao's project inverts that logic entirely. Developed during a month-long residency at CHERUBY following the closure of his label fabric qorn—a brand celebrated for humorously reclaiming styles often dismissed as tasteless—the exhibition asks what persists after a brand's commercial life has ended.

Rather than treating the end of fabric qorn as a conclusion, Zhao transforms the gallery into a site of collective screen-printing sessions, creating shared experiences that extend the social life of the brand beyond its market lifespan. Alongside these participatory gestures, the exhibition turns inward. Works drawn from passing thoughts and private doubts reveal the mundane mental landscapes that accompany everyday reflection. Together, these moves between collective participation and personal introspection propose forms of value rooted not in metrics or visibility but in creativity, lived experience and communal potential.

AD HOC: Textile as Common Ground

From 26 June to 26 July, the programme's second phase welcomes Paris-based artist Marie Hazard and Lisbon-based fashion designer Constança Entrudo as summer artists-in-residence. Their collaborative textile project, AD HOC, operates at the intersection of textile art and fashion, occupying the territory where artistic research meets the worn garment.

The name, derived from the Latin for "for this," signals a condition of responsiveness—something devised for a specific situation rather than according to a predetermined plan. Anchored in a shared fascination with textiles, the collaboration unsettles the hierarchies that have traditionally separated art from fashion. Neither discipline serves the other. Instead, the textile becomes common ground through which both practices can be rethought. Hazard's tactile compositions and Entrudo's digitally layered textiles each investigate weaving as a language, probing the relationship between craft, technology and material knowledge.

Time is central to the project. Both practitioners consider the labour embedded within textile production and how contemporary technologies have transformed its temporal rhythms. Following a residency and exhibition at Studio2M in New York, AD HOC continues its development at CHERUBY, where contextual research, material experimentation, wearable sculpture and performativity unfold simultaneously.

Shanzhai MFA: Nomadic Theatre as Grassroots Methodology

The programme's final chapter, running from 8 to 22 August, introduces Shanzhai MFA, a nomadic theatre school run by Dongcun Xinfu Experimental Theatre. The project draws on the survival wisdom of traditional Chaoshan opera troupes, whose semi-nomadic performers once carried costumes, instruments and stage props in a handful of trunks, moving from village to village and constructing temporary stages wherever they arrived.

While "shanzhai" is commonly understood through the lens of imitation or copying, Dongcun Xinfu approaches it as a grassroots spirit of adaptation, resourcefulness and collective self-organisation. Like forms of para-content that circulate around, reinterpret and extend existing material, the shanzhai troupe treats performance not as a fixed original but as something continually remade through movement, encounter and local participation. This mobile way of life remains a vital link connecting contemporary practitioners with histories of maritime migration and cultural exchange.

Across its three phases, A Pop-up of A Pop-up resists the production of stable objects of attention. Instead, it continually redirects focus through circulation, response and reproduction—proposing that the most meaningful cultural work may happen not in the finished product but in the encounters, relations and possibilities that emerge between people.