At NYU Shanghai’s Institute of Contemporary Art, we hold a special space for an indie art publishing project. The name of this corner is 51 Personae. 51 Personae is a space of treasures and gems, where you can find books from a different range of languages, written by independent authors from China and all around the world. This project was started by Yun Chen, who holds a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from Fudan University.

It all began in 2008 when she started working at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, one of the first art centers in China with an international focus on contemporary art. There, she worked for almost three years where she started doing book publications promoting contemporary art in the public press. She enjoyed publishing art books that not only were addressed to the artist community, but to the Chinese public audience, serving as a bridge between the international art world and Chinese society. She was involved in the book publishing industry for ten years, formally publishing ten books ranging from themes about cinema, book history, social thought, decolonizing ideas and many more. During this time she worked closely at the West Heavens, a landmark of cultural initiative that brought together leading Indian scholars and artists to engage directly with Chinese audiences, challenging both nations' Western-centric worldviews through forums, screenings, lectures, urbanist workshops, artist residencies, and field visits. The publication of these West Heavens books meant the first time the Chinese audience had access to these specific international perspectives about contemporary art and society through India.

But how did Yun end up working full time on her own 51 Personae project? Around 2016 to 2017, she was in the curatorial team of the 11th Shanghai Biennale “Why Not Ask Again”, and Raqs Media Collective, chief curator of that edition of Shanghai Biennale, proposed to launch '51 Personae' as a societal, urbanist, and socially-rooted event series. Over three months, 51 projects were brought to life as public events; held at plazas, bookstores, ruins, demolishing sites and across suburban and rural Shanghai, that anyone could sign up for, show up to, experience, and learn from. Yun and her friends in Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society (also initiated by her back in 2014) had spent ten months preparing to deliver these events to the people of Shanghai.

One such project took place during the 11th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art in 2016, where film poster painters Li Shude, Shi Yuanxiang, and Dai Yongguo were invited to work in an open studio for three days. Over that time, they painted a new wall-sized poster for the 2001 film Go For Broke (directed by Wang Guangli), which was then screened at PSA as part of the 51 Personae series, a quiet, striking collision of craft, cinema, and collective memory.

The 51 events were a major success, and the stories of that period, when art was flourishing across Shanghai, were compiled into a small booklet and launched before the opening of the Biennale also titled 51 Personae. Presented at book fairs across China between 2018 and 2019, it captured a pre-pandemic moment when the city felt wide open to the world. Once this project was over, Yun realized she enjoyed the project so much that she wanted to convert it into an ongoing idea.

Yun navigated a legal ordeal in 2022 that reshaped her entire approach to publishing. The experience led her to describe bookmaking as "a kind of activism", and to find a path that let her keep practicing it. She now publishes through a registered company in Shanghai, using international ISBNs rather than domestic ones, which grants her greater freedom over design and content. Once censorship approval is obtained, her books can circulate inside China as well, although still with some limitations. While tabling opportunities at domestic book fairs have grown scarcer, she has increasingly taken her work to international art book fairs and zine fests, a way of continuing to share art and ideas freely with the world, a passion that has carried her through the highs and lows of her journey.

During Spring 2026, Yun Chen hosted the space of 51 Personae at NYU Shanghai ICA center. This space not only reflects long years of hardship and effort, but it is a unique corner where we can find gems that otherwise you can not find in any other part of the city. It is an honor to host this space at NYU Shanghai, as it is a vivid reflection of our institutional values of curiosity, rigor, integrity, respect, harmony, responsibility, and deep engagement with all humanity. Yun’s story inspires our fight for what we are passionate about, and keep on working towards a society that values every aspect and perspective of our world.