The London-based nonprofit Space Yandu Project (YDP) has appointed Billy Tang as artistic director, just before opening in October in a Class I townhouse in London’s Bedford Square. Tang starts his role this month.
YDP is from Artnews Yan Du, the top 200 collector, was founded in London in 2019. Although the asymmetry focuses on cultivating curators and promoting understanding of contemporary art for Chinese people, YDP aims to put its network wider with a focus on Asian and Asian diaspora artists.
He left the Tang Para site just three months after his appointment, one of the most watched art institutions in Hong Kong, at the end of his three-year contract as executive director and curator. This move also represents the return of Tang, who was born in London and his parents arrived in the UK as refugees after the Vietnam War in the early 1980s.
Tang told Artnews In an interview: “I was blessed with the desire to have a complete circle that brought my hard-win experience back to the city, and it was a profound source of inspiration for curators and Londoners.”
In 2013, Tang was attracted by China’s rapidly growing art world and moved to Beijing to work as a curator in the field of magicians. In 2018, he joined the Rockbund Museum of Art in Shanghai as a senior curator. Then, in 2022, Tang took up a director role at Para, just as Hong Kong lifted its extended Covid-19 travel ban.
“It’s all about rebuilding momentum,” Don recalls. He noted that the planned structure he developed with the team has brought the Para website from a grassroots space to a more formal space – he thinks he thinks part of it is his legacy. “This is no longer a young organization. It’s normal [an organization] Rethink how it wants to renew and its priorities. ”
On Hong Kong itself, Tang is frank: “It’s still a center with collective possibilities and a great place to work. However, it’s not an easy city, so it’s necessary to acknowledge its challenges rather than underestimate its complexity,” he said, noting that political and economic challenges are still shaping everyday life.
YDP space in Bedford Plaza 2025.
Photo by Joni Woodward/Petitive YDP
However, what ultimately brought him back to London was not only the city’s growing role in his early career—he first discovered nonprofits at places like the Camden Arts Centre, but also the mission of YDP. For Tang, the project represents an opportunity to pursue a unique institutional model rooted in the UK while redefining global connections through Asia and its diaspora magazines.
“It has the potential to be a platform where artists can experiment outside a Western-centric framework,” said Don, adding that he is excited about the opportunity to build momentum at the organizational level, not just through individual exhibitions.
Unlike most spaces, YDP will have a flexible program structure. Instead of investing in a certain number of exhibitions every year, Tang hopes that the program can expand the previous inquiry methods by shifting its theme focus, or solve the neglected blind spots of previous years.
“Emerging and experimental practices require time and freedom to grow on their own terms,” Don said. “YDP can be the lab where this happens or the platform for the first time introducing international voice to the UK.” He pointed to groundbreaking figures like Filipino artist David Medalla, who advanced Asian visibility in a Western context and shaped global discourse through brief signal galleries, which he co-founded in 1964.
Although both asymmetry and YDP are backed by the same founder, Don stressed that they are independent entities. Although the asymmetry focuses on curatorial practices, YDP is committed to supporting a variety of artistic practices. “It is important that, especially in these early stages, YDP finds its voice,” he said, adding that the two organizations could eventually collaborate as part of a wider ecosystem.
Focusing on the immigrant and diaspora communities, YDP has just witnessed more than 110,000 people participating in the far-right street protests in its capital’s core, the largest nationalist rally in decades. Tang said that as a child of a refugee, he knew that the narrative of the diaspora was by no means homogeneous. “There is always a contradiction between the concept of history and identity,” he said.
For the Tang Dynasty, contemporary art was a way to emerge from these complexities, giving voice to stories that have not been told. “In a world that is increasingly polarized, you have to actively build bridges so that cultures can diverge and understand each other,” he said.
