Within & Beyond at AMP Gallery, August 2025
Photographer - Jingyao Jia
In August 2025, Peckham’s AMP Gallery became a site of negotiation. Within & Beyond (22–28 August), curated by Jingyao Jia, Jiayi Wang, and Jingchen Han, with Zichen Wang as co-curator & technician, brought together London-based artists of Asian backgrounds to explore identity as a process shaped by displacement, memory, and hybridity. Inspired by Robert E. Park’s “marginal man” theory and framed by Homi Bhabha’s notion of the “third space”, the exhibition positioned diasporic identity as a state of in-betweenness—at once estranged and generative, suspended between cultures yet capable of producing new modes of seeing and belonging. Through this lens, Within & Beyond revealed identity through encounter, friction, and reinvention.
Rooted in Park’s conception of the marginal man, the exhibition begins with a figure who stands at the threshold of two worlds—never fully belonging to either, yet constantly mediating between them. For Park, marginality was both a condition of alienation and a source of insight: the outsider sees clearest what each culture cannot see in itself. In Within & Beyond, this state of liminality evolves into what Bhabha later termed the “third space”—a fluid zone where fixed identities dissolve and hybrid meanings emerge. If Park’s marginal man embodied the psychological fracture of living between civilizations, Bhabha’s third space transforms that fracture into a site of negotiation and renewal. For the artists in Within & Beyond, this passage—from marginality to hybridity—marks not an end but an expansion: their works inhabit the unstable threshold between distance and intimacy, East and West, memory and becoming, where identity ceases to be a static category and becomes a continuous act of translation.
Photographer - Jingyao Jia
Jingyao Jia’s Willow Ben inverted the Chinoiserie fantasy of the English Willow plate with a replica Big Ben in Zhengzhou, reflecting colonial appropriation’s uncanny returns. Maliha Abidi’s Phopos (Aunts) (2024), portraits of her aunts in Bangladesh, addressed displacement and cultural shifts while asserting Asian female visibility onto Peckham’s streets. Jingchen Han’s Twin Flame (2025) intertwined phoenix imagery and sacred geometry to reflect female identity caught between China and the UK, where intimacy, patriarchal silence, and feminist awakening converge.
The curatorial approach engaged AMP’s architecture as collaborator. Jiayi Wang’s Between Black and White (2024), an interactive installation set in a domestic scene of toys, chopsticks, and furniture, shifted from monochrome to colour with passersby, evoking distant homes and enduring memory. Zichen Wang‘s Double Happiness (2025) placed a bowl of rice on ceiling pipes, symbolising the fleeting yet tangible nature of belonging. Mina Fouladi’s Vanet on the Road to Semnan (Erasure), miniature Tehran landscapes, extended beyond the gallery walls, probing diasporic presence in London’s urban fabric.
Photographer - Jingyao Jia
Other practices expanded the scope of Within & Beyond. Di Cao’s Fragile expressed vulnerability in digital form; Siwei Chen’s Rive the Forest fused sound, AI imagery, and traditional motifs; Muping Zhao’s In the House traces the quiet ache between displacement and acceptance. Chenchen Liao examined cyclical order through sculptural rhythm; Tingting Li reinterpreted morality and ritual through performative gesture; Shuting Cui visualised desire and self-reflection within fluid femininity; Po-Chien Huang interrogated uncertainty through material fragility; Hanyu Wang’s Bound in Stillness: The Politics of Anxious Bodies explores anxiety through rope performance and photography, using physical restraint as a metaphor for social and psychological confinement. Her work traces how the anxious body navigates control, vulnerability, and displaced identity; Peixin Liu engaged with the poetics of tradition and contemporary translation; and Hui-Hsin Lu and Yueting Liu mapped displacement and memory through textile-based cartographies.
Within & Beyond was not a simple survey but a transformation of AMP into a “third space” for marginal identities. It foregrounded fragility, dislocation, and resilience as generative forces, revealing Asian diasporic life in London as a shifting field of memory, sorrow, vitality, and recognition—unstable yet profoundly alive.
Photographer - Jingyao Jia