Photographer and curator Jingyi Yu, who earlier this year served as sole juror for the group exhibition "New Year, New [Me]ntal Issues" at A Space Gallery, now presents a new exhibition titled "Not for Sale," co-curated with Qi Ling and opening May 24. The show features work selected from an international open call that received nearly one hundred submissions from artists across the United States, China, Korea, and Europe, including London-based artist and animator Marian Obando. The exhibition centers on pieces made without strategic intention or commercial ambition—private, impulsive, or emotionally driven works that were never intended for public circulation.
"Not for Sale" matters because it directly challenges the pervasive pressure on contemporary artists to constantly produce, stay visible, and turn their practice into something useful or marketable. By foregrounding unfinished sketches, abandoned experiments, and deeply personal gestures that would typically be deemed "too weird" or "too unresolved" for public display, the exhibition reframes these qualities as evidence of honesty without performance. It offers a quiet but pointed critique of the art world's demand for optimization and self-branding, protecting fragile ways of making from being absorbed into commercial logic.