Works | ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair 2026

Nan Ke Gallery is pleased to return to ART021 in 2026 at its usual booth, W01. This year, we’re giving the booth a makeover and trading the austere, cool look of the standard white cube for a small Hong Kong–style café. At Nan Ke Bing Sutt, we’ll be serving up works carefully prepared by nine artists with very different approaches: Killion Huang, Olaf Hajek, Lingrou Xie, Joyce Chonghui Wu, Wenjie Yu, Mengfan Bai, Tong Mo, Martine Poppe and Mustafa Boğa.

The exhibition takes its title from Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip—Confessions of a Cynical Waiter, a work of nonfiction published in 2008 by the American writer Steve Dublanica. Drawing on his own experience as a waiter in the United States, Dublanica chronicles the tangled relationships among diners, owners, cooks and servers, along with the absurd stories that rarely make it out to the table with the food.

It’s an all-too-real survival guide to the restaurant business. Dublanica writes with an easy humour that can turn sharp, biting and even cruel. In his hands, the petty incidents of restaurant life become field notes on human society. Food itself receives little reverence. The restaurant, as ordinary a setting as any, brings people and their competing demands into such close quarters that even a small incident can set off a fierce dispute.

Cover of Steve Dublanica’s Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip—Confessions of a Cynical Waiter, first published in 2008.

When a dish arrives at the table, who gets to enjoy dinner, and who pays the price for it? One of the book’s most interesting concerns is the invisibility of service work. Even with the most unreasonable customer, servers are expected to keep a smile on their faces and remain polite, patient and professional. What diners pay for includes the pleasure of being looked after and the lift that an evening out can bring to the rest of their lives. A satisfying dinner often rests on countless adjustments and compromises that go unseen. And after all that physical and emotional effort, it’s never the waiter who decides whether it was worth a tip.

If the restaurant is a metaphor for the art world, the gallery is the dining room, the artist the chef, and the artwork a carefully prepared dish. Collectors are the diners, while gallery staff move between kitchen and table. The curator might draw up the menu, and the critic plays the role of the restaurant reviewer. An art fair, then, is something like a street lined with restaurants. Some people come for the classics, others for molecular gastronomy. Some order only the house special, while others are happy to try a dish whose name they can’t even pronounce.

Killion Huang

Rain Drop, 2026

Oil on canvas

180h x 140w cm

Of course, the comparison only goes so far. A work of art needn’t try to please as many palates as a dish might, and artists shouldn’t have to adjust their recipes whenever a customer’s tastes change. Once a work enters the circuit of galleries, fairs and collections, however, it finds itself caught up in much the same web of social relations as a meal: how it is presented, judged, exchanged and consumed.

We value the independence of artistic practice, and sustaining that independence takes a complex system of management and service. As social conventions shift and old and new ways of doing business overlap, the traditional restaurant and the traditional gallery seem to be facing some of the same pressures.

Lingrou Xie

Embers, 2026

Oil on canvas

60h x 50w x 3.6d cm

Ready-made dishes, delivery platforms, social media and customer reviews are rapidly reshaping what people expect from a restaurant. As with a work of art, the idea that “quality” can be judged in isolation has come to seem increasingly idealistic. Diners now expect more from the experience itself. Does the room look good in a photo? Is the service attentive? Is there anything new about it? The tensions Dublanica observed in restaurant life have only grown sharper.

Olaf Hajek

Lichtung, 2025

Acrylic on canvas

60h x 60w cm

Should a restaurant stick to the chef’s own style or cater to its diners’ tastes? What gives a dish its value: the ingredients, the cooking, the plating, or the carefully styled backdrop that still looks exquisite when the camera throws it out of focus? And when every restaurant starts chasing the same fashionable taste, where do we go for a dinner that might actually surprise us?

Much the same questions apply to the art world. How artists make work, how galleries operate, what collectors buy and how the public encounters art are all being reshaped by new forms of media, changing markets and consumer culture. With Nan Ke Bing Sutt, we hope to offer a way of looking at art that begins with these conditions.

Killion Huang

Lunar Eclipse, 2026

Oil on canvas

50h x 42w cm

Killion Huang uses interiors to arrange figures and bodies, dividing the picture with walls, window frames and light. Ordinary scenes take on the composition of a stage. In the young bodies he paints, ambiguity and moments of lucidity come into view as light and shadow shift. Olaf Hajek brings folklore, plants, animals and ornament into richly coloured compositions. Flowers, fruit, figures and vessels thread through one another, bringing still life into contact with fable. Vivid colours and meticulous detail give these forms a nearly tangible presence, even as the relationships between them follow the leaps of a dream.

Joyce Chonghui Wu

Crispy Chicken, Smoked with Tea leaves , 2023

Acrylic and pastel on wood block

45h x 60w cm

Joyce Chonghui Wu builds a personal archive of contemporary life through photography and textiles. She transfers private photographs and everyday images gathered while living in different places onto fabric, then pieces and stitches them together. Through this process, she considers how identity changes across cultural settings and personal relationships, and what those changes feel like from within.

Mo Tong

Origami Spring, 2026

Oil on canvas

120h x 40w cm

Tong Mo’s paintings move between the family album and personal memory, from scenes of collective life in old photographs to the childhood he remembers firsthand. His soft, hazy brushwork leaves the less distinct parts of those memories unresolved. Mustafa Boğa draws on family archives and local life in southern Turkey, using embroidery and moving image to record family rituals, familiar landscapes and the gestures of daily life.

Mustafa Boga

Orange Tree 34, 2026

Textile, embroidery thread

73h x 50w cm

Lingrou Xie

Eye on you, 2026

Oil on canvas

130h x 100w cm

Lingrou Xie often begins with literature and images from the natural world. In her oil paintings, she varies the intensity of colour and the definition of forms, allowing figures and landscapes to cross paths in parallel narratives that reflect the shifting meanings of “femininity” today. Wenjie Yu works with stitching, pastel and translucent fabric to give form to details that surface and recede in memory. Loose ends and layers of cloth are part of how the work is made and seen.

Wenjie Yu

Satisfaction of oscillation #8, 2026

Cotton cloth, linen, silk, cotton sewing thread, soft pastel, resin and wood paint

50h x 42w cm

Water recurs in Mengfan Bai’s paintings. She often narrows the view to a section of the surface, where ripples stretch and break up reflections into sharply edged patches of colour. Greens of varying depths mingle with pale blue and off-white, and the image shifts between recognisable reflections on water and an almost abstract composition.

Mengfan Bai

Asymmetrical fountain pools VI, 2026

Oil on canvas

133h x 102w x 4d cm

Martine Poppe often begins with a photograph, reworking its light and colour in paint on translucent fabric. In the work on view, white clouds dissolve into a blue-grey sky, while faint halos seem to hover at the surface. The sky appears distant, yet it is part of the atmosphere we live and breathe in every day. By returning to the shifting forms of clouds and light, Poppe makes that easily overlooked connection palpable in a changing climate.

Martine Poppe

Neverwhere , 2025

Oil on polyester restoration fabric

148h x 120w x 2.4d cm

Nine artists from different cultural backgrounds, each with a distinct visual language, make up a slightly unconventional menu in this temporary café, much like the bistros currently in vogue around the fair. Contemporary art is already serious enough. It might be worth trying a different way of ordering once in a while. Whether the traditional gallery model can remain viable, what relationships artists, galleries and collectors should build, and how to cook a better meal and stay in business in a world that keeps speeding up are questions that one dinner is unlikely to settle.

Still, the restaurant is open and the kitchen is fired up. We might as well begin with a good meal. We hope you enjoy what’s on the table and feel at home here. If you like the service, a kind word is always welcome.

“Thanks for the tip!”