Artissima | 2026: Can Sun and Sophie Mei Birkin

Mandy Zhang Art is pleased to announce a duo presentation of Sophie Mei Birkin and Can Sun at Artissima 2026. Working across photography and sculpture, Birkin and Sun are united by a shared enquiry into fragility, pressure, and the traces left by impact. Both artists focus on moments where balance is unstable and systems - emotional or material - are quietly strained. Rather than treating fragility as something fixed, they approach it as something produced through circulation, staging, and latent forces that precede rupture. 

Sophie Mei Birkin’s sculptural series I didn’t ask to be dredged draws from her research into the 18th-century Ca Mau shipwreck and its lost cargo of ceramic tea bowls. Aged and transformed beyond use, these fragments became fused and encrusted with marine organisms. Birkin mirrors this slow, transformative process - matter burns, fuses, and is reborn. The resulting ceramics are enveloped by natural forms, exploring the emergence of contrasting materialities through the collision of human artefacts with both organic and synthetic matter. Through intricate layering, porous surfaces and forms reminiscent of coral and sediment, Birkin creates an ambiguous material language in which processes of growth, decay and transformation become indistinguishable. The sculptures rest upon structures, which take their form from bioprocessing units evoking laboratories, observation trays, and the human impulse to classify and control. In this presentation, works reflect how artefacts are gathered, processed, and re-situated within new systems of meaning.

Can Sun transforms familiar objects and everyday materials into quietly surreal compositions, exploring the fragile relationships between the body, emotion and the material world. Domestic objects, fruits, plants and found materials are subjected to subtle interventions that disrupt their ordinary functions. A barb-wire bra is delicately held against the body, a plate is restrained by metal clips, while a cactus and a sliced fruit are brought together in an unlikely embrace. Through these carefully staged encounters, Sun introduces a language of tenderness, tension, humour and vulnerability, allowing seemingly insignificant objects to carry distinctly human emotions. Often presented against sparse, neutral backgrounds, his compositions draw attention to the smallest gestures of connection, restraint and transformation. By balancing playfulness with psychological sensitivity, Sun reveals how ordinary things can become intimate reflections of the complexities of human relationships.

Find us at booth Fuxia 6, part of the New Entries section at Artissima 2026.

Dates and times:

30 – 31 October 2026: 12:00 PM – 8:00 PM
1 November 2026: 11:00 AM – 7:00 PM

For enquiries please email: info@mandyzhang.art