A Public Art Project Initiated by Yuchun Li

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In Pop Lab: The Wet Market, pop icon Yuchun Li reimagines The Wet Market—an everyday site of buying and selling—as a speculative space for public art, sensory memory, and cultural re-entry.

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To understand a city, one must dive headfirst into its wet markets. In these spaces, ordinary life is laid bare: produce, noise, bodies, exchanges. Yet for a generation raised in digital saturation and virtual environments, the market holds another texture—a nostalgic trace of physicality and proximity, of touch, scent, and clutter. The Wet Market, in this context, becomes an intersection where consumption, memory, and critique collide.

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The Wet Market is not an exhibition in the traditional sense.  It is a temporal reactivation of an archetypal public space. The wet Market becomes an interface—a way to experience the "popular" not as a trend, but as a shared language. Over ten days at Taikoo Li, Shanghai, each stall becomes an artist’s studio, and every object—banana, watermelon, grain—becomes a potential medium. The familiar scene of urban commerce is transformed into a site of exchange between contemporary art and collective experience.  It folds back into it.  People stroll through installations made of fruit, audio, scent, and code. They do not just look at art;  they shop, listen, touch, and absorb it.

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As Joseph Beuys famously said, "Everyone is an artist." This project does not simply echo that idea; it enacts it. By dissolving the boundaries between creation and consumption, audience and participant, Pop Lab: The Wet Market proposes that everyday life itself is a valid material for art, and that art, in turn, has the right to return to the streets.

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Jiayu Liu: Happy Recipe

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Among the participating artists, Jiayu contributes a distinct sonic intervention titled Harmonic Market. In this interactive installation, fruits and vegetables—such as bananas and watermelons—are equipped with sensors and conductors, allowing them to function as musical instruments. Each touch activates sounds generated by the natural electrolytes within the produce, transforming The Wet Market stall into a living, breathing synthesizer.

Through this work, Jiayu blurs the boundary between new media technology and everyday experience. The installation invites people to play, to listen, to wonder. In doing so, it reframes The Wet Market not as a relic of the past, but as a site of sensory invention—where daily life can still surprise us, and where technology need not alienate, but reconnect.

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