Design Nexus
May 2026
NYC
Exhibition
Overview
Design Nexus explores the evolving role of art and design as a bridge between cultural heritage, technological innovation, and emerging social systems. We selected the most representative works from over 825 artworks by artists and designers worldwide to showcase at Nexus，the event examines how designers and artists can shape new relationships between creativity, design, and future society.
This exhibition was created as a companion to Design Nexus during NYC x Design Festival 2026, on view at RE/CRAFT website from May 18 to 30, 2026
Fanfiction Writers In Exile
Selin Huilin Ruan
*Fanfiction Writers In Exile* is a fanzine created by Selin in 2025, chronicling the online exodus of fanfiction writers. This work explores the relationship between fanfiction, its authors, and censorship; it documents the migration of fanfiction across various platforms in the internet age, incorporating commentary and screenshots regarding online content censorship. Employing a collage aesthetic to preserve the traces of the internet, the project leverages the unique characteristics and artifacts of scanning and photocopying processes before undergoing final digital layout.
Life Loop
Huanhuan Duan
Nuo World（傩界）Paper-cutting Series
Rainy Li
This work draws inspiration from Chenzhou Nuo Culture, a national intangible cultural heritage. The artwork uses four Nuo masks—Nuo Gong, Nuo Mu, Shanxiao, and Niu Wang—as its medium, employing paper-cutting techniques to depict them.
To bridge the psychological distance between the ancient and mysterious Nuo culture and people today, break through its usage scenarios, and construct a brand-new visual appearance of Chenzhou Nuo culture.
This work explores life not as a linear progression, but as a spiral structure—iterative, expanding, and continuously in motion. Rather than moving toward fixed endings, life unfolds through cycles of rupture, repair, and regeneration.
The project emerged during 2024–2025, a period marked by personal loss and physical vulnerability. During this time, the artist’s cat passed away, and she underwent two surgeries in close succession.
Alien Archive
Una Qingwen Zhang
Alien Archive is a research-based sculptural project that examines how cultural identity is constructed and preserved through food. The project began with the discovery that “dumpling” originally referred to simple boiled doughs in early English cookbooks and only later expanded
to include meat-filled forms like wontons and jiaozi as Asian migration reshaped both cuisine and language, embedding the term within debates about belonging and difference.
Convenience Optimization Log
Yifei Chen
Convenience Optimization Log is a browser-based poetic interface presented as a failed diagnostic of the networked self. Through system logs, emotional queries, memory access, identity simulation, glitch transitions, and AI-mediated imagery, the work stages a world where human experience is continuously translated into data, convenience, and optimized response. As the interface progresses, its clean logic breaks down: pain cannot be categorized, memory returns null, and desire produces errors. The piece uses visual experience design as critical language, turning interface conventions against the systems they usually serve.
Nuo World（傩界）Paper-cutting Series
Rainy Li
This work draws inspiration from Chenzhou Nuo Culture, a national intangible cultural heritage. The artwork uses four Nuo masks—Nuo Gong, Nuo Mu, Shanxiao, and Niu Wang—as its medium, employing paper-cutting techniques to depict them.
To bridge the psychological distance between the ancient and mysterious Nuo culture and people today, break through its usage scenarios, and construct a brand-new visual appearance of Chenzhou Nuo culture.