When Shanghai’s Precision Meets New York’s Chaos - The Parrot

BY SERENA HANZHI WANG, Oct 16th, 2025

The late-afternoon light in SoHo stretches across the concrete floor, turning the space a soft, metallic gold. Iris Yu stands by the window of The Parrot Art Foundation’s new office, watching the street below pulse with yellow cabs and fragments of conversation. The room is nearly empty, save for a few works leaning against the wall, yet Yu speaks of it as if it already breathes. “I don’t think of it as an office,” she says. “It’s a passage, an in-between space where ideas migrate, where what begins in one city can be reimagined in another.”

For Yu, who founded The Parrot in Shanghai in 2018, the move to New York is not an expansion but a continuation. The Parrot began as a small, restless space along the Bund, staging exhibitions that treated art not as spectacle but as civic encounter. “Space is never neutral,” Yu says. “Once you shift how it’s perceived, you also shift the relationships it allows — that’s the quiet politics of art.” This conviction has shaped her approach from the beginning: culture as an invisible infrastructure that connects people to place and to each other.

By 2024, The Parrot had evolved into a non-profit foundation based in Hong Kong, giving form to Yu’s growing international ambitions. Its principles — creative freedom, diversity, sustainability, and care — serve less as branding than as a working method. Artists are encouraged to experiment across disciplines; curators are invited to think in public; every exhibition is designed as both an aesthetic and civic gesture. The result is a voice both precise and porous — poetic yet pragmatic, resisting the division between art and life.

Yu calls the SoHo space “a bridge, not a branch.” It will host residencies, exhibitions, and partnerships with local institutions, acting as a meeting point for artists, designers, and thinkers from both sides of the Pacific. “New York normalises differences in a way few cities do,” she says. “It’s a laboratory for coexistence — and I’m interested in what happens when Shanghai’s precision meets that chaos.”

The Parrot has built a reputation for exhibitions that balance emotional depth with conceptual clarity. Its ongoing biennial, The Existence of Spirituality, explores the endurance of inner life in an accelerated world. The most recent chapter, Realm of Falling Light, unfolded around the idea of the “container” — at once a vessel, a body, a threshold. Visitors moved through rooms washed in shifting tones of silver and lilac; video, sculpture, and sound looped softly into one another. “It’s not a show about solutions,” Yu says, “but about persistence — about how the spirit learns to survive in silence.”

Other projects move between history and reinvention. The Parrot’s design collective reimagined Dream of the Red Chamber through a series of contemporary porcelain pieces, translating its melancholy beauty into minimalist form. The doomed lovers appear as a crabapple blossom and a fractured bamboo stem — symbols of tenderness and endurance. The series won the 2024 Muse Design Award, proof that traditional craft can still speak with modern fluency. “Continuity matters more than preservation,” Yu reflects. “Nostalgia freezes things; continuity lets them breathe.”

Philanthropy forms a quiet current within The Parrot’s practice. In Into the Deep, marine artist Yang Yang presented photographs taken over a decade of free diving. Her images — pale light cutting through water, the slow drift of coral, the dark body of a whale — became meditations on coexistence. The exhibition worked with conservation groups to raise awareness for ocean ecology, turning aesthetic wonder into quiet activism. “Beauty is an ethic of attention,” Yu says. “It teaches us to notice what the world hides, and noticing is the first gesture of care.”

That same ethos guided the Valley, a digital exhibition of drawings by children from a rural school in China. Their imagined cities and dreamlike animals appeared online for audiences worldwide. “They’d never realised their work could be seen by anyone else,” Yu says softly. “When they did, their drawings changed — they became freer, bolder.” The show’s introduction read: “Their future may still lie hidden in the valley, but today we can be the first beam of light shining into it.” It remains one of The Parrot’s most widely shared projects, a small demonstration of what Yu calls “the social tenderness of art.”

From this new base in New York, The Parrot will extend its artist-exchange programmes between Shanghai, Hong Kong, and the US, and develop public installations designed to operate across cities simultaneously — a kind of cultural twinship. Yu imagines a park installation in Manhattan mirrored by one along the Suzhou Creek, a pair of works responding to the same time and light. “We already live in parallel atmospheres,” she says. “Art can make those parallels visible — not by illustrating connection, but by letting people feel it.” In Shanghai, this philosophy has already taken form through what Yu calls “micro-renewal” — small-scale acts of cultural regeneration that reshape how people feel the city. The Parrot’s transformation of Jiulu Road 758 Creative Park turned a disused industrial compound into a lively cultural hub, blending public art and community life. “It’s about emotion as much as architecture,” Yu says. “A city breathes differently when art is part of its rhythm.” 

As the evening light fades, the SoHo loft grows hushed. Yu walks among unboxed works, speaking with quiet conviction. “Art migrates through gestures, through mistranslations, through memory. The point isn’t to fix meaning, but to keep it alive.” For her, The Parrot’s journey from Shanghai to New York is not expansion but return — a continual movement between translation and belonging. The parrot, after all, is a creature of voice: it listens, imitates, and transforms. And like its namesake, The Parrot Foundation now carries its colour across the world, wherever dialogue awaits.

To learn more or get in touch with The Parrot Art and Design Foundation:
Instagram: @theparrot.foundation
Email: lumanjiang.lj@gmail.cn