For the Fall 2026 season, artist, researcher, and strategy consultant YIN Aiwen will temporarily inhabit our Reading Room for the Friends of ICA residency. Since 2019, Yin Aiwen has pursued an ongoing practice of inquiry, dialogue, and collaboration with collectives, communities, and collaborators across cultural contexts and situations, under the banner of Alchemy of Commons. The project returns again and again to a constellation of questions orbiting belonging and autonomy, solidarity, and the drive to change: What is a community? For whom does it exist? Why do people want community? How does it come into being? And eventually, how does a community disperse as life continues? Beginning with a search for more sustainable ways of supporting communities, then moving through an ontological inquiry about how communities exist in the world, Alchemy of Commons’ seven-year investigation arrives now at a metaphysical journey of belonging, unfolding, in part, at the ICA at NYU Shanghai.

Amid community stories marked by a messy, often trivial, sometimes heavy accumulation of feelings and difficulties, alongside moments of joy and celebration, the artist has come to sense a perpetual journey that questions the entanglement of individual fate and societal change, the self and the other, trauma and desire, hope and melancholy. Drawing on nearly 1,000 hours of conversations, interviews, workshops, and field research, Yin has distilled the community stories she has lived through, witnessed, and engaged with into a series of works: a "Cosmogram of Community" mapping the life of a community; a companion oracle deck, “The Commoning Arcana,” narrating its long and circuitous journey; a "divination" tablecloth for reading community predicaments; and a curated reading list organized around six core themes of community life: Space, Relationship, Labor, Economy, Ideology, and Healing.

During Yin’s residency, the ICA’s Reading Room will be transformed into a temporary space station within this community cosmology, open to visitors for a series of weekly themed readings and workshops, held both online and on-site, as well as for casual browsing. Among these activities, the London/Hangzhou-based self-organized collective AfterSchool will act as a co-learning partner and host three thematic workshops and a sharing session around their translation process for the Guide to the Cosmogram of Community.

Weekly Program:

19 September – Open House with Yin Aiwen x AfterSchool: Guide to the Cosmogram of Community launch and tour

24 September – Community Chat: Let’s Read Some Cosmogram

10 October – AfterSchool | Navigating the Cosmogram of Community (1/3): On Labor and Healing

17 October – Community Chat: Let’s Read Some Tarot

24 October – AfterSchool | Navigating the Cosmogram of Community (2/3): On Relationship and Ideology

31 October – Make Your Own Commoning Arcana: Collective Tarot Co-Creation Workshop

7 November – A Conversation on Self-Organized Community

14 November – Community Chat: Let’s Read Some Tarot

21 November – AfterSchool | Navigating the Cosmogram of Community (3/3): On Space and Economy

28 November – Make Your Own Commoning Arcana: Collective Tarot Co-Creation Workshop

4 December – The Commoning Arcana Fair: One-Day Exhibition of Co-Creation Workshops


Alchemy of Commons community clinic

Beyond the public programs, YIN will also offer three closed-door clinic sessions to communities in need. The clinic is a stand-alone session for one community to work together and unpack the challenges, tensions, and uncertainties they are currently facing. A clinic session generally lasts between four to six hours, depending on each community's situation. Interested communities are welcome to message the Alchemy of Commons WeChat account (alchemyofcommons) or email alchemyofcommons@gmail.com to reserve a session. Reservations will be confirmed on a first-come, first-served basis until all three sessions are booked.

The Friends of ICA residency by Yin Aiwen, “Alchemy of Commons: Long Way to Belong,” was made possible with the support of Creative Industries Fund NL and in collaboration with:

Co-learning partner: AfterSchool (FAN Bangyu, SHEN Yuting, Wang Ziyi, YANG Shuqing)
Project assistant: LIAN Ziyi
Illustration artist: Yegane Mehrnaz
Graphic designer: ZENG Sixin                                             


Friends of ICA

Friends of ICA is a mutual aid residency where our friends inhabit the ICA’s Reading Room to share their knowledge and to make community through printed matter.  

Until now, our reading room has been a bit lonely.  Our modest collection of printed matter has been gathered, presented, and stored for ICA’s artistic research programs. So, we’re inviting our friends who make books, booklets, magazines, newspapers, posters, postcards, dossiers, and other ephemera to share them with us and others.  

We want to support our friends, from near and far, who continue to print, publish, and distribute printed matter under increasingly harsh conditions.  We also care about printed matter as a medium of knowledge exchange and community making at a time when the internet no longer seems to be free, open, nor safe as a place for knowledge exchange and community making.  

Indeed, this residency is a bit of a cheeky inversion of the "friends of" patronage model for our peer institutions, including museums, libraries, and universities. In this sense, Friends of ICA reimagines what it might mean to be “friends of” an institution—proposing a reciprocal, material form of support grounded in shared space, printed matter, and community.