About the Exhibition
Group Exhibition — Whiteshepherd Gallery in collaboration with D Contemporary Curator: Ziyan Xu, Whiteshepherd Gallery Koppel Collective, 157 Regent's Park Road, London NW1 8BB
A date on a label was never a deadline, only a suggestion. It tells us when something is at its best, saying almost nothing about what comes after: fermenting, softening, sweetening, becoming something else.
Best Before, the latest group exhibition from Whiteshepherd Gallery in collaboration with D Contemporary, takes ripeness as a way of keeping time. Painting, installation, and performance gather in the blurred interval between ripe and expired, treating it not as failure but as the most interesting moment of all. Alongside the works, a table is laid. Invited food artists set their pieces here to be looked at, smelled, and eaten. Part of this exhibition is only complete once it has been consumed.
What Best Before celebrates is what is still becoming: fruit is sweetest just before it turns; a gathering changes as people come and go; the best part of a meal is often the part nobody planned. The exhibition is less interested in when the date runs out than in how we spend it together.
"not only the sugar, but the days" Li-Young Lee, From Blossoms
Exhibition Artists: Alice d'Apolito, Zijing Deng, Beverley Duckworth, Deep Food, Nelson Hernández, Chujun Hu, Xingxin Hu, Kairos Huang, Sophie Keith, Na Young Lee, Yuexuan Li, Zhenzhen Ma, Siyu Man, Jennifer Louise Martin, Ling Miao, Finn James, Ismail Ucci, Mou In Yao, Jiayi Xu, 00 Zhang
Food Art — Part I: The Table
An edible installation by Paola A. Sánchez
A table of guavas, some ripe, some not quite, some wrapped in newspaper to hurry them along, sits at the centre of Paola A. Sánchez's contribution to Best Before. Among them, handmade bocadillos, a traditional Colombian guava sweet sealed in bijao leaves, bear best-before dates that have already passed. The work asks visitors to trust their senses rather than the label: what gets eaten and what gets left behind becomes part of the piece itself. Sánchez, a Colombian art director and co-founder of Bogotá studio Espacio Crudo, works with food and everyday objects to explore heritage, identity, and the rituals of eating.
In Best Before, Sánchez's table operates as both still life and social proposition. The bocadillo has not expired; only the date has. What ripens here is not the fruit alone but the moment of decision: the interval between looking and tasting that the exhibition takes as its subject.
Food Art — Part II: A Plan for Eating
A guided edible installation by Tony Li
Tony Li draws the table as a 1:1 architectural plan and moves a single ingredient, pear, across it from fresh to preserved. In small groups of six, visitors travel through six distinct zones, each a stage in the pear's life: threshold, becoming, best, beyond, gathering, and after. The work sits precisely at the boundary between architecture and cooking: one disciplines the body through space and movement, the other through time and transformation. Li, founder of creative studio Moonlight Collective, brings both instincts to a tasting that is as much about sequence and attention as it is about flavour.
Threshold · Before: nashi pear, cucumber, celery
Promenade I · Becoming: fresh pear, shiso, cultured cream
Promenade II · Becoming: jasmine-poached pear, sunflower seed miso
Pause · Best: ripe pear, jasmine cream, osmanthus
Beyond: roasted pear, fermented pear, aged cheese
Courtyard · Gathering: sourdough and pear, shared
Departure · After: pear pâte de fruit, warm Pu'er tea
Within Best Before, Li's installation extends the exhibition's central inquiry from the visual to the edible. Each zone marks a moment in time: not a countdown but a passage. To move through the table is to experience ripeness not as a fixed state but as a direction of travel, which is precisely what the exhibition asks of all its works.
About Whiteshepherd Gallery
Founded by Xu Ziyan, Whiteshepherd Gallery is a London-based nomadic gallery and curatorial platform. Whiteshepherd works with emerging artists from the earliest stages of their practice, building first exhibition concepts, developing sustainable commercial frameworks, and connecting artists with the resources of established institutions. Its programme centres cross-cultural inquiry, with particular attention to feminism, migration, and identity politics, and operates actively across Asia and the United Kingdom.
contact@whiteshepherdgallery.com | +44 (0)75 2977 1191 37 Thurloe Street, South Kensington, London SW7 2LQ
About D Contemporary
D Contemporary is a London gallery committed to bringing newly emerging and graduating artists into the commercial art world earlier than conventional gallery structures permit, and to championing contemporary art from international communities underrepresented in the London art scene. Since its founding in Mayfair seven years ago, the gallery has hosted over fifty exhibitions dedicated to young artists and the elevation of new international art markets.
D Contemporary | 1 Birdcage Walk, London SW1H 9JJ
