Living Content

Living Content Living Content is a curatorial platform focusing on contemporary art and limited-editioned apparel created in collaboration with artists.

We asked Umico Niwa to choose a contemporary artist that she felt inspired by and she named Emilia Wang recalling the se...
07/21/2026

We asked Umico Niwa to choose a contemporary artist that she felt inspired by and she named Emilia Wang recalling the sense of play in her work, and the seamless blending of mediums. Emilia Wang is an artist writer and musician based in Tokyo, Japan. She has been included group exhibitions at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan (2024), Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen, Norway (2023), and Goethe Institut Tokyo, Japan (2022). The above featured works are part of her first solo exhibition in the US, as well as her most recent group exhibition, both of which took place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
She creates a space outside a linear understanding of time, where transcendence is searched for in the small and ordinary. Her work explores the diasporic state of feeling untethered while continuously searching for roots.

Perfect Number 5, 2026 Tin metal box and lid, acrylic, paper, fabric, coins box
Perfect Number 4, 2026 Photo, paper, wool felt, buttons, shell, electronic circuit
Potato 2 and 3, 2024, utensil organizer, boxes, washi paper, plastic bags, styrofoam potatoes
Buddha (from Longmen Grottos), 2024, watercolor, pencil, and ink on washi paper, polyester linen


emilia wang

Growing up as a q***r kid, Umico Niwa recalls finding an unexpected kinship with crickets. To locate one another, cricke...
07/02/2026

Growing up as a q***r kid, Umico Niwa recalls finding an unexpected kinship with crickets. To locate one another, crickets must sing loudly enough to be heard, but quietly enough to avoid detection. Niwa recognized in this precarious signaling a familiar negotiation: the desire to be seen and understood while remaining protected from those who might pose a threat.

In this conversation, the artist speaks about how the tension between visibility and concealment continues to shape a deeply personal practice rooted in grief, memory, family, and transformation.

Working with foraged and perishable materials, she considers what it means today to make art that remains responsive to its environment—art that decays and resists being easily preserved or collected.

Moving through different bodies of work, Niwa reflects on artmaking as a form of introspection and survival. We talk about the importance of taking risks as artists, about irreverence, and about finding possibility in whatever materials are already at hand.

Cover: Family Staircase Series: Extended Love, electroplated foraged organic matter, 2023.

海子「ウミコ 」u m i c o x

We asked Emilie Gossiaux to choose a contemporary artist whose work has shaped her own practice. She selected Finnegan S...
06/28/2026

We asked Emilie Gossiaux to choose a contemporary artist whose work has shaped her own practice. She selected Finnegan Shannon, whose work challenges the physical and social conventions of museums through disability culture, protest, and audience participation.
Gossiaux describes Shannon’s work as giving her greater confidence to address disability more directly in her own practice. She is particularly drawn to the way their projects invite collaboration, transforming accessibility from an accommodation into an artistic method.
Finnegan Shannon (b. 1989) is an american multidisciplinary artist, based in New York. Their practice focuses on disability culture, being most known for his protest pieces, blue benches placed in art galleries which serve as commentary on the lack of accessibility. They are known to challenge traditional museum etiquette, very well exemplified by their work „Don’t mind if I do”, which featured a conveyor belt that brings the artwork to the people that can sit on comfortable chairs.

Do you want us here or not, 2021
A little softness for you, 2022
Don't mind if I do, 2023


Finnegan Shannon

We asked Emilie Gossiaux to choose a historical work that feels aligned with her practice. She selected Paul Klee’s Cat ...
06/27/2026

We asked Emilie Gossiaux to choose a historical work that feels aligned with her practice. She selected Paul Klee’s Cat and Bird (1928), which she remembers discovering in her father’s encyclopedia as a child, describing it as the work that did “more than anything else to set me on the path to the artist that I am today.”
Klee’s Cat and Bird (1928) shows a large, mask-like cat’s face, rendered in warm, muted tones, with a tiny bird hovering between its enormous green eyes. The bird appears almost inside the cat’s head like a thought, or a desire.

Bikerton’s iconic character, the Blue Man, marks a distinct era in the artist’s body of work. Set against the backdrop o...
06/17/2026

Bikerton’s iconic character, the Blue Man, marks a distinct era in the artist’s body of work. Set against the backdrop of exoticized landscapes and bodies, the ironic representation of the western expat is laden with excess, creating a dramatic scene of gluttony and mania in juxtaposition to their environment. The frames he often uses are artisanally crafted sculpted coconut shells that add another level of satire. Postmodern irony might not completely encapsulate his vision, as Ashley also talked in our interview about his relationship to irony, how it often becomes something that artists overindulge in, without it going anywhere, half-jokingly saying: „But I have a cover! My overarching guiding principle is that hypocrisy is a fine philosophy.” Flipping the stereotypes in vibrant colors and meticulously crafted frames, his works represent, just as he intended, the theater of the world.
RIP

The Dream, 2008
Red Scooter, 2009
The Bar, 2018
TITNW7, 2010-2011
Pregnant Woman, 2020

Throwback to our interview for Living Content, issue no. 59, with Mark Leckey, where he talks about his distinct relatio...
05/28/2026

Throwback to our interview for Living Content, issue no. 59, with Mark Leckey, where he talks about his distinct relationship with different mediums, how some feel more honest than others, but most importantly the way he views art: “I don't want to be educated by art or to be taught or to be edified in any way. I think I just want to be transported. At the same time, good art can do all these things simultaneously. All I want from art is to be delighted.”
Mark Leckey (b. 1964, Birkenhead, UK) developed an impressive, decades-long body of work several of which gained cult status. His practice works as a bridge, both between mediums and different cultural strata. Working across video, music and installation, Leckey frequently draws on elements of pop culture. His work actively engages with British subcultures – from youth movements to rave culture, merging nostalgia with sharp political commentary on class. He has had a notable number of international solo exhibitions, some of which took place in: Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin; Tate Britain, London; Glasgow International, Scotland; MoMA PS1, New York; Museo Madre, Naples, Italy Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany. He has also participated in Belgrade Biennial (2021), Carnegie International (2013), 55th Venice Biennale (2013), and 8th Gwangju Biennial (2010). In 2008, Leckey was awarded the Turner Prize.

And the City Stood in its Brightness, 2025
Nobodaddy, 2018
To the old world (Thank you for the use of your body), 2021
3 Songs from the Liver, 2024
Millennium Bug, 2025
O' Magic Power of Bleakness, 2021

leckey

In our interview for Living Content, Marguerite Humeau talks about her research into design and science: “I started look...
05/27/2026

In our interview for Living Content, Marguerite Humeau talks about her research into design and science: “I started looking at the great mysteries of human existence: looking into black holes and mythologies. This quest, which is probably spiritual as well, was about thinking about what would be the myths for our contemporary era. How do we connect with the sublime and how can I use emerging technologies to do that?” She describes her practice as very holistic, traveling and research being important foundational aspects, but dialogue even more so, as a multiplicity of viewpoints matters the most.
Marguerite Humeau (b. 1986, Cholet, France) lives and works in London. Her work is centered around interdisciplinarity and experimentation. Working with AI, scientists and researchers she develops new materials, engaging with ontological questions.
She participated in multiple Biennale - 15th Gwangju Biennale, 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia The Milk of Dreams curated by Cecilia Alemani (2022); 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2022), the Istanbul Biennial (2019) – and had numerous solo shows, some of which took place in Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; Kunstverein Hamburg; Museion, Bolzano; New Museum, New York; Tate Britain, London; Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich; Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin; Nottingham Contemporary; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Arken Museum, Denmark and White Cube Gallery in New York.

Torches, 2025
Limenescence: the quiet resolve to metabolise on the brink, living with just enough light, like root tips and algae at the cave’s mouth - making life from scarcity, 2025
The Holder of Vasp Venom, 2025
Torches, 2025
The Provider Beyond Bloodlines: the radical generosity of nursing the hungry regardless of origin, when your body becomes a common - the dissolution of “mine” and “yours” at the level of sustenance, 2025
Centurience: possessing the primordial patience to outlast catastrophe by barely moving at all, knowing that sometimes the greatest revolution is simply refusing to hurry toward extinction, 2025
Migrations, 2022


Shaun Motsi (b. 1989, Harare, Zimbabwe) lives and works in Germany, having studied fine arts at the Städelschule in Fran...
05/14/2026

Shaun Motsi (b. 1989, Harare, Zimbabwe) lives and works in Germany, having studied fine arts at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, where he received Sammlung Pohl Graduate Prize and the Colliers International Rundgang Award in 2020. His artistic practice engages with multiple mediums, spanning installation, sculpture, video, drawing and painting through which he explores the way subjectivity is constructed in relation to systems of power. In our interview for Living Content he talks about identity and the ideas that influenced his work: „This is one thing that really resonates with me in some of [Stuart] Hall’s writing: the varied possibility of black subjectivities (...) On some level it becomes kind of banal, just in that mediation of one’s identity isn’t specifically an artist’s problem, I think any person of color can relate to this, but there’s something in this problem that’s exciting to me as an artist, where it becomes a question of representation, which somehow blurs a boundary between identity and aesthetics.” His interdisciplinary practice explores this blurring of boundaries – between self and culture, identity and aesthetics. His work has been shown at MMK Tower, Frankfurt/Main (2025); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2024); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2024); Elvira, Frankfurt/Main (2021); Shedhalle, Zurich (2020); Portikus, Frankfurt/Main (2020); and the Berlin Biennale (2016).

Untitled (White mask), 2025
Untitled (Spectacles), 2025
Tell me, we both matter, don't we?, 2021
Untitled (White mask), 2025
Untitled (Browns), 2024


Cato Ouyang (b. 1993, Chicago) works in multiple mediums – installation, sculpture, painting - interconnected by their e...
04/03/2026

Cato Ouyang (b. 1993, Chicago) works in multiple mediums – installation, sculpture, painting - interconnected by their explorations of the themes of spirituality and identity. In our interview for Living Content they say: “When I was younger, I used to really hit the buzz-word word-bank hard. Maybe as a way to shield my work, or prop it up. I had a realization that that's obnoxious, on many levels. I am... a young person coming from my own pretty limited subject position and set of experiences, and to say, "My work is about colonialism and it does this!" Well, it doesn't! It does something maybe semi¬ related but is at once deeply inadequate and more complicated and exciting.”
Their work, mostly installation, takes found objects and recontextualizes them through conceptual approaches to materiality.
Growing up in a secular home, explorations of spirituality are central to the artist’s work, with elements from Chinese mythology and Catholic iconography reoccurring yet never fixed. Cato has earned an MFA from Yale and has held solo exhibitions at Night Gallery (LA), No Place Gallery (Collumbus, OH), Lyles & King (New York), The Knockdown Center (NY) and Make Room (LA).

otherwise, spite: 1. wh**es at the end of the world / 2. from every drop of his blood another demon arose (1829-1840), 2020
Lamia, 2023
Apart (Half), 2024
Pitch, 2024


Joseph Buckley (b. 1990, Ellesmere Port, UK) is a New York–based artist working primarily in sculpture and installation....
03/26/2026

Joseph Buckley (b. 1990, Ellesmere Port, UK) is a New York–based artist working primarily in sculpture and installation. His practice draws on the language of science fiction to examine contemporary systems of power and the dystopian logic through which they increasingly shape social life. Buckley uses speculative narration as a way of approaching the present indirectly: its violences, its ideological residues, and its slow drift toward authoritarianism.
In a conversation from with Living Content, Buckley spoke about his recent efforts to think through fascism and its contemporary manifestations, while also trying to imagine political possibilities emerging from within the afterlife of colonial structures „Of late, I have been trying to work towards the topics of fascism and its contemporary manifestations. (...) In making all of this stuff, I am trying to help to dream up a politics sprouting out from within the nation-corpse of the colonizer: a republic on the British mainland, built around the central premises of artifact repatriation, of financial reparation, of apology.”
As Buckley suggest, literature and speculative narratives offer him a vocabulary for staying close to the darkness of the present without collapsing into it.
Buckley received an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London. Selected solo projects include Despair Engine, Island Gallery, New York City; Cannibal Galaxies, Specialist Gallery, Seattle; Letter From the Home Office, Lock Up International, London; Traitor Muscle, Art in General, New York; and Brotherhood Tapestry, The Tetley, Leeds.

The Harrowing of Hell (2025)
Extinction (2024)
Walking Angel (2025)
Peasant (2024)
Better Clone Sons (2017)
Cousin Table (2020)
Psychic Armour for Black Northeners (2017)


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