Billy Tang Returns to London to Lead YDP as Artistic Director

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Curator Billy Tang has been appointed artistic director of YDP, marking a homecoming for the London-born curator, who spent over a decade developing a distinctive curatorial practice in Greater China before taking up his new role in late September 2025.

YDP, the non-profit project space founded and directed by Yan Du and opening this October in Bloomsbury, has positioned itself as more than just another addition to the city’s crowded arts calendar. With Tang at the helm, it signals a commitment to experimentation and transcultural dialogue, and to amplifying voices from Asia and its diasporas in a London setting that has long been fertile ground for such encounters.

Tang’s trajectory has been marked by an insistence on rethinking how institutions serve artists. At Para Site in Hong Kong and Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai—and earlier at Magician Space in Beijing—he consistently foregrounded overlooked mid-career and emerging practitioners. He has championed unconventional formats and approaches, often restructuring how exhibitions themselves function.

Tang’s return also carries personal significance. His parents arrived in the U.K. as refugees from the Vietnam War in the early 1980s, and his curatorial voice has been shaped by an intimate understanding of migration and resilience. That lived perspective sharpens his alignment with YDP’s ambition to create not just another project space, but a laboratory for new institutional models rooted in London yet entangled with Asia’s wider cultural currents.

YDP will open to the public on 14 October 2025 with an inaugural exhibition by Chinese artist Duan Jianyu. —[O]

Main image: YDP on Bedford Square. Courtesy YDP. Photo: Jooney Woodward.