WAYWARD TRIBE — PIGSY Solo Exhibition at AcentricSpace, Shanghai
Irish contemporary artist PIGSY presents Wayward Tribe, a new body of work created during a three-month artist residency at AcentricSpace in Zhujiajiao, Shanghai, China. Opening on Saturday, 22 August 2026, the exhibition brings together painting, mixed media, Chinese scrolls and digital work exploring tribes, belonging, memory and the connections found between seemingly distant places.
WAYWARD TRIBE — Exhibition Details
Artist: PIGSY
Exhibition:Wayward Tribe
Venue: AcentricSpace, Zhujiajiao, Qingpu, Shanghai, China
Opening: Saturday, 22 August 2026
Time: 4:00 PM
From the lanes of Dublin to the laneways of Zhujiajiao
When I arrived in China, I thought I would make work about China.
Instead, I found myself making work about something far more familiar.
I spent much of my residency walking through the ancient laneways of Zhujiajiao. The town can be packed with tourists at weekends, but it was the quieter, less busy weekdays that caught my imagination: people gathering without ceremony, families moving together through narrow streets, neighbours sharing space, delivery riders speeding through the lanes and conversations unfolding in places hidden from the wider world.
I was an outsider observing, but what I recognised was surprisingly not uniquely Chinese. These were behaviours I had witnessed and known all my life.
I cut my teeth in the back lanes of Northside Dublin. Those lanes are where friendships were made, loyalties tested, arguments settled and forgiven, football was played until dark and where the world was first understood through other people. They were places of companionship and conflict, belonging and exclusion, fun and disappointment.
Looking through the lanes of Zhujiajiao, separated by thousands of miles and a completely different history, I recognised something different but, at the same time, unexpectedly familiar.
These people were strangers.
Yet nothing about them felt unfamiliar.
That recognition became the starting point for Wayward Tribe.
Architecture, Laneways and the Spaces Between
Before becoming a full-time artist, I worked as an architect, and I have always had a particular grá for the overlooked spaces of cities.
Given the choice between walking along a roadway or disappearing down a laneway, I will nearly always choose the laneway.
I am interested not only in grand streets and celebrated buildings, but in the passages behind them: laneways, service alleys, backstreets, abandoned sites, fields waiting for development and forgotten connections between places where everyday life quietly gets on with itself.
These spaces fascinate me because they reveal how people actually use and adapt the places they inhabit. They evolve organically through the people who occupy them rather than through a preconceived idea of how somebody is supposed to live.
In Zhujiajiao, I found myself drawn once again to these hidden routes and secluded areas. Their atmosphere and rhythms continually brought me back to the laneways of my childhood in north Dublin.
What Is a Wayward Tribe?
The figures within these paintings rarely exist alone.
They gather, support, confront, carry and witness one another. Individual identities begin to melt into collective ones.
The paintings are intentionally not portraits of specific people or places. They are observations of how human beings move through the world together, even when many miles apart.
Families, friends, communities, teammates, audiences, strangers waiting together, people carrying one another — these temporary groupings form and dissolve continuously throughout our lives.
They are the tribes we inherit, leave behind, discover and create for ourselves.
The title Wayward Tribe grew from this idea.
To be wayward is not simply to be lost. It is to continue searching without always knowing precisely what is being sought. We move between places, relationships and cultures, hoping to recognise something of ourselves in the people we encounter — to make a connection.
Sometimes we find it immediately.
Sometimes we only recognise it after we have moved on.
“We Wander in Search of What Is Known”
Throughout my residency, one sentence I had written remained pinned to the wall of my studio:
We wander in search of what is known, returning to what is shared.
It became less a statement than a way of working.
The sentence also became a physical work within the exhibition, translated into Chinese and produced as a calligraphy scroll:
我们漂泊，寻找早已知晓之物；终将归于共同所有。
Every painting, drawing, scroll and fragment seemed to return to that thought.
Gradually, the work stopped being about documenting a place and became an attempt to understand why distant places can sometimes feel deeply familiar.
PIGSY, Monkey Magic and Journey to the West
The residency also unexpectedly brought me back to my own name.
As a child in Ireland, my nickname PIGSY came from my fascination — probably obsession — with Monkey Magic, the English-dubbed television adaptation of the Chinese story Journey to the West.
Decades later, I found myself in China discovering comic books and references to the original story, of the Journey to the West, tucked away in small shops along the same laneways I had become fascinated by.
There was something beautifully circular about it.
I had travelled east only to encounter the origins of something that had travelled west long before me.
A story originating in China had somehow become part of my childhood identity in Dublin. Years later, that same name travelled back to China with me as an artist.
That sense of returning rather than arriving became central to the work.
The Paintings of WAYWARD TRIBE
The exhibition brings together work created during my three months at AcentricSpace, from individual Chinese scrolls measuring just 32 × 95 cm to the large-scale Wayward Tribe painting measuring 460 × 160 cm.
The exhibition includes Wayward Tribe, Laneway, Persistence, The Awakening Conscience, Thug Life, SLUA, Madding Crowd, The Herd Instinct and the nine-part Chinese scroll work Different but Still, alongside the digital work Shifting and an untitled calligraphy scroll.
Although the works vary considerably in scale and language, the same questions continually reappear.
How do we gather?
Where do we belong?
What happens to the individual within the group?
And what do we recognise in people whose lives may initially appear completely different from our own?
The Work Leaves the Studio
These paintings are the result of that search.
They were made during my residency in Shanghai, but they are not intended to describe China any more than they describe Ireland.
They belong to no one place and, at the same time, to all places.
They are about the shared patterns that exist beneath geography, language and culture — the human need to belong and the complicated ways we continue to form tribes around ourselves.
For me, there also comes a point when the artist has to let go.
Once the paintings leave the studio, they no longer belong to me.
They belong to the people who spend time with them.
If someone recognises something of themselves within these works, then the journey continues.
Visit PIGSY: WAYWARD TRIBE in Shanghai
WAYWARD TRIBE — PIGSY
AcentricSpace
No. 12, Thumb Plaza
Zhujiajiao, Qingpu
Shanghai, China
Opening: Saturday, 22 August 2026
Time: 4:00 PM
See you there!
Wayward Tribe was created during PIGSY's three-month 2026 artist residency at AcentricSpace in Zhujiajiao, Shanghai.
