Over the past two years, CHERUBY, a young institution operating “at the intersection of art and fashion,” has made its presence felt across the international art exhibition circuit. Its support has extended to a video installation at Kunsthalle Basel (“Shuang Li: Alliance”), a spatial intervention at Chisenhale Gallery in London (“Bruno Zhu: Licensed to Live”), and a co-commissioned multimedia installation combining sound, garments, and light at the Busan Biennale (Tanat Teeradakorn’s Memory Threshold: Chaos Resonance, 2026). These projects approach bodies and cultural circulation from different perspectives, expanding the organization’s interests beyond clothing and fashion. Alongside its international activities, CHERUBY hosts residencies in Shanghai, inviting artists to live in the city, research its histories, and develop work through sustained engagement with its local context. 

Behind the initiative is Cherry Xu. Trained in fashion design before going on to study fine art in the US, Cherry is wary of being cast as a collector-turned-patron on a mission to bridge the two fields. “I don’t think I ever deliberately set out to connect art and fashion. For me, the two were never really separate to begin with,” she says. Only when she entered the professional art world as a collector did she discover, with some surprise, how sharply it maintains that distinction: “That wasn’t how I had experienced culture at all.” Fashion, for her, was never primarily about clothing, but “a way of defining one’s identity,” inseparable from broader questions of the body, consumption, agency, desire, popular culture, and even technology. CHERUBY gives institutional form to this interconnected understanding of the interfaceted nature of culture, and in doing so, destabilizes its boundaries.

Cherry began collecting through intuition and curiosity. Her first purchase was a Julian Opie lightbox, bought after she encountered one of the artist’s works in a public square in Shanghai during the pandemic, when the city had suddenly emptied. She had no plans at the time to build a coherent collection; she simply wanted to live with the work. That instinct still steers her choices of artists at CHERUBY. “Intuition still matters enormously to me,” she explains. What has changed is its focus. Once passionate about acquiring finished work, she is now more interested in supporting their development: “What excites me now is participating in the process that allows a new work to come into being.”