Canal Street Research Association is a fictional office founded in 2020 in an empty storefront on Canal Street, New York City’s counterfeit epicenter. Delving into the cultural and material ecologies of the street and its long history as a site that probes the limits of ownership and authorship, the Association repurposes underused real estate as spaces for gathering ephemeral histories, mapping local lore, and tracing the flows and fissures of capital. They have occupied storefronts, empty office buildings, a storage unit, a basement, and a river bank. They collaborate with local artists, businesses, vendors and passersby and have worked with art and community spaces including Abrons Arts Center, Amant, Artists Space, Canal Projects, CARA, the Center for Canadian Architecture, Clemente Soto Velez, Cuchifritos, MoMA PS1, SculptureCenter, and Storefront for Art & Architecture.

Canal Street Research Association is operated by Shanzhai Lyric (Ming Lin and Alex Tatarsky), a poetic research unit that studies the nonstandard language of counterfeit (山寨 shanzhai) garments as a challenge to dominant hierarchies, power structures, and ideas of property. Incomplete Poem, their roving archive of shanzhai garments, has been hosted in community centers, libraries, and art spaces, including Abrons Arts Center, Giselle’s, Henry Moore Institute, Kunsthalle Wien, MoMA PS1, Stuart Hall Library, and Women’s Art Library. Endless Garment, a transcription of the archive, has just been published in their first poetry book—out now with Pioneer Works Press.

David L. Johnson is an artist who lives and works in New York City. Johnson's work focuses on the urban built environment, pinpointing moments of slippage between public and private property. His practice uses photography, video, found and stolen objects, and installation to examine the politics, histories, aesthetics, and forms of use that define contemporary urban space.

Recent solo and dual exhibitions include: Fanta MLN, Milan (2025); The Shop at Sadie Coles HQ, London (2024); Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin; Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin; Art Lot, Brooklyn (all 2023); and Theta, New York (2021). Recent group exhibitions include: The Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2026); Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg (both 2024); Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Chicago Architecture Biennial, Chicago; MoMA PS1, New York (all 2023); and Artists Space, New York (2022). Johnson received a BFA from the Cooper Union in 2015 and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2020. He is an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program and is a part-time faculty member at the Fine Arts MFA program at the Parsons School of Design. Johnson’s work is held in the public collection of The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Columbus Museum of Art.

Sidian Liu (b. 1997, Foshan, China) is an artist, translator, yarner, and nest builder based in New York City. Using "housewife skills," she makes social relationships to facilitate trust and intimacy from a respectful distance, exploring pathways to further solidarity in our challenging times. Living in flux as a Chinese woman and an immigrant in the U.S., her works often take forms in images, performance, light-weight installations, and socially-engaged projects.

Sidian obtained her BA in English at Shanghai International Studies University in 2019, and her MFA in Photography at Parsons, The New School in 2023. In 2025 she participated in Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Some of the honors she received include: the 2025 Emerging Artist Grant by Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the 2024 Denis Roussel Fellowship, the 2023 Snider Prize, and Top 10 of 9th Annual Photography Rankings in China.

Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966, Honolulu, Hawaii) is an artist living and working in New York City, who has been making work in video, photography, installation, and sculpture since the late 1990s. Known for his innovative manipulation of digital media, Pfeiffer recasts the visual language of mass media spectacle to examine how images shape our awareness of ourselves and the world. Sampling footage from YouTube and other sources, he uses these to plumb the depths of contemporary culture, assessing its racial, religious, and technological dimensions. At the same time, Pfeiffer's objects and images function diachronically, establishing profound genealogies that connect contemporary culture and its many particularities to the long, seemingly remote histories of art, media, religion, and human consciousness.

Pfeiffer has had many one-person exhibitions at Whitney Museum of American Art (2001); the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2003 and 2017-18); the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2005); MUSAC León, Spain (2008); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2009); Sammlung Goetz, Munich (2011); Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2015); Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil (2018); and The Athenaeum, Athens, GA (2023). He has presented work in major international exhibitions, most recently the Performa Biennial and the Honolulu Biennial in 2019 and the Toronto Biennial and Seoul Mediacity Biennale in 2022. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; M+, Hong Kong; The Guggenheim; Tate Modern; and the Pinault Collection, among many others.

Pfeiffer’s first large-scale retrospective of his work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2023-24) is traveling to the Guggenheim Bilbao (2024-2025) and MCA Chicago (2025).

Dylan Seh-Jin Kim is a curator who lives in Brooklyn. He works as Curatorial Assistant at MoMA PS1 and the Programs Coordinator at Independent Curators International (ICI). He is a participant in Asia Art Archive in America’s Leadership Camp VII. He was a participant in ICI’s New York Curatorial Seminar, a Bandung Resident at Asian American Arts Alliance (A4) & Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art (MoCADA), and a Curatorial Fellow at NARS Foundation. He has organized and worked on exhibitions and programs at MoMA PS1, Protocinema, Unclebrother, FAR–NEAR, Gavin Brown's enterprise, Tutu Gallery, NARS Foundation, Columbia University, brownstones, restaurants, and elsewhere. He was a guest speaker for Pratt Institute’s Arts and Cultural Management, MPS program. He was a participant in the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program for 2024-25. He received a BA in Philosophy and Film and Media Studies from Columbia University.

Jessica Kwok is a curator and researcher based between New York and London where she works at Asymmetry as Head of Programmes and Curatorial. Her research interests are driven by the effects of spatial politics on both the social body and the individual body, using feminist perspectives to fracture governing frameworks that influence cultural production, labour, and performance. Jessica previously served as Associate Curator at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York from 2019-2026. From 2017-2020, she founded and directed domesti.city, a project space in Lower Manhattan. Her writing can be found in Flash Art, Frieze, Viscose Journal, and other publications, as well as in artist books and catalogues. She is a member of the editorial collective Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory and has collaborated with The New Museum of Contemporary Art and Protocinema as a curatorial mentor.

Christopher Y. Lew, is the founder of C/O: Curatorial Office. He has over 15 years of experience working at American museums and arts nonprofits. He was the founding Chief Artistic Director at Horizon Art Foundation and Outland Art and is a former curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he oversaw the emerging artist program and was co-curator of the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Prior to joining the Whitney, he was assistant curator at MoMA PS1 and organized many exhibitions there. Lew has contributed to several publications including Art AsiaPacific, Art in America, Art Journal, Bomb, Huffington Post, and Mousse.

Mari Spirito is Executive Director, Curator of Protocinema, a trans-regional arts organization based in New York with international operations, founded in 2011 which explores shared human experiences uniting all of us.

Spirito curated The Substance With Which The Future Is Made, inaugural 6-month public video art program, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai, 2025. She runs Protocinema’s Emerging Curator Series mentorship program, launched in 2015, and is faculty, AfterSchool Special, RISD Rhode Island School of Design from 2023. Spirito’s practice is guided by a vested interest in ingenuity and resourcefulness, in 2020 and 2021, she innovated a group exhibition across multiple cities titled A Few in Many Places featuring artists’ neighborhood interventions in Philadelphia, Beirut, Berlin, Bangkok, Seoul and Istanbul. She curated Art Basel’s Conversations program from 2013 to 2018, and was director, 303 Gallery, 2000-2012. In 2023-24, she curated The Myth of Normal, a Celebration of Authentic Expression, Massart Museum, Boston, served Jury for Member, Mamut Art Project, Istanbul 2025; Advisor, 2nd Mardin Biennial, Turkey, 2012; currently is Vice President, Board of Trustees of Participant Inc; Board of Directors, ArteEast, New York and Advisory Committee of The Joan and Martin Goldfarb Gallery York University, Toronto.