Bow Skills workshop: zero material — interface as artistic media with Chen Liang-Jung
Thursday 10th December 2026 , 6:00pm to 8:00pm
How can artists make work when money, materials and resources are limited? While traditional practices often rely on physical materials, this workshop explores how art can emerge from the intangible materials of everyday life.
Join artist Chen Liang-Jung for a reflective workshop exploring how everyday systems, digital platforms, administration, mass production and familiar interfaces can become artistic materials. Through discussion and experimentation, participants will explore new ways of making art and developing their practice using existing resources and contemporary systems.
In a world shaped by both scarcity and excess, what kinds of art-making remain relevant? Traditional art forms such as painting and sculpture often require physical materials, space and funding. But what happens when resources are limited? How can artists make work using what already exists around them?
Chen’s zero material manifesto proposes that artists do not always need to begin with new materials. Instead, it asks us to recognise the agency already embedded within the objects, infrastructures, platforms and systems that shape our everyday lives. Through strategies such as hacking, smuggling and piggybacking, existing conditions can become sites of artistic intervention.
Drawing on Chen’s practice — from UK Indefinite Leave to Remain Application Fee, a project developed through the labour of navigating immigration bureaucracy, to the ongoing Hardware Archive, a research project investigating industrial objects and material culture — this workshop explores how administration, digital platforms, mass production and everyday interfaces can operate as artistic media.
At the centre of this approach is a way of reading agency and affordance: every system is designed to enable certain actions while restricting others. These designs can be observed, interpreted, redirected and repurposed as creative material.
The workshop invites participants to rethink what counts as artistic material and explore creative possibilities that emerge from the conditions of contemporary life.
In this workshop, you will:
- Learn how the zero material manifesto developed through UK Indefinite Leave to Remain Application Fee and Hardware Archive
- Explore agency and affordance as tools for reading everyday interfaces, objects and systems
- Identify existing structures within your own life or practice that could become sites of artistic intervention
Who is this for?
This workshop will particularly resonate with creative practitioners interested in cross-disciplinary approaches to making — including those whose lived experiences of navigating systems such as migration, bureaucracy, labour or precarity have shaped what they recognise as artistic material. It is open to anyone interested in expanding what can constitute artistic media, from objects and technologies to processes, infrastructures and social relationships.
This workshop will take place at Bow Arts Courtyard Room, 183 Bow Road, London, E3 2SJ.
To get here, come to 183 Bow Road, London E3 2SJ. When you arrive at the big grey wooden portico on Bow Road, press the ‘Bow Arts Offices’ button on the intercom and someone will buzz you in. Head straight into the courtyard where you will find us!
About Chen Liang-Jung
Chen Liang-Jung’s practice reads the interfaces and infrastructures that quietly structure everyday life as artistic media in their own right. Rooted in industrial design, her practice began with a close reading of manufactured objects and the systems and logics embedded within them. Through site-responsive installation and live performance, she creates situations of subtle tension that extend materiality beyond the familiar, using embodied gesture and movement to make otherwise invisible structures newly perceptible.
About Bow Skills
Bow Arts seeks to support creative professionals at all stages of their careers. In 2015, Bow Arts launched Bow Skills in response to an artist survey which showed over 90% of practicing artists find it useful to receive further support outside formal education.
Bow Skills is a dynamic and relevant programme of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) which is informed by an artist steering group and open to all creative practitioners across London. The programme of talks, panel discussions, new skills labs and peer crits is open to all, with concession rates available to students, over 65s, under 18s, Bow Arts artists and key workers.
Access information
The Bow Arts Trust offices have step-free access throughout from street level, including to the accessible toilet, and is service animal friendly. This venue does not have a hearing loop system. Accessible parking is not available on-site.
If you have any questions regarding accessibility at this venue or event, would like to make us aware of any access requirements that you have in advance of visiting, or would like this information in an alternate format including Easy Read, please email nunnery@bowarts.com or call 020 8980 7774 (Ext. 3)
Access requirements could include things like providing equipment, services or support (e.g. information in Easy Read, speech to text software, additional 1:1 support), adjusting workshop timings (e.g. more break times), adjustments to the event space (e.g. making sure you have a seat near the entrance) or anything else you can think of!
Transport Information
Opening hours: Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm
Address: Bow Arts Trust, 183 Bow Road, London, E3 2SJ
Nearest station(s): Bow Road (District and Hammersmith and City lines) is a 6-minute walk away, and Bow Church (DLR) is a 3-minute walk away.
Bus: 205, 25, 425, A8, D8, 108, 276, 488 and 8 all service the surrounding area.
Bike: Bicycle parking is located at Bow Church Station. The nearest Santander Cycles docking station is at Bow Church Station.
