Shanghai Gallery BANK Is Set to Land in New York City

Observer
Elisa Carollo , March 4, 2025

Founder Mathieu Borysevicz tells Observer that the endeavor is his way of promoting diplomacy—creating space for cross-cultural dialog and giving artists from mainland China visibility in the States.

 

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Undeterred by tariffs, widespread gallery closures and a still-fragile market showing only the first signs of recovery, Shanghai-born BANK Gallery is preparing to test U.S. waters with a pilot space in New York. From March 21 through August, the gallery will occupy a two-story space at 127 Elizabeth Street in Nolita—a former Ukrainian church turned gallery. The building has been home to seasoned dealer Nathalie Karg since she moved there three years ago, but with Karg now taking a hiatus and needing to remain in Europe for personal reasons, the opportunity arose for BANK to establish a temporary presence in New York without committing to a full-time lease.

“We have been friends and collaborators for some time now, presenting some of her artists in China and some from our program with her in New York,” explains BANK founder Mathieu Borysevicz. “From the very first time I saw the space, I immediately loved it.”

Borysevicz had been considering opening in New York for some time, and this temporary space serves as a way to solidify and expand the gallery’s existing relationships with U.S. collectors and institutions they’ve been engaged with for years. It also provides a platform to introduce BANK’s roster to an American audience—especially artists from mainland China who have never exhibited in the States, Chinese diasporic artists and international figures whose work has debuted in Shanghai under BANK’s program.

Since its founding in 2013, BANK has served as a conduit for cultural exchange between China and the U.S., becoming one of the first galleries in Shanghai to exhibit contemporary American artists. Its inaugural show in China featured Paul McCarthy, Roxy Paine, Zhang Enli and Howard Hodgkin—setting the tone for its cross-cultural mission.

Borysevicz, who was born and raised in Queens, has spent more than two decades living between China and the U.S. His journey began with what was meant to be a short-term project following his graduation from SVA. “When I graduated, it was all about post-modernity and cultural studies, and China seemed like an interesting kind of focus through that lens. I went with this idea to do a research-based project and ended up staying,” he tells Observer. “After six months, I was just scratching the surface, and China was super magnetic, being at the time in its moment of full change.”

Originally arriving as an artist, Borysevicz soon found himself immersed in film and television, becoming the Chinese-American producer for ZDF German Television. Even after returning to New York four and a half years later, he remained closely connected to China, working with Chinese artists in the city and frequently traveling back for film projects. “It was as if I had never left.”

In 2007, Borysevicz returned to China, this time settling in Shanghai, where he built a career as an artist, curator and writer, and played a key role in launching Artforum’s Chinese edition. It was the early 2000s, a period of rapid expansion in China’s art market, but at the time, he had no interest in the commercial side. “I just couldn’t see the commune of art and commerce as a good thing,” he recalls.

Then life shifted, bringing new responsibilities. Borysevicz curated a show at the Shanghai Gallery of Art, which led to an unexpected job offer as its director. “I went to the other side, and I was selling art, and it was great,” he says.

Still, the commercial art world never felt like the right fit. When he founded BANK—formerly known as MAB Society, named for his initials—Borysevicz conceived it as a curatorial space and art consultancy firm. In the beginning, they didn’t even have a gallery. “We just had an office space on the 25th floor. Still, I always thought it would have been nice to have a little room to incubate some exhibition projects or a showroom.” That opportunity came when Borysevicz was introduced to a mostly destroyed and dilapidated former bank—the building that would later lend its name to the gallery. “It was charming but dilapidated, and quite loaded, embedding different moments of China’s history in its architectural features.”

BANK’s first space was in the Bund, a riverside neighborhood where blue-chip galleries like Perrotin, Lisson and Almine Rech are located. As BANK gained recognition and its program developed, Borysevicz had to professionalize the business model and transition into a fully commercial gallery. “In China, no not-for-profit structure allows you to take in funds, so from the beginning, we were tasked with selling the work in the show to make it function.” In 2016, BANK was forced to abandon its historic venue when the Chinese government began reclaiming all state-owned properties under a nationwide edict. The gallery now operates from its space on Anfu Road in the French Concession, a vibrant and rapidly growing district where many international young professionals live and where other galleries like Capsule Shanghai have also set up shop.

The thick of COVID-19 marked the pinnacle of the gallery’s growth alongside China’s ever-expanding art market. But after COVID, everything shifted. The crash of the real estate sector and escalating tensions between China and the U.S. created a period of uncertainty.

Borysevicz himself had a turbulent pandemic. His family was stranded in Thailand for two years after China closed its borders to foreign nationals during the 2020 Lunar New Year. When Thailand locked down two years later, they moved to the U.S., and Borysevicz began traveling between New York and Shanghai, maintaining a foothold in both countries.

Despite recent challenges and the economic slowdown of the past few years, Borysevicz remains confident in China’s resilience and long-term growth. BANK will keep its Shanghai venue. “The Chinese market is the second largest in the world—there’s still a lot of buying power there,” he tells Observer. “Like everywhere else in the world, art has become a popular asset class for people. This is true both on a speculative level, as the Chinese have this strong sense of entrepreneurship and gambling, but it has also become truly part of a luxury lifestyle there. You can’t open up a magazine, whether it’s an in-flight magazine or anything in China, without looking at some contemporary art. The art world has just grown exponentially since the ‘90s.”

 

More promising still is the new generation of privileged young Chinese collectors who had been living, investing and collecting abroad but returned home during the pandemic. “There are a lot of young people with buying power who really want to get involved in the art world, not only by collecting but also opening galleries or private foundations and supporting artists,” Borysevicz says. “There are tons of smart, creative people there who are very entrepreneurial and willing to foster the art system in their country.”

 

The gallery’s American chapter

The gallery will launch its new chapter with a solo show by internationally renowned interdisciplinary artist Patty Chang on the first floor. Chang’s work has been exhibited at major institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the New Museum in New York, and the show is timed to coincide with the unveiling of a new commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of the upcoming exhibition “Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie.” The L.A.-based artist, performer and film director has built a career on work that is often highly provocative, addressing identity, racial and political issues such as the fetishization and exotification of Asian women in popular culture. Her practice challenges the pervasive stereotypes that shape and distort how female identity is perceived in society. Included in BANK’s debut show will be the video essay and accompanying installation from her ongoing research project “Learning Endings,” along with the wall piece Things I’m Scared of Right Now.

Chang’s solo show will be accompanied by a related group exhibition curated by Yuan Fuca on the second floor, bringing together artists whose practices engage with interconnected themes of body and land, rituals of care and remembrance, kinship and environmental concerns expressed through a transcultural dialogue. The show will feature works by Chang alongside artists from mainland China and beyond, including Ching Ho Cheng, Chang Yuchen, Cao Shuyi, Michael Najjar, Timur Si-Qin, Zhang Yibei, Sky Hopinka, Alice Wang, Pao Houa Her and Carolina Caycedo.

In May, coinciding with Frieze and New York’s peak art season, the gallery will dedicate one floor to the first U.S. solo show of visionary Shanghai-based artist Bai Yiyi. Focused on the concept of “hybridity,” Yiyi’s elaborately layered painterly compositions explore simultaneity and interconnectivity, visualizing beings as part of a broader network and ecosystem of essential relations. Embracing the traditional Chinese notion of “Dao” and the idea of a collective consciousness governing all life processes, Yiyi’s seemingly abstract yet densely symbolic paintings evoke a fluid, interwoven reality where all things connect, converge and dissolve into one another. His compositions, a drifting interplay of images, symbols and fragmented sources, offer revelatory visual embodiments of an existence governed by synthetic and symbiotic forces that sustain mutual survival and energetic balance.

With its rich and varied program in New York, BANK plans to feature in the coming months the “futuristic, hyper-queer” performance artist Tianzhou Chen, the multifaceted Oliver Herring following his successful presentation at the Armory Show last year and Ching Ho Cheng, the late NYC-based artist known for his psychedelic and alchemical works and his involvement in the downtown New York art scene of the 1960s and 1970s.

The New York space won’t be BANK’s first foray into the U.S. market. In recent years, the gallery has maintained a steady presence at fairs on both coasts, most recently with a solo booth at Frieze Los Angeles featuring work by hyperrealistic painter Liang Hao making his U.S. debut.

Seeking to expand its international visibility and offset the slowdown in China’s art market, BANK has invested heavily in fairs, participating in twenty-two between 2023 and 2024. Now, however, as the gallery rethinks its model and reduces its fair participation, Borysevicz sees the New York initiative as a partial alternative, responding to shifting market dynamics and new geopolitical challenges. Among those are the tariffs Donald Trump has threatened to impose on all goods coming from China. “We’re an international gallery, our program is eclectic and includes artists from all over the world, so it’s very challenging,” he says. “We will be subject to tariffs on both sides. There are already tariffs of over 20 percent on the China side and now upwards of 25 percent that hasn’t been completely validated yet, but at least 17 percent here. So when we bring in artists who are new to the market here or in China, on both sides, it’s kind of a blow against us, eating our profit margin.”

Still, Borysevicz remains committed to BANK’s role as a bridge between the two countries. “This whole endeavor of us opening here is an attempt to keep a spot for diplomacy and create a platform where this kind of dialogue can go on and for artists from mainland China to have visibility here in the States,” he explains. “BANK always wanted to be that platform where non-Chinese and Chinese artists could have a dialog on equal terms. We’ve always had an international program that was about creating a cultural exchange between China and the rest of the world.”

 
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