Frieze London: from scrap metal to ink in The Code Universe
In Carol Yinghua Lu’s curated section, Shinro Ohtake, Selma Selman, Oototol and Payne Zhu approach popular culture through very different materials.
A sheet crowded with printed matter, photographs and marks of colour is one way into The Code Universe. Shinro Ohtake’s Retina/Yellow RAM 2 does not present a single, pristine image. Its fragments are layered, interrupted and kept visibly separate. The work makes a good introduction to Carol Yinghua Lu’s curated section at Frieze London, which looks at how popular culture is made and circulated across generations.
What an object has already lived through
Ohtake’s contribution, presented by Take Ninagawa and greengrassi, extends from collage to works in his ongoing Scrapbook series. In the illustrated piece, scraps of print and photography acquire another life without losing their first one. Selma Selman approaches reuse from a different direction. Working on discarded metal, including the curved body of a car, she makes the support impossible to ignore. The image sits on an object that has already been used, handled and assigned a price. Her presentation is with acb Gallery.
Repetition, screens and new surfaces
Oototol’s ink painting offers a quieter form of repetition. Four uniformed, androgynous figures stand close together; the small changes between them become the subject. The Indonesian artist is presented by Valentine. With SPURS Gallery, Payne Zhu turns instead to the relation between human perception and machine cognition. Frieze describes a new multi-channel video installation accompanied by paintings on algae-based leather, drawing on scientific illustration. The installation photograph reproduced below records a separate presentation in Beijing, not the London stand.
Karim Boumjimar brings another kind of body into the conversation. His drawings populate the page with hybrid figures; at Frieze, TINA presents ceramics and a mural made for the site. It is a reminder that “popular culture” here does not refer to one look or one medium. The section moves between what is salvaged, repeated, screened and imagined, asking viewers to pay attention to the material in front of them as well as the image it carries.
Frieze London and Frieze Masters run in Regent’s Park from 14 to 18 October 2026. The Code Universe is a curated section of Frieze London.
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