The Royal College of Art (RCA) is ranked as the world’s top university for art and design. This summer, until 19 July, it is hosting RCA2026 – a vibrant programme of exhibitions and events spanning three London campuses. These showcases offer a preview of what’s next for the creative industries, featuring innovative, boundary-pushing projects from 1,600 postgraduate students. The showcase represents the cutting edge of Arts & Humanities, Architecture, Communication and Design. Here are five talents to know:
Manxin Li | School of Design EXPO (17 – 19 July, RCA Battersea)
Manxin Li (MA Textiles) draws on the folklore and customs of southern Fujian, China, working across textiles, fashion, installation and painting to translate historical narratives and myths into contemporary visual languages. Her project, on view at the School of Design EXPO, reinterprets traditional Chinese zhiguai (literally “records of the strange”) – short narratives originating in the Han dynasty that recount encounters with ghosts, deities and mythological beasts as factual events. In response, Li constructs a speculative multi-species world inhabited by people, non-human entities and objects alike. Through this imagined realm, she explores fear, disorder and the possibility of coexistence beyond anthropocentrism.
Annie Ziying Liu | Festival of Communication (3 – 5 July and 10 – 12 July, RCA White City)
Annie Ziying Liu (MA Digital Direction) blends technology with traditional media to create immersive experiences spanning animation, video games and interactive installation. She interrogates themes of xenobiology (the study of lifeforms beyond Earth), as well as posthumanism and feminism. Her multimedia experimental film, showcased at the Festival of Communication in early July, combines two-dimensional illustrations with three-dimensional modelling to visually articulate her thesis “of faith as a superposition of certainty and doubt.” Her wider body of work includes a pixel video game reflecting on the environmental complexities surrounding radioactive waste discharge, and a visual poem navigating grief.
Ruoyi Wu | School of Architecture Show (3 – 5 July, RCA Kensington)
Ruoyi Wu (MA Interior Design) is an interior designer and spatial storyteller who explores themes of “liminality, urban routine and emotional resistance” within contemporary Chinese society. Her project Off The Clock is a highlight of the School of Architecture Show; it holds up a mirror to commuting culture, burnout and “lying flat” (a movement where young people reject overwork and consumerism) within a near-future Shanghai. Through a train interior, film and dining experiences, Wu confronts the emotional exhaustion of contemporary life by imagining a space where passengers can temporarily escape productivity-driven routines. She asks: can rest exist outside systems of efficiency and control?
Vlada Bondarenko | School of Architecture Show (3 – 5 July, RCA Kensington)
Another standout of the School of Architecture Show is Vlada Bondarenko’s (MA Architecture) project, which explores transgender healthcare, reproductive justice and therapeutic building design through an alternative fertility clinic and community space in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Inspired by Ukrainian mythology, water rituals and personal experiences of transition, Bondarenko’s proposed structure combines immersive environments, sound, mist and experimental materials to imagine architecture as an infrastructure of care, transformation and collective healing during wartime.
Aninda Singh | School of Arts & Humanities Show (18 – 21 June, RCA Battersea)
Working across clay and textiles, Aninda Singh (MA Ceramics & Glass) investigates the entanglement between ecology, empire and consumption. Terra Strata responds to the extensive cultivation of plants and insects under colonialism, to extract raw materials for the production of goods such as fabrics, dyes, sugar, coffee, tobacco and tea. At the School of Arts & Humanities Show in June, Singh’s project brought these botanical histories into dialogue with clay structures inspired by termite mounds. The work dwells on how imperial exploitation continues to underpin contemporary social and ecological realities, and creates a powerful dialogue with her other project, Re-Route, which further engages with the afterlives of colonial extraction. Work from RCA’s School of Arts & Humanities students is available to browse and purchase on the RCA2026 Store, from ceramics and glass to sculpture, photography, painting, prints and more.
Free and open to the public, the official schedule for RCA2026 can be accessed here.
A selection of works from RCA2026 graduating students is available for purchase through RCA Sales, a special sales platform, which is open until Monday 20 July.
Words: Eleanor Sutherland
Image Credits:
1. Ruoyi Wu, Off The Clock, Film Still. Credit: Ruoyi Wu.
2. Manxin Li, MA Textiles, RCA2026.
3. Annie Ziying Liu, Eternal Recurrence. Digital 3D Sculpture. Unreal Engine 2.
4. Ruoyi Wu, Off The Clock, Film Still. Credit: Ruoyi Wu.
5. Vlada Bondarenko, Clinic for Reproductive and Trans Care. Unreal Engine render of the clinic and garden exterior.
6. Aninda Singh, Terra Strata. Terracotta, stoneware and resin.
