Hong Kong Future Diaspora: Eelyn Lee
21 October - 19 November
Launch event: Thu 20 Oct, 6 - 8pm
Includes a special opening performance at 6:30pm
Free & open to all
Hong Kong Future Diaspora is the second cycle of artist and filmmaker Eelyn Lee’s ambitious Performing Identities project that explores what it means to be East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) in the UK today.
With a focus on Hong Kong diaspora in Sheffield, this cycle spans a two-year period (2022-23) of relationship building, careful workshopping and co-development. While Eelyn’s opening gambit is the ‘Chinese’ takeaway and restaurant as a site of embodied identity, she also turns to other, everyday movements that settle into our bodies over time. Inviting recent and established UK-based Hong Kongers across two generations of migration, she facilitates critical discussions around the shaping, holding and re-imagining of identities. Collaborators include artists, researchers, martial arts scholars and fellow makers: Clara Cheung, Dr Wayne Wong, Jan-Ming Lee, Angela YT Chan, Anna Chan, Jonathan Tang, Franco Ho and Shan Ray Cheung. Curated by Sunshine Wong.
The October 2022 edition of Hong Kong Future Diaspora marks the quarter-way point of this collective journey with a public sharing of works-in-progress. Through performance, discussions and an exhibition of past and current documentation of the larger Performing Identities project, the programme sketches the shifting landscapes of the wandering Hong Konger through past, present and future.
Documentation images: Yellow Pocket Studios.
Opening night ritual / performance video credit: Richard Heap.
Eelyn Lee is an award-winning artist and filmmaker based in Sheffield. She has exhibited at Barbican, Tate Modern, National Portrait Gallery and Whitechapel Gallery as well as internationally in Paris, Berlin, Bogotá and Toronto. Eelyn’s practice combines collective research, devised theatre and filmmaking to create frameworks for ensembles of collaborators to work together. In 2016 she co-founded Social Art Network, an artist-led network, building agency in the field of art and social practice. In 2020 she was commissioned to make Casting Fu Manchu, a film exploring ‘yellow peril’ in response to the rise of COVID related ‘Asian hate’. Eelyn is currently developing her first narrative feature film.