Performing Identities

Performing Identities

Performing Identities is an ongoing iterative series of work exploring identity and the East and  Southeast Asian [ESEA] diasporas. Through collaboration with other ESEA artists and wider communities, Eelyn is seeking to discover embodied modes of expression for complex  identities, whilst testing the emergent ESEA label as an effective mode of categorisation.

Harmful myths around ESEA identity are often reduced to either ‘model minority’ - quiet,  hardworking and studious - or ‘insidious threat’, as incarnate in the racist character Dr Fu  Manchu. The COVID-related Asian Hate, together with the escalation of the Black Lives  Matter movement, has motivated many ESEA people to challenge stereotypes and build  community. By drawing on lived experiences, personal cosmologies and knowledge sharing, collaborators are collectively imagining new performance aesthetics as means of self-expressing identity. At the end of each cycle of creation the findings are performed as methods of resistance, resilience and re-imagining.

Cycle One: Saam Sing 三星
Cycle Two: Hong Kong Future Diaspora 香港離散之後 and Four Quadrants of the Sky 四大神獸

News

IMAGE Ancestral Futures - A Street Procession in Sheffield

Thursday, 15 August 2024
Ancestral Futures 源流之後 is a processional street performance in honour of the first recorded Chinese people in Sheffield –a group of magicians on tour from China who performed at the Whitsuntide Festival, 1855. 

 On 31st May, 1855, the lead magician, Teh Kwei 德貴, buried his 5-week old baby in a Sheffield graveyard.... Read More...

IMAGE Four Quadrants of the Sky 四大神獸 Exhibition Review

Monday, 22 January 2024
' Four Quadrants of the Sky employs mythology as a tool that is both fantastical and particular, to think expansively and interconnectedly—a mythological trans-local. It is an intellectual, theoretical and political work, and also a magical, gorgeous one.' - Emma Bolland. Four Quadrants of the Sky 四大神獸 reviewed in Corridor 8. Read the... Read More...

IMAGE Four Quadrants of the Sky Exhibition Opens 14th Sept

Monday, 28 August 2023
Four Quadrants of the Sky 四大神獸 completes the second cycle of Performing Identities, an... Read More...