Hong Kong Future Diaspora (2022)

This July – October 2022 I began collaborating with artist and filmmaker Eelyn Lee to choreograph and facilitate a collective performance making process for Hong Kong Future Diaspora. It is the second cycle from her 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.

We marked the quarter-way point of this collective journey on October 21st 2022 with a blessing performance and work-in-progress sharing at Bloc Gallery, Sheffield. It was joyous!

Collaborators in the project include artists, researchers, martial arts scholars and fellow makers: Clara Cheung, Dr Wayne Wong, Angela YT Chan, Anna Chan, Jonathan Tang, Franco Ho and Shan Ray Cheung. Curated by Sunshine Wong.

Photos Yellow Pocket Studios.