esea contemporary marks its 40th anniversary with a new group exhibition bringing together six artists whose practices probe the architectures of transition and the fragile ecologies of the in-between.
'Smooth Sailing, 一路順風’ is the first institutional solo exhibition by Marcos Kueh—an emerging artist whose richly layered textile works has been increasingly recognised on the international stage. This exhibition introduces new materials and processes while deepening his ongoing exploration of cross-cultural histories, diasporic identity, and collective memory.
'The Contest of the Fruits' is the first UK institutional solo exhibition by the internationally acclaimed art collective Slavs and Tatars. It is an exploration of language, politics, religion, and humour through the lens of a 19th-century Uighur poem, reimagined as a vibrant animated film and rap battle.
esea contemporary and MAO (Museum of Asian Art), Turin, are pleased to present ‘Shadow and Void: Buddha¹⁰’, an innovative collaboration between the UK’s only non-profit gallery dedicated to East and Southeast Asian contemporary art and one of Europe’s foremost institutional collections of Asian art.
esea contemporary presents London-based artist Steph Huang's solo exhibition 'There is nothing old under the sun' as part of the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award’s National Touring Programme.
Over the month of August, esea contemporary is pleased to present the post-artist residency exhibition ‘Clayground’ of Elgea Balzarie who lives and works together with Jatiwangi Art Factory (JaF).
esea contemporary presents Jane Jin Kaisen's first UK solo show ‘Halmang’, featuring polyphonic moving-image works, archive and reference materials. By weaving together oceanic cosmology and gendered histories, the exhibition is an in-depth inquiry into narratives of subjective and collective loss, resilience, and the formation of alternative communities.
‘A Phantom’s Vibe’ is a solo exhibition by artist Dinu Li, featuring newly commissioned and existing works that combine music, sculptural assemblages, and video installation. The exhibition explores the complexities of colonial history, cultural memory, and hybrid identities.
Practise Till We Meet explores diasporic experiences, the condition of migration, and the adaptations required to make a new life in a new place, featuring works by Asia-Art-Activism, Asian Feminist Studio for Art and Research, Audrey Albert, Isaac Chong Wai, Koki Tanaka, Liu Weiwei and Mimian Hsu.
Join us for a creative workshop exploring punk zines, DIY publishing, and archival practice, led by Charmaine Wah of Shoes Off, held in conjunction with Chris Zhongtian Yuan’s solo exhibition ‘Two Improvisations’ at esea contemporary.
Join us for 'Thailand and the Making of Modernity,' a screening and conversation event presented in dialogue with Nakrob Moonmanas's exhibition 'รูปสุวรรณศิวิไลซ์: Metamorphosis in Gold,' curated by Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, at Warin Lab Contemporary, Bangkok.
Join Penny Yiou Peng and Milia Xin Bi for an engaging conversation that revisits the concepts of intelligence (zhìnéng, 智能) and wisdom (zhìhuì, 智慧), exploring how these ideas are understood, challenged, and reimagined in contemporary artistic and cultural contexts.
Join Y7 and Milia Xin Bi for a screening of ‘Undead Internet Theory’, exploring the eerie conditions of an internet increasingly shaped by non-human agencies, including bots, algorithms, synthetic content, and automated systems.
Join us for a talk with artist and curator Yuen Fong Ling, who will reflect on a period of creativity, hybridity, and possibility centred around Manchester, when artists of ESEA heritage were building connections across a widely dispersed and often fragmented artistic community.
Join curator and writer Milia Xin Bi's talk on a body of work that explores the material, cultural, and temporal dimensions of data and digital infrastructures.
On the occasion of ‘Thresholds of Becoming’, dr dima mekdad has envisioned this workshop as a shared space for sensing and practising becoming together.
Across two screening programmes featuring films by So Yo-hen, Erika Tan, Richard Fung, and Fiona Tan, 'Whose Homeland' considers migration, labour, and return as lived, embodied processes rather than fixed narratives.
Join us for the preview of 'Thresholds of Becoming', featuring works by Nicole Coson, Xin Liu, Charmaine Poh, Minoru Nomata, Yang Yongliang, and Yin Aiwen.
Join us for ‘Counter Archives: On Acts of Resistance and Remembrance’, a film screening and workshop that explore how memories and embodied histories can act as feminist and queer forms of resistance in the face of erasure.
Join artist Marcos Kueh in conversation with Amy George and Dr Vera Mey, moderated by Jo-Lene Ong, as they discuss 'Smooth Sailing, 一路順風' — Kueh’s first institutional solo exhibition exploring migration, memory, and cultural repair.
Join us for a collective exploration of memory, migration, and selfhood through film. This screening presents artists’ moving image works that imagine futures made possible through acts of re-telling.
esea contemporary is pleased to present 'Auntie Tales: Ghost Stories Across the Generations', an engaging and playful workshop led by theatre-maker and artist Trà Nguyễn.
Join us for the preview of 'Smooth Sailing, 一路順風', the first institutional solo exhibition by Marcos Kueh — an emerging artist from Sarawak, Borneo Malaysia, who currently lives and works in the Netherlands.
As part of Japan Week, join us for two curated screening programmes — Rhythms of the Earth and Feminist & Queer Reflections — featuring moving image works from the collection of the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.
esea contemporary and The White Hotel present Violent Magic Orchestra (VMO) — an extreme art music project from Osaka that fuses techno, black metal, industrial, noise, gabber, and contemporary composition.
Learn the language of flowers through the timeless art of ikebana with Junko Popham, who blends classical Japanese technique with a northern sensibility.
Presented in collaboration with the Whitworth Art Gallery, this evening of collective reading invites you on a journey across continents and centuries, weaving together voices and texts in dialogue with 'Slavs and Tatars: The Contest of the Fruits', on view at esea contemporary.
As Japan Week marks its 50th anniversary in Manchester, esea contemporary invites you to an exhilarating weekend festival that brings Japan’s genre-defying contemporary culture to life.
Join us for a special afternoon with artist Yan Wang Preston, centring on her new book 'With Love. From an Invader. — Rhododendons, Empire, China and Me.'
Join us for a special event with London-based artist Ye Wuji—taking place alongside Slavs and Tatars’ inaugural UK institutional solo exhibition 'The Contest of the Fruits' at esea contemporary.
Join us for a special screening event with artist-filmmaker Luka Yuanyuan Yang, featuring three of her short films and a talk on her latest book, 'Dance in Herland.'
Every last Saturday of the month, join a staff member in the gallery for a free guided tour of esea contemporary’s exhibition ‘Slavs and Tatars: The Contest of the Fruits.’
Part of our ongoing initiative Moving Forwards, Sideways—a series of creative workshops designed to support the Hong Kong BN(O) community in Greater Manchester—this session invites participants of all ages to reflect on experiences of change, grounding, and belonging.
Join open-call winner Jason Lut Ming Kwong for a hands-on creative clay workshop for Hong BN(O) of all-ages, using Mahjong as a playful starting point to explore ideas of identity, belonging, and cultural symbolism.
esea contemporary presents Amplified Margins: Cross-Cultural Narratives, a discussion on the role of cross-cultural storytelling in arts writing and criticism. The event brings together Vivienne Chow, award-winning journalist and writer, and Chloe Stead, associate editor of frieze, to examine the complexities of making marginalised narratives visible, impactful, and present.
esea contemporary and Liverpool Biennial are pleased to co-present an engaging public programme featuring the Aroma Cantonese Opera Troupe in collaboration with artist Karen Tam, as part of the Liverpool Biennial’s official programme.
Join us for the preview of 'The Contest of the Fruits', the first UK institutional solo exhibition by the internationally acclaimed art collective Slavs and Tatars.
Join us for a practical, hands-on workshop tailored to help you craft compelling grant applications, navigate the UK funding landscape, and explore cross-cultural funding opportunities beyond local grants.
Join us for an evocative exploration of sound, identity, and history, as 'Bitter Sounds: A Potential Rehearsal' uncovers the sonic imprints of migration between Asia and Africa.
esea contemporary is pleased to co-present, with the Manchester Urban Film Series, ‘ESEA and South Asian Women Speak Out!’, a screening of two short films exploring anti-racist resistance within East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) and South Asian communities in the UK.
esea contemporary and Bound Art Book Fair are pleased to co-present a panel discussion celebrating the launch of ‘There is nothing old under the sun,’ a special publication accompanying the eponymous exhibition by Steph Huang.
esea contemporary co-presents with Queer East, ‘Silence Will Not Protect You’, a screening programme offering an unfiltered look into unseen and unspoken aspects of LGBTQ+ experience.
esea contemporary and Manchester Contemporary are pleased to present 'Amplifying Women's Voices: Leadership, Mentorship, and Global-Majority Perspectives in Contemporary Art', an insightful panel discussion celebrating the vital contributions of women in the contemporary art world.
Join us for an afternoon of insightful dialogue, publication displays, and meaningful connections, as we continue to celebrate the transformative role of books in bridging diverse communities.
Every Saturday, join a staff member in the gallery for a free guided tour of esea contemporary’s exhibition ‘Steph Huang: There is nothing old under the sun.’
Led by Elgea Balzarie, an artist from Jatiwangi art Factory (JaF), this workshop series will explore the role of clay, deeply rooted in JaF's research in the Jatiwangi region, as a medium that fosters community engagement and empowers the conservation of local lands.
In this artist talk, Alison Lam will reflect on her British Chinese neurodivergent identity and experiences of navigating her artistic social practice engagements, all informed by her lived experience of raising children with autism in British cultural environments.
esea contemporary has commissioned Manchester-based artist and designer Sarah Marsh to create the site-specific installation 'Sensory Archive Corner' in our Communal Project Space.
This dynamic programme offers a critical examination – through an artistic lens and research – which seeks to destabilise entrenched power dynamics and foster a thought-provoking understanding and representation of memory and history.
Join us for an Artist Talk followed by a Reading Workshop, where UK-based Taiwanese artist Clare Chun-yu Liu will explore ideas of diasporic cultural identity, (self-)representation, and the relationship between self and other.
Join us for a sensory workshop created for the new Hong Kong BN(O) communities residing in Manchester. Led by practitioner Sarah Marsh, the artist behind the acclaimed The Sensory Toolkit, participants will craft their ‘dumplings’ using soft T-shirt fabric, decorating the fabric before filling it with a blend of natural dried grains and aromatic herbs.
Join this lecture-performance by internationally renowned art collective, Slavs and Tatars, which explores the sounds rolling off our tongues as a strategy of resistance and interdisciplinary research.
These bilingual non-fiction workshops offer a distinctive opportunity for participants to delve into and chronicle their personal experiences of migration through the art of storytelling.
These bilingual non-fiction workshops offer a distinctive opportunity for participants to delve into and chronicle their personal experiences of migration through the art of storytelling.
The book, published by Multilingual Matters and edited by Cangbai Wang and Terry Lamb, explores the transnational practices of migrant groups in global London.
Join us in the Gallery for a special screening on the final day of the exhibition ‘Jane Jin Kaisen: Halmang.' Featuring three earlier film works that collectively delve into the complex, transgenerational issue of gender and militarism, at the nexus of colonisation, nationalism, patriarchy, and imperialism.
Join us for a unique wine experience led by wine writer Kelly Liang. During the workshop, Kelly will guide us through a selection of wines on the topic of 'Home.'
Join wine writer Kelly Liang for a thought-provoking, interactive evening of wine tasting and storytelling exploring the theme of ‘Women’ through the lens of wine.
esea contemporary is pleased to co-host an in-person reading session with the Feminist Duration Reading Group, led by Taey Iohe and Grace Eunhye Park. Through three lyrical texts, the session will reflect on the different social multiplicity of gender and migratory encounters in the concurrent ecological, social, and political crises of our time.
Join us online for a conversation between Karen Smith, curator and Director of Academic Initiatives at De Ying Foundation, and Xiaowen Zhu, Director of esea contemporary
Join us for a free colouring workshop exploring Jeju Island's seascapes and marine life, inspired by the haenyeos featured in our current exhibition 'Jane Jin Kaisen: Halmang'
Celebrate the dawn of the Year of the Wood Dragon at an exclusive event for esea contemporary’s supporters, collaborators, and partners from Manchester and beyond
Join Shanghai-based independent curator Chao Jiaxing on-site as we navigate storytelling as a curatorial methodology, and the impact of cultural diasporas on contemporary visual art curatorship.
Join wine writer Kelly Liang for a thought-provoking, interactive evening of wine tasting and storytelling exploring the notion of ‘Home’ through the lens of wine.
esea contemporary is pleased to co-present an off-site screening of 'Community of Parting' by Jane Jin Kaisen at School of Digital Arts, Manchester Metropolitan University.
Join us online for a talk by Infrasonica, a digital platform of non-Western cultures, archives of experimental sound and visual artists, as well as theoretical musings on contemporary critical thought.
Join our Curator Dot Zhihan Jia for an afternoon reading session where we will collectively read the accompanying text by Koki Tanaka for his feature film 'Vulnerable Histories' (2018).
Join us for a creative workshop exploring punk zines, DIY publishing, and archival practice, led by Charmaine Wah of Shoes Off, held in conjunction with Chris Zhongtian Yuan’s solo exhibition ‘Two Improvisations’ at esea contemporary.
Join us for 'Thailand and the Making of Modernity,' a screening and conversation event presented in dialogue with Nakrob Moonmanas's exhibition 'รูปสุวรรณศิวิไลซ์: Metamorphosis in Gold,' curated by Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, at Warin Lab Contemporary, Bangkok.
Join Penny Yiou Peng and Milia Xin Bi for an engaging conversation that revisits the concepts of intelligence (zhìnéng, 智能) and wisdom (zhìhuì, 智慧), exploring how these ideas are understood, challenged, and reimagined in contemporary artistic and cultural contexts.
Join Y7 and Milia Xin Bi for a screening of ‘Undead Internet Theory’, exploring the eerie conditions of an internet increasingly shaped by non-human agencies, including bots, algorithms, synthetic content, and automated systems.
Join us for a talk with artist and curator Yuen Fong Ling, who will reflect on a period of creativity, hybridity, and possibility centred around Manchester, when artists of ESEA heritage were building connections across a widely dispersed and often fragmented artistic community.
Join curator and writer Milia Xin Bi's talk on a body of work that explores the material, cultural, and temporal dimensions of data and digital infrastructures.
On the occasion of ‘Thresholds of Becoming’, dr dima mekdad has envisioned this workshop as a shared space for sensing and practising becoming together.
Across two screening programmes featuring films by So Yo-hen, Erika Tan, Richard Fung, and Fiona Tan, 'Whose Homeland' considers migration, labour, and return as lived, embodied processes rather than fixed narratives.
Join us for the preview of 'Thresholds of Becoming', featuring works by Nicole Coson, Xin Liu, Charmaine Poh, Minoru Nomata, Yang Yongliang, and Yin Aiwen.
Join us for ‘Counter Archives: On Acts of Resistance and Remembrance’, a film screening and workshop that explore how memories and embodied histories can act as feminist and queer forms of resistance in the face of erasure.
Join artist Marcos Kueh in conversation with Amy George and Dr Vera Mey, moderated by Jo-Lene Ong, as they discuss 'Smooth Sailing, 一路順風' — Kueh’s first institutional solo exhibition exploring migration, memory, and cultural repair.
Join us for a collective exploration of memory, migration, and selfhood through film. This screening presents artists’ moving image works that imagine futures made possible through acts of re-telling.
esea contemporary is pleased to present 'Auntie Tales: Ghost Stories Across the Generations', an engaging and playful workshop led by theatre-maker and artist Trà Nguyễn.
Join us for the preview of 'Smooth Sailing, 一路順風', the first institutional solo exhibition by Marcos Kueh — an emerging artist from Sarawak, Borneo Malaysia, who currently lives and works in the Netherlands.
As part of Japan Week, join us for two curated screening programmes — Rhythms of the Earth and Feminist & Queer Reflections — featuring moving image works from the collection of the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.
esea contemporary and The White Hotel present Violent Magic Orchestra (VMO) — an extreme art music project from Osaka that fuses techno, black metal, industrial, noise, gabber, and contemporary composition.
Learn the language of flowers through the timeless art of ikebana with Junko Popham, who blends classical Japanese technique with a northern sensibility.
Presented in collaboration with the Whitworth Art Gallery, this evening of collective reading invites you on a journey across continents and centuries, weaving together voices and texts in dialogue with 'Slavs and Tatars: The Contest of the Fruits', on view at esea contemporary.
As Japan Week marks its 50th anniversary in Manchester, esea contemporary invites you to an exhilarating weekend festival that brings Japan’s genre-defying contemporary culture to life.
Join us for a special afternoon with artist Yan Wang Preston, centring on her new book 'With Love. From an Invader. — Rhododendons, Empire, China and Me.'
Join us for a special event with London-based artist Ye Wuji—taking place alongside Slavs and Tatars’ inaugural UK institutional solo exhibition 'The Contest of the Fruits' at esea contemporary.
Join us for a special screening event with artist-filmmaker Luka Yuanyuan Yang, featuring three of her short films and a talk on her latest book, 'Dance in Herland.'
Every last Saturday of the month, join a staff member in the gallery for a free guided tour of esea contemporary’s exhibition ‘Slavs and Tatars: The Contest of the Fruits.’
Part of our ongoing initiative Moving Forwards, Sideways—a series of creative workshops designed to support the Hong Kong BN(O) community in Greater Manchester—this session invites participants of all ages to reflect on experiences of change, grounding, and belonging.
Join open-call winner Jason Lut Ming Kwong for a hands-on creative clay workshop for Hong BN(O) of all-ages, using Mahjong as a playful starting point to explore ideas of identity, belonging, and cultural symbolism.
esea contemporary presents Amplified Margins: Cross-Cultural Narratives, a discussion on the role of cross-cultural storytelling in arts writing and criticism. The event brings together Vivienne Chow, award-winning journalist and writer, and Chloe Stead, associate editor of frieze, to examine the complexities of making marginalised narratives visible, impactful, and present.
esea contemporary and Liverpool Biennial are pleased to co-present an engaging public programme featuring the Aroma Cantonese Opera Troupe in collaboration with artist Karen Tam, as part of the Liverpool Biennial’s official programme.
Join us for the preview of 'The Contest of the Fruits', the first UK institutional solo exhibition by the internationally acclaimed art collective Slavs and Tatars.
Join us for a practical, hands-on workshop tailored to help you craft compelling grant applications, navigate the UK funding landscape, and explore cross-cultural funding opportunities beyond local grants.
Join us for an evocative exploration of sound, identity, and history, as 'Bitter Sounds: A Potential Rehearsal' uncovers the sonic imprints of migration between Asia and Africa.
esea contemporary is pleased to co-present, with the Manchester Urban Film Series, ‘ESEA and South Asian Women Speak Out!’, a screening of two short films exploring anti-racist resistance within East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) and South Asian communities in the UK.
esea contemporary and Bound Art Book Fair are pleased to co-present a panel discussion celebrating the launch of ‘There is nothing old under the sun,’ a special publication accompanying the eponymous exhibition by Steph Huang.
esea contemporary co-presents with Queer East, ‘Silence Will Not Protect You’, a screening programme offering an unfiltered look into unseen and unspoken aspects of LGBTQ+ experience.
esea contemporary and Manchester Contemporary are pleased to present 'Amplifying Women's Voices: Leadership, Mentorship, and Global-Majority Perspectives in Contemporary Art', an insightful panel discussion celebrating the vital contributions of women in the contemporary art world.
Join us for an afternoon of insightful dialogue, publication displays, and meaningful connections, as we continue to celebrate the transformative role of books in bridging diverse communities.
Every Saturday, join a staff member in the gallery for a free guided tour of esea contemporary’s exhibition ‘Steph Huang: There is nothing old under the sun.’
Led by Elgea Balzarie, an artist from Jatiwangi art Factory (JaF), this workshop series will explore the role of clay, deeply rooted in JaF's research in the Jatiwangi region, as a medium that fosters community engagement and empowers the conservation of local lands.
In this artist talk, Alison Lam will reflect on her British Chinese neurodivergent identity and experiences of navigating her artistic social practice engagements, all informed by her lived experience of raising children with autism in British cultural environments.
esea contemporary has commissioned Manchester-based artist and designer Sarah Marsh to create the site-specific installation 'Sensory Archive Corner' in our Communal Project Space.
This dynamic programme offers a critical examination – through an artistic lens and research – which seeks to destabilise entrenched power dynamics and foster a thought-provoking understanding and representation of memory and history.
Join us for an Artist Talk followed by a Reading Workshop, where UK-based Taiwanese artist Clare Chun-yu Liu will explore ideas of diasporic cultural identity, (self-)representation, and the relationship between self and other.
Join us for a sensory workshop created for the new Hong Kong BN(O) communities residing in Manchester. Led by practitioner Sarah Marsh, the artist behind the acclaimed The Sensory Toolkit, participants will craft their ‘dumplings’ using soft T-shirt fabric, decorating the fabric before filling it with a blend of natural dried grains and aromatic herbs.
Join this lecture-performance by internationally renowned art collective, Slavs and Tatars, which explores the sounds rolling off our tongues as a strategy of resistance and interdisciplinary research.
These bilingual non-fiction workshops offer a distinctive opportunity for participants to delve into and chronicle their personal experiences of migration through the art of storytelling.
These bilingual non-fiction workshops offer a distinctive opportunity for participants to delve into and chronicle their personal experiences of migration through the art of storytelling.
The book, published by Multilingual Matters and edited by Cangbai Wang and Terry Lamb, explores the transnational practices of migrant groups in global London.
Join us in the Gallery for a special screening on the final day of the exhibition ‘Jane Jin Kaisen: Halmang.' Featuring three earlier film works that collectively delve into the complex, transgenerational issue of gender and militarism, at the nexus of colonisation, nationalism, patriarchy, and imperialism.
Join us for a unique wine experience led by wine writer Kelly Liang. During the workshop, Kelly will guide us through a selection of wines on the topic of 'Home.'
Join wine writer Kelly Liang for a thought-provoking, interactive evening of wine tasting and storytelling exploring the theme of ‘Women’ through the lens of wine.
esea contemporary is pleased to co-host an in-person reading session with the Feminist Duration Reading Group, led by Taey Iohe and Grace Eunhye Park. Through three lyrical texts, the session will reflect on the different social multiplicity of gender and migratory encounters in the concurrent ecological, social, and political crises of our time.
Join us online for a conversation between Karen Smith, curator and Director of Academic Initiatives at De Ying Foundation, and Xiaowen Zhu, Director of esea contemporary
Join us for a free colouring workshop exploring Jeju Island's seascapes and marine life, inspired by the haenyeos featured in our current exhibition 'Jane Jin Kaisen: Halmang'
Celebrate the dawn of the Year of the Wood Dragon at an exclusive event for esea contemporary’s supporters, collaborators, and partners from Manchester and beyond
Join Shanghai-based independent curator Chao Jiaxing on-site as we navigate storytelling as a curatorial methodology, and the impact of cultural diasporas on contemporary visual art curatorship.
Join wine writer Kelly Liang for a thought-provoking, interactive evening of wine tasting and storytelling exploring the notion of ‘Home’ through the lens of wine.
esea contemporary is pleased to co-present an off-site screening of 'Community of Parting' by Jane Jin Kaisen at School of Digital Arts, Manchester Metropolitan University.
Join us online for a talk by Infrasonica, a digital platform of non-Western cultures, archives of experimental sound and visual artists, as well as theoretical musings on contemporary critical thought.
Join our Curator Dot Zhihan Jia for an afternoon reading session where we will collectively read the accompanying text by Koki Tanaka for his feature film 'Vulnerable Histories' (2018).
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