Dear esea contemporary community,
In poetry, we seek refuge; in art, we discover possibility. These words often return to me as I reflect on the city we call home—Manchester, a place where histories of movement, labour, and resistance are woven into its very fabric. The industrial residue of red-brick buildings and the constant passage of international planes remind me that the city is ever in flux, and in stepping beyond the familiar, we become strangers once more.
Contemporary art today advocates for polyphonic and pluralistic modes of knowledge production, seeking to unsettle inherited certainties. At times, it grapples with cultural clichés and the reduction of identity; at others, it interrogates unjust power and normalised forms of exclusion. The most compelling voices risk being misunderstood. Yet they persist—testing the peripheries of belief systems and the margins of ritual—because it is along these borders that hybridity takes root, and syncretism begins to speak.
Our organisation has undergone a profound transformation: one that moves away from rigid definitions and towards an expansive, relational understanding of East and Southeast Asian cultural experiences. ESEA is not a neutral designation. It emerges from centuries of movement and rupture: Zheng He’s fifteenth-century expeditions from Nanjing to Malacca, Aceh, and Galle; the long shadow of colonial rule—Dutch in Indonesia, British in Burma, French in Vietnam—that carved borders to imperial design. These histories persist in accents, in trade routes, in the circuitry of global exchange. The region today is both centre and margin—hyper-visible, yet often misread. Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Taipei: nodes of power and precarity, each bearing the contradictions of the so-called East Asian Miracle. ASEAN, born of postcolonial hope, now mediates competing global interests. In these entangled geographies, where hypercapitalism brushes against ancestral memory, categories fray.
And so we begin with porous edges—privileging movement over fixity, translation over origin. By attending to what slips through, we reimagine how artistic practice might speak across difference—without collapsing it. We seek a more inclusive, layered understanding of contemporary art in, from, and about Asia—one that reflects the entangled complexities of our globalised world.
This ethos of centring the margins—as sites of synthesis, not separation—feels deeply resonant in Manchester: a city shaped by migration, industrial legacy, and anti-colonial struggle. esea contemporary’s location in the Northern Quarter, once home to textile warehouses, fish markets, and waves of migrants, positions the gallery within a neighbourhood where the past and present continuously converse.
Through our programmes, commissions, community-building, and partnerships, we are committed to amplifying artistic voices that challenge dominant narratives and deepen our understanding of diasporic experience—especially those that invite us to navigate shifting terrains, where opposites blur, categories dissolve, and ritual and rupture coalesce.
In a world increasingly shaped by polarisation, we hope esea contemporary opens a third space: one where ambiguity is not avoided, but embraced; where the urgency of the aesthetic meets the weight of our shared realities; where the act of seeing becomes an act of listening. In these in-between spaces—strange and familiar, playful and profound—we continue to find meaning, together. It is here, in the gaps between centre and margin, visibility and misinterpretation, that new ways of being in community begin to grow—through conversation, mutual care, and the transformative power of art.
With warmth and solidarity,
Xiaowen Zhu
Director, esea contemporary