esea contemporary is pleased to welcome artist Sophie Mak-Schram for a residency exploring zhizha (紙紮), the traditional Chinese practice of crafting bamboo and paper sculptures for funerary and celebratory rituals. Historically created as offerings for ancestors, these ephemeral structures carry complex histories of migration, repression, and transformation, having been driven underground during the Cultural Revolution before continuing across diasporic communities, including in Hong Kong.

Through artistic research, material experimentation, and conversations with local communities, Mak-Schram will investigate how zhizha might speak to contemporary questions of ecological futures, impermanence and social connection. The residency forms part of her ongoing interest in collective forms of knowledge-making and in the ways cultural practices are reshaped through movement, memory and place.

Developed in dialogue with Manchester’s Chinese and East and Southeast Asian communities, the residency also draws on research into local museum collections, including funerary paper objects held within the city’s galleries and archives. Bringing together community engagement, archival inquiry and making processes, the project considers how ritual traditions can generate new ways of relating across generations, geographies, and temporalities.