Eelyn Lee

My British-born, blended Hakka-Hong Kong-English body sits at the heart of my practice. The hybridity within me, endears me to fluidity, shape-shifting and not knowing. As a child, Hong Kong was a place of my imagination –a place I had never visited, but knew was part of me. Sitting at the staff table in my dad’s Chinese Restaurant, sharing food with people who loved me, but spoke with different words to me - was my everyday. 

My collaborative practice starts in the spirit of not knowing to collectively imagine other ways of being. I am interested in bringing humans and more than humans together, to share knowledge and build solidarities, in acts of collective imagining. By delving in to ancestral memories that sit within the body, new mythologies emerge - new constellations, providing guides to possible futures. The collaborators are bodies - human bodies, water bodies, bodies of land - memories, ghosts and lost stories. The materials include deep listening, collective note-taking, and intuiting - framed by anti racist strategies and love ethics - breathing life in to the gaps of colonial histories.

Amidst climate breakdown, division, false narratives, and genocide, I am interested in creating spaces where gentle reflection and difference are embraced –spaces to share, create, learn, test and fail. Traces from these encounters are transposed to moving images and live performance - in the gallery and on the streets –creating spaces that are both meditative and noisy - acts of defiance - rehearsals for our liberation.

With a racialised body and marginalised gender, I’ve had to work hard to keep going, despite not having the exposure and opportunities I might otherwise have received. After graduating in Fine Art in the 90’s, I supported my practice with teaching roles, and working in community arts organisations. In the 2000’s I began receiving commissions to deliver participatory art projects with young people  –work that kept going until 2018. Although, then, there was a distinction between ‘community artist’ and ‘contemporary artist’ - and the work lacked critique and validation - this period is the bedrock for my current practice.

In 2020, with the rise of Covid related Asian Hate, I consciously shifted my focus, centre-ing my own lived experience to explore diasporic East and Southeast Asian identities. Once engaged in this enquiry, it became starkly apparent that British ESEA artists are largely missing from the contemporary art narrative in the UK.