Eelyn Lee is an award-winning artist and filmmaker of Hong Kong-English heritage who has shown work at Barbican, Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Palais de Tokyo and at international film festivals. Her art practice combines collective research, performance and filmmaking to create frameworks for collaboration. With organising a key aspect of her practice, Eelyn has convened a range of dialogue projects including the Social Art Summit 2018 – an artist-led review of socially engaged arts practice, and the ESEA Artists’ Futures Town Hall 2023 – a place to imagine new landscapes for East and Southeast Asian artists in the UK and beyond. Her ongoing body of work, Performing Identities is a collective reimagining of ESEA identities through the creation of new mythical characters and their cosmologies.
There isn’t a recording available so I have took time out to look at her site.
I came across four quadrants of the sky which I happened to stumble upon at Bloc Projects https://www.eelynlee.com/item/four-quadrants-of-the-sky?category_id=19
Four Quadrants of the Sky 四大神獸 completes the second cycle of Eelyn Lee’s Performing Identities, an expansive project that reimagines diasporic East and Southeast Asian [ESEA] identities through contemporary myth-making.
Made through a year-long collaboration with a core group of UK-based Hong Kongers, Four Quadrants of the Sky 四大神獸 newly constellates diasporic identity and becoming. Sitting within the realms of a creation myth, the film explores versions of Hong Kongness through the arrival of four newly devised characters, Wok Hei, The Navigator, Lo Ting and Hybridiy. By referring to the ‘four images’—the custodians of each cardinal direction (North, South, East and West) in Chinese celestial thinking—Lee charts the new characters and their cosmologies on to an ancient system of mapping the stars.
The film expresses a collaborative articulation of embodied knowledges. Reaching beyond conscious memories or narratives and tapping into movement and sensory realms, the work asks, what else are we storing in our bodies? What do they tell us about homeland, selfhood and legacies of un-belonging?
I have included this lovely review from Emma Bolland which succinctly goes into detail regarding the nuance of the installation.
Rusty'sArtWerk 