Four Quadrants of the Sky 四大神獸 by Eelyn Lee exhibited at Bloc Projects, Sheffield

(September 19, 2024 → October 14, 2024) I co-created and performed a mythical character The Navigator for Eelyn Lee’s year-long collaborative project that ‘newly constellates diasporic identity and becoming’ for East and Southeast Asians in the UK. The exhibition includes Eelyn’s film and the costumes we co-designed with Christine Ting-Huan 挺歡 Urquhart during character development.

“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 Hybridity. 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?”

Find out more about Eelyn Lee’s project here