ESEA heritage month celebration with Dan Chan and Wei Zhang

Thu 22 Sep, 6pm

The event started with a screening of Wei Zhang’s work, The Avulsed Rabbit. This film depicts a bizarre Sci-Fi and dystopian world where gender essentialism and heteronormativity are still popular and widely accepted. The work reveals that women and queer people are unfairly treated socially, culturally, and politically. It also finds a unique perspective to demonstrate the significance of queer theory.

Liverpool based visual and drag artist, Dan Chan performed a combination of poetry, movement and lip sync. The spoken word poetry is pre-recorded with sounds embedded throughout the recording, which leads onto the lip sync of the song Cellophane by FKA Twigs. Both of these elements are connected through movement.

The performance expresses the plight of the queer Asian experience and the impact of the white gay male gaze.

Our guest curator Katherine Ka Yi Liu 廖加怡 hosted a conversation between the artists to further explore and investigate the means of heritage as the final part of this programme.

Last year, besea.n (Britain’s East and South East Asian Network) launched the first heritage month to celebrate the UK’s East and South East Asian (ESEA) communities in September. The ESEA Heritage Month is created as a space for ESEA people to share ancestral histories, beliefs and indelibly mark ESEA communities’ place in the UK cultural landscape.

The Bluecoat was proud to participate in the East and South East Asian Heritage Month in 2022. We hope to continue to take part in the campaign, to support and to contribute to Liverpool’s local ESEA community.