East West Old New: Artist Eelyn Lee in Conversation with Writer Yen Ooi

Join artist Eelyn Lee and writer-researcher Dr Yen Ooi for an illustrated discussion about their ongoing collaboration – a call and response creative dialogue between artist and writer. You’ll hear about how both draw on migratory energies and ancestral stories, producing work that creates new orientations, shaped by East and Southeast Asian [ESEA] diasporic experiences.

In 2023 Eelyn invited Yen to make a written response to her exhibition, Four Quadrants of the Sky 四大神獸 [Bloc Projects, Sept-Oct, 2023], an immersive video installation reimagining ESEA identities through the creation of four new mythological characters. In Yen’s short story response, The Temple, Sheffield becomes Sharefield, where the smell of jasmine fills the streets, and the gallery is a portal to another time and place. This year, Yen has written, Three Constellations, a series of poems in response to Eelyn’s, Saam Sing 三星, a moving image work, currently on display at Graves Gallery.

The event will take place in the gallery with an opportunity to view Saam Sing 三星 and watch extracts from Four Quadrants of the Sky 四大神獸. Yen will present the first ever public readings from The Temple and Three Constellations.

Eelyn Lee is a Sheffield based, award winning artist and filmmaker of Hong Kong-English heritage. She has shown work at Barbican, Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Site Gallery, Bloc Projects, Palais de Tokyo, and at international film festivals. Eelyn’s art practice combines collective research, performance and filmmaking to create frameworks for collaboration. Her ongoing body of work, Performing Identities is a collective reimagining of East and Southeast Asian identities through the creation of new mythological characters and their cosmologies. The latest iteration, Ancestral Futures [2024] was a street procession in honour of the first recorded Chinese people in Sheffield.

https://eelynlee.com

Dr Yen Ooi is a Hugo Awards finalist writer-researcher whose works explore East and Southeast Asian culture, identity and values. Her projects aim to cultivate cultural engagement in our modern, technology-driven lives. Her PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London looks at the development of Sino science fiction and its contribution to zoefuturism through the writing and philosophy of rationality. Yen is narrative director and writer on Road to Guangdong, a narrative-style driving game. She is author of Rén: The Ancient Chinese Art of Finding Peace and Fulfilment (non-fiction), Sun: Queens of Earth (novel) and A Suspicious Collection of Short Stories and Poetry (collection). She is also co-editor of Ab Terra, Brain Mill Press's science fiction imprint. When she's not got her head in a book, she lectures, mentors and plays the viola.

www.yenooi.com

Image credit: Still from Saam Sing © Eelyn Lee

Host or Publisher Museums Sheffield