Liquid Dependencies: Guided Game Session

Join us for a guided game session for 'Liquid Dependencies: What does a decentralised, caring society look like?'

This live action role-playing experience invites 12 participants to inhabit characters within the fictional ReUnion society, a sustainable community shaped by long-term mutual care and collective responsibility.

Developed by designer and theorist Yin Aiwen with Zoe Zhao and Yiren Zhao, the game creates a speculative, participatory space. This newly localised iteration invites players to navigate evolving scenarios while balancing their own needs with the wellbeing of the wider community. Within this society, mutual care unfolds through a fluid network of friends, flatmates, partners, colleagues, neighbours and other forms of chosen ‘new’ kinship. As relationships shift and alliances form, participants collectively shape a social structure in which care becomes the community’s primary form of currency.

The session will run for approximately five hours and will be hosted by artist Yin Aiwen alongside esea contemporary’s curator-in-residence and writer Milia Xin Bi. The session will open with brief remarks from Asymmetry Director Michèle Ruo Yi Landolt, introducing the foundation’s support for Yin’s fellowship, and from esea contemporary Director Xiaowen Zhu, who will introduce the exhibition 'Thresholds of Becoming', which she curates and in which Aiwen’s work is featured.

There will be a short break between rounds, with complimentary snacks provided.

Advance booking is required to attend this event.

This event is co-hosted by esea contemporary and Asymmetry, with generous support from Asymmetry.

About Aiwen Yin

Yin Aiwen (b. Zhanjiang) is a Rotterdam-based designer, artist, researcher and strategist. Yin is an artist, designer, researcher, and occasional institutional strategist. Departing from the idea that 'the technological is institutional, the institutional is technological', Yin reconsiders and reimagines socio-economic, cultural, emotional, and bodily conditions by designing new techno-institutional frameworks grounded in care ethics. Her work often begins with ambitious speculative questions and uses critical theory as a design brief to create new systems of value through various forms of demonstration, such as performances, games, digital platforms, or exhibitions. Yin teaches at Design Academy Eindhoven and the Master Institute of Visual Cultures in the Netherlands. She received an Asymmetry Scholarship to pursue a PhD in Advanced Practices at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2024. Previously, she held research fellowships at Framer Framed (2024), the Creative Impact Research Centre Europe (2024 & 2023), ZK/U Berlin (2019), and Art Center South Florida (US, 2017). In 2019, Yin received the INFORM Prize for Conceptual Design for her work.

About Milia Xin Bi

Milia Xin Bi is a curator and writer based in Glossop, UK. Her curatorial practice explores how artistic practices can question the instrumental logic of technology and propose alternative narratives for how technology might be lived with. Her research explores multi-temporalities, manifold materialities, and mediated agency emerging from complex systems.

Milia is currently Curator-in-Residence at FACT Liverpool (2025–2026), where her residency exhibition Can Meeple Escape the Neurophoria? is on view. Alongside this role, she has been an integral part of Chronus Art Center (CAC) since 2017, where she has led and contributed to numerous interdisciplinary projects. She is also the recipient of the Hyundai Blue Prize Art+Tech 2022.

About Asymmetry

Asymmetry is a non-profit independent organisation based in London that supports curators and researchers with Chinese and Sinophone backgrounds. Through fellowships, scholarships, public programmes, research, and a specialist library, they create a space for critical inquiry and long-term dialogue. By fostering connective collaboration, they contribute to more inclusive futures for contemporary art.

About Michèle Ruo Yi Landolt

Michèle Ruo Yi Landolt is the Director at Asymmetry. She leads the organisation’s strategy, programming, and partnerships and oversees its public programme in East London. She regularly contributes to contemporary art and cultural discourse as well as panels and lectures internationally.

About esea contemporary

esea contemporary is the UK’s only non-profit art centre specialising in presenting and platforming artists and art practices that identify with and are informed by East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) cultural backgrounds.

esea contemporary is situated in an award-winning building in the heart of Manchester, home to one of the largest East Asian populations in the UK. Since its inauguration as a community-oriented visual arts festival in 1986, esea contemporary has continuously evolved to establish itself as a dynamic and engaging space for cross-cultural exchanges in the British art scene, as well as in a global context.

esea contemporary aims to increase the visibility of contemporary art practices from the East and Southeast Asian communities and their diasporas. It is a site for forward-thinking art programmes that beyond exhibitions also include commissions, research, residencies, publishing, and a wide range of vibrant public events. esea contemporary values creativity, compassion, interconnectedness, and collectivity in implementing its mission.

Learn more at: www.eseacontemporary.org

Photo by Joe Smith.

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