Sounding the Northwest: Folk Music, Poetry, and Migration

Join us for a workshop-led performance with BuYi Band that explores how music carries memory, place, and lived experience. Drawing on personal stories and folk traditions from Northwest China, particularly the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, the band traces how everyday life – poetry, food, migration, and routine – shapes their creative practice.

Born out of cross-regional movement and cultural encounter, the session follows sound as a way of understanding identity: not as something fixed, but as something continually formed across land, language, and repetition. Through live performance, guided listening, and conversation, BuYi Band unpacks how folk melodies, poetic texts, and contemporary arrangements give voice to experiences of displacement, endurance, and belonging.

Combining performance with discussion, the workshop invites audiences to reflect on how music expresses ideas of ‘home’, how migration is felt through rhythm and sound, and how ordinary moments – place names, daily rituals, fragments of speech – are transformed into cultural and creative material.

Advanced booking is required for this event. No prior musical knowledge is required; the emphasis is on listening, sharing, and exchange.

About Xiaoxing (Ivy) Huang and Akai Live

Xiaoxing Huang is a UK-based cultural producer and founder of Akai Live, a platform for live music promotion and artist development focused on cross-cultural exchange and community-based practices. Trained as a scientist with a PhD in Physiology from the University of Manchester, she brings a research-driven, interdisciplinary approach to her work.

A long-standing engagement with independent and grassroots rock scenes shapes her exploration of how sound, access, and participation intersect under conditions of structural precarity. Through Akai Live, Huang develops projects that support artists while foregrounding place, resilience, and cultural exchange, positioning live music as both an artistic form and a social practice that fosters listening, encounter, and shared experience.

About Buyi Band

BuYi Band was formed in 1995 in Ningxia, Northwest China. For over three decades, they have embodied the spirit of rock through sincerity and a grounded, unadorned approach. Rooted in the landscapes and everyday life of Northwest China, their songs draw on folk traditions, poetry, and lived experience to express love for home, family, lovers, life, and nature. BuYi focuses on the ordinary, using music to carry memory, affection, and resilience. After more than 30 years on the road, their work continues to radiate calm yet powerful optimism, offering a worldview shaped by endurance, openness, and generosity of spirit.

Image credit:

1. BuYi Band, image courtesy of Xiaoxing Huang.
2. BuYi Band, image courtesy of Xiaoxing Huang.
3. Image courtesy of Xiaoxing Huang.
   

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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