Programme highlights

Dance and movement

Megumi Ohata presents 白昼夢 – A Daydream: Stage II, the second chapter of a work built around Haori, an artificial skin Ohata made using prosthetics techniques. Performer Yuki Kyobu, whose practice draws on Jintai-koukyō-geki and butoh, moves through mirrors, touch and prosthetics to ask how an altered body recognises itself, with sound by Momose Yasunaga. Ohata won Visual Art Open 2026.

Pei Kuo 郭珮’s Butterfly Hickey: UNFOLDED deconstructs the “butterfly stance” (蝶姿) of Chinese classical dance through sapphic intention, turning an imperial, nationalistic form into space for queer joy. Ping-en Hung’s score weaves interviews with queer migrants in Amsterdam with fluttering wings, snapping scissors and breath.

Annie Pui Ling Lok, Co-Artistic Director and Joint CEO of Siobhan Davies Studios, leads a 90-minute taster of the Contact Improvisation Underscore for BPOC/Global Majority dancers, exploring how CI can be owned by everyone through conscious decoloniality.

Performance and live art

Xuyi Zhu’s The Surveillance Monster lies dormant like the venue’s CCTV, then wakes: a mirrored, wearable inflatable that pans, tilts and locks onto audience members, reflecting them back at themselves.

Bevis Wu’s Re-Travel / Soul Retrieval reworks the Taiwanese Siu-Kiann soul-recalling ritual as a struggle against over-protection, as he tries to scrub the green from his own skin.

Yifan He 何伊凡’s 14.44 sets two performers fighting for 14 minutes 44 seconds over the pedal of a cardboard fountain. The loser drinks.

Max Percy + Shirly’s smile b*tch is a multimedia enquiry into the many ways laughter is expressed in Asian societies, inspired by Yue Minjun’s laughing men.

Comedy, drag and cabaret

Zhou Ning performs This Time is Different, an hour of stand-up, live music, magic and storytelling about love, shame, queerness, family, immigration, microwaved leftovers and a driving licence that never quite happens.

Mild Peril, creator of 101 Damn Asians, brings Inside the Mind of Fu Manchu: drag and stand-up in character, unpicking the figure’s colonial origins and the history of yellowface.

Music and sound

William Shiu’s Poo-Wee-Pee combines tabletop object performance, composition, choreography and spatial audio to break the taboos around pooping, peeing and farting, “hilariously but seriously”. Shiu was commissioned by the 2025 Andriessen Festival.

angela wai nok hui performs I am in paradise, sound and noise that sugar-coats stories of activism and self-love with a bitter aftertaste.

Xuanni_Space closes the night with a live set that collapses rave energy and noise into the same moment. Active in the southern Chinese underground since 2013, the Cantonese artist feeds a no-input mixer and a Nintendo 3DS synth into unstable loops.

Film

Cetus Kuo 郭敬耘’s feature Because Watching Pacifies (2024, 85’) receives its UK premiere. It follows twins born into an Akha taboo across borderlands drawn by Cold War alliances, between Taiwan and Southeast Asia. 

Yarli Allison’s In Petri Dish We Sing (2025, 28’) imagines 2135, when stem cells can become anything: a man grows furniture from his late lover’s cells, and a 79-year-old woman pursues pregnancy.

Yasmine Anlan Huang’s Crescendo (2024, 14’) begins with the director’s accent-correction training in rural Maine and asks whether translation is inherently violent.

Tsz Kei (Jasmine) Mok’s Bow and Rise (2025, 9’) follows Bristol University’s lion dance troupe in the run-up to Chinese New Year.

Visual art

The exhibition ME / WE, curated by Hsin-Yi Huang and Alice Luo, asks how an individual finds a place within a collective, when every “we” leaves someone out. It brings together KooNg’s miniature Hong Kong-scale parks, Amy Hsu Tzu Chen’s salvaged textiles, Shao-Jie Lin’s work on borders and mobility, and Yang-En Hume’s inherited objects.

Talks and workshops

Takuya Watanabe presents his research tracing Japanese knotweed across Europe. Brought from Japan in the nineteenth century as an ornamental commodity and now classed as an invasive species, the plant becomes a way to ask how movement, classification and responsibility are assigned across generations.

Yu’an Huang leads Writing Archives in Tongues, a multilingual writing workshop responding to Cetus Kuo’s film. 

Chán Magazine (Dot Zhihan Jia and Jiaying Kou) leads notes on feeding each other, a recipe-writing workshop on the legacy of Bloodroot, the US feminist vegetarian restaurant that closed in 2025 after 40 years.