The ESEA Artists’ Futures research project arose from artists’ intervention and whistleblowing in 2020 about the systemic failures in the visual arts, in particular the failures of the ESEA visual arts landscape.
In March 2020, artist and lecturer JJ Chan published an open letter explaining why they had to withdraw from further engagement with the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art [CFCCA], a longstanding Arts Council England, National Portfolio Organisation that artists considered to be the ‘flagship’ ESEA visual arts organisation at the time. In collective mutual support, other artists also confirmed JJ’s experiences and withdrew their engagement.
Not long after, in Sept 2020, CFCCA appointed an Artist Working Group [AWG] comprising seven artists of Chinese heritage to co-design a Revisioning Project that would shape CFCCA’s future and solve the issues of underrepresentation in the staff team. At the time of AWG’s engagement, CFCCA employed just one person of colour [in a coordinating role] out of thirteen members of staff, and only three of its eleven Board members were of Chinese heritage.*
However, what followed was a series of events that unearthed deep-rooted racism at the core of the institution and revealed an organisation unfit for its purpose. When AWG confronted CFCCA with evidence of this, AWG was terminated without notice and replaced by a management consultant organisation. As a result, AWG launched a whistleblowing campaign in Spring 2021 to defund CFCCA and to call Arts Council England to account for its long and historic role in funding this failed organisation.
You can read the full AWG Public Report about their experiences here.
When the campaign concluded, some members of the former AWG initiated a series of artists’ knowledge exchanges with the support of YVAN to consider what we should do after CFCCA. These knowledge exchanges eventually resulted in (and ran alongside) the Regional Roundtables that helped us hone specific questions and themes about what is needed for a supportive and thriving ESEA arts sector. Supported by ACE and Necessity, these Roundtables helped to develop the Motions which will be debated and agreed upon at the Town Hall in Nov 2023.
*CFCCA has since re-branded to ‘esea contemporary’ and now has a predominantly ESEA staff team. The work of ESEA Artists’ Futures is a result of the situation at CFCCA in 2020/2021 and is not a reflection of the current work of esea contemporary.
WIDER CONTEXT
CFCCA started life in 1986 as the Chinese Arts Centre, an artist-led charity in the heart of Manchester’s Chinatown. Established by Hong Kong born artist Amy Lai, the Centre engaged the local Chinese community and platformed British Chinese artists. A few decades and directors later, together with a series of relocation and rebranding exercises, CFCCA had become a predominantly white organisation.
STOP ASIAN HATE continues to be the context in which this work operates, particularly following the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic when people of ESEA heritage, or indeed anyone appearing to be ESEA, were targeted and attacked. The pandemic also revealed in real- time, the deadly effect of institutional and systemic racism in the UK, with ESEA, South Asian and Black health workers dying at a much faster rate than their white counterparts.
ORIENTALISM and its connected racism also inform the context of this work.
- Invisibilisation: ESEA people continue to suffer invisibilisation or, if our presence is acknowledged, we are deemed to be passive, subservient or at best ‘nice’. As such, ESEA needs and world views are ignored, in particular those that present ESEA people and artists as fully rounded complex beings.
- Exoticisation: ESEA people are exoticised and framed as the exotic other. This means we are trapped in (and only funded to create work about) exotic oriental pasts or exotic techno-oriental futures.
- Model Minority: ESEA people are often deemed to be very well-behaved, reliable and successful middle-class overachievers. We are not considered disadvantaged or victimised enough to be supported or funded. This not only ignores the diversity of communities within ESEA and the intersectionalities of deep disadvantage they experience, it also provides a perfect rationale for not allocating resources to meet ESEA needs.
- Criminality: Yet in tandem with the idea of ESEA conformity and model behaviour, places where ESEA people gather are considered to be dens of iniquity. In particular, ESEA cultures are criminally effeminised (as opposed to feminised) and our gathering places are regularly depicted as sites of moral corruptibility and seduction: drug addiction, prostitution, disease, filth, fraud/theft, illicit trade. ESEA criminality is thus framed as a ‘goings on’, an insidious inner working or process that is hidden. As such ESEA people have to navigate an existential distrust or suspicion of their relationships within Anglophone society.
- Yellow Peril: The idea of the yellow peril is founded on the sense that ESEA people are multitudinous. This has two opposite racist outcomes. Firstly, the idea that an invisibly present, overachieving, criminally seductive oriental horde is about to swamp this country is terrifying. But it is also possibly a subconscious reason to think that ESEA artists shouldn’t be allowed to ‘take over’ either in programming or leadership in non-ESEA spaces, businesses or institutions. Secondly, our numerousness means that there will always be more of us and that we are replaceable. Hence ESEA labour is disposable and not considered to be valuable or irreplaceable.
ESEA as an emergent term
ESEA (East and Southeast Asian) is a term that has gained much wider use since 2020, in particular with the establishment of the ESEA Heritage Month. Before this, ‘East Asian’ was broadly used, which itself was often wrongly used interchangeably with ‘Chinese’. Problematically the term failed to include growing communities from Southeast Asia who may also be considered ‘oriental’. Additionally, historical policy and decision-making terms that reference ‘Asian’ such as BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) tended to account only for South Asian experience or data. As such anti-racist discourse and movements have also historically overlooked the ESEA experience.
In Asia, ‘ESEA’ is not recognised as a descriptor of any coalition or grouping. East Asia is not considered a cooperative block by any of the countries or territories within it. However, all but one (East Timor) of the countries in Southeast Asia are part of a collective economic identity called ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations).
ESEA is a British term. While the cultures within ESEA are diverse and may also be in deep conflict (e.g., China and Taiwan, or Indonesia and East Timor), we are connected because we are broadly subject to the same kind of racism and orientalism in the UK. Covid Asian Hate for example makes no distinction between someone living in the UK who is from Wuhan, China or someone who comes from the Philippines or Singapore.
However, our use of this term acknowledges that it is contested and may change in the future.
ESEA Artists’ Futures 