Whatever the weather, I encourage you to step away from the busyness of the Moor and slip down Eyre Lane into Bloc Projects' gallery space for Four Quadrants of the Sky 四大神獸. It was a rainy day when I visited, so I was pleased to escape that element and go through the curtain to be immersed in the liminal space created by award-winning artist and filmmaker Eelyn Lee. Met with light and dark, night and day, the experience of being within and outside of East Asian culture, history and folklore, the narrator whispered messages of balance.
An amazing show of colourful costumed characters moved into archetype-like Chinese mythological characters, embodying elements of traditional Chinese medicine: fire, earth, metal and water. Wood was also present in crafted origami-style folded papers, fan-like wings that also brought the winds of change. In this dreamlike space I began to feel like I could inhabit the suspended costumes, to move and dance slowly, mindfully, with the images that appeared on the films in front of me.
The exhibition encourages questions of what is it to be in between cultures – to have that choice, but also to be unable to cancel out one’s own heritage that can appear to be far away when in reality it's ever present in others' responses and reflections of your presence. Family stories passed down and ones forgotten that may want to be rekindled or retold – to be understood or reinterpreted into a new dance – energetically echo around. It resonates with my own lived experience of being dual/triple heritage – Malaysian Chinese and White English. The characters themselves incorporate different elemental duos: Wok Hei is fire and metal, Hybridity is earth and sky, Lo Ting is earth and water, and the Navigator is air and wind, said to carry a thousand stories in her tortoise-like shell.
It's well worth visiting and sitting to watch these scenes, and I'm delighted that the exhibition launched within ESEA Heritage Month in September. In some ways, although the references are from the east, many can relate to the experience of hybridity. Culture is forever changing and we all have the choice of whether to embrace the new whilst holding the past, or to reject both and forge our own path.
