A powerful testament to the vitality and future of ESEA diaspora arts.
Alternative Roots Festival, curated by Kakilang and Ming Strike, was a full day festival of arts spanning different mediums celebrating the works of ESEA artists diaspora. Hosted by the Hoxton Hall, it opened for one-day only on November 8th, showcasing a constellation of works that were radically diverse, yet each was bold and poignant in its own way. With its extremely generous offer, Alternative Roots excelled in celebrating and creating spaces for experimental arts created by the ESEA diaspora.
Hoxton Hall’s multi-tiered building hosted a kaleidoscope of arts. The ground floor featured two main performance venues for screenings, live performances, and podcasts. The first space, May Scott Studio, had a variety of experimental performances. With its simple, rectangular structure that breaks from the dictates of traditional theatre architecture, the space opened up more possibilities for “seeing” and thus was a perfect venue for pieces exploring new ways of seeing – whether it’s the performance, or the diaspora experience, or simply, the presence of each other. Rat Eater (Act 1) by Lanyun Huang (Finch) invited the audience to peek into the inside world of a balloon-headed rat eater – the queer psychic and the private worlds of thoughts showcased through staged performance and the projection of video as well as floating diary fragments – while NIGHTARCHIVES (Working Title) by Jan-Ming Lee deconstructed the space into an intimate chamber where the performance and audience areas mingled, transforming watching into a shared experience. Her movement quality and the exploration of the state of restless insomnia contributes to a unique immersive quality of her piece, taking the audiences onto her journey of wandering thoughts in between dream and sleep.
Simultaneously, screenings of films and other performance events were happening at the main hall, hosting live podcasts, film screenings, and other forms of performances and live art. In the hallway, an all-encompassing pop-up marketplace offered unique windows into different aspects of ESEA culture, featuring tables from VaChina’s feminist arts collection, Outlandish Publishing’s artist zines, Yulin Huang’s pop-up for personalized tarot cards, and various food vendors.
On the second floor, the Palmer Room was turned into an exhibition space showcasing installations and other art works. Flo Yuting Zhu’s “Endless Migration and Home In the Mirror,” translated the feeling of endless drifting into a video installation using projections on uneven glass surfaces as a “river” and “mirror”. Kassy Fang’s Ikebana incorporated philosophical ideas into live performance, contemplating on a sense of presence within migration, Also featured was X&J’s film installation 2025PCM, projected onto a 90-degree folded screen representing a one-cubic-metre London flat. The film documents a person trying to make a home in a space that is too small yet just affordable, capturing the absurdity of London’s housing market and the sense of suffocation migrants can feel while trying to establish a foothold in this major metropolis.
The festival concluded with BAD ASIAN CLUB, a brilliant lineup of performances by queer Asian artists in Hoxton’s main hall. Filiphinx-Irish-British live artist Sam Reynolds delivered a stunning performance of his piece “Spell,” masterfully weaving together queer longing, horror, and absurdity. Runxuan Yang’s May Kway transformed the conventional music hall into a two-story Chinese tea house, with a performance that directly confronted and overthrew “orientalism”, as well as the colonialist and patriarchal gazes it bears. Finch’s movement piece Peacock blended stunning visuals into a story of a mythic creature losing its supernatural power, yet then regains agency through power play. The night then transitioned into a disco party DJed by the performance duo 多多 (duoduo), opening the space for all audiences and artists to dance and mingle.
Alternative Root’s forward-looking programming created a vital platform for artists of ESEA heritage to showcase their boundary-pushing practices. Rather than narrowing the definition of “Asian artist” to “migrant” or a generalized notion of culture, the festival championed work rooted in individuality and specific experience. It was a powerful testament to the vitality and future of diaspora arts.