‘The place lost its way. Now that’s changed’: can a Manchester art museum move beyond its troubled past? — SkimNews
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- esea contemporary (formerly Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art) closed in 2020 after artist JJ Chan withdrew from a group exhibition, discovering 12 of 13 staff members were white; an ensuing artist-led boycott led six board members and several employees to resign, and the space never reopened after COVID.
- Xiaowen Zhu, a Shanghai-born artist based between Manchester and Berlin, relaunched the venue in 2023 under the name esea contemporary — broadening its focus to the wider east and south-east Asian diaspora — alongside a team primarily composed of first- and second-generation migrants.
- Chris Zhongtian Yuan's "Two Improvisations," an experimental film featuring a band frontman projected as a dark shadow representing China's mythical Yeren, runs at the gallery as the venue's first UK institutional solo exhibition by the London-based, Wuhan-born artist (to 13 September).
- The gallery previously launched Conservative MP George Osborne's 2013 Manchester China Forum and hosted global trade deals; Chan said the British government's pro-China policy restricted which artworks could be exhibited, with the venue unable to be "directly critical of the people the government were trying to do business with."
- Zhu's Esea outreach programme supports east and south-east Asian residents over 50 through art-making to combat loneliness, and the organisation's events and visitor experience manager was initially hired as front-of-house while working as a cashier at nearby Chinese supermarket Wing Yip.
Why it matters: The relaunch marks a deliberate shift from a UK gallery once shaped by British government trade interests with China to one explicitly accountable to first- and second-generation migrant communities — Zhu notes east and south-east Asian perspectives remain underrepresented in major UK institutions and permanent collections, a gap esea contemporary is now positioning itself as the country's only non-profit gallery to fill.
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