‘The place lost its way. Now that’s changed’: can a Manchester art museum move beyond its troubled past? — SkimNews
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- JJ Chan withdrew from a March 2020 group exhibition at Manchester's Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art after discovering 12 of 13 staff were white, publishing an open letter saying their trauma was being used as "a leg-up into an industry for an already overrepresented demographic."
- An artist-led boycott petition led to the resignation of six board members and several employees; the gallery closed during COVID in 2020 and never reopened under its original name.
- Shanghai-born director Xiaowen Zhu relaunched the venue in 2023 as esea contemporary — broadening its mission from Chinese visual arts to the wider east and south-east Asian diaspora — with a new team primarily of first- and second-generation migrants.
- The 40th-anniversary programme includes Chris Zhongtian Yuan's first UK institutional solo show "Two Improvisations" (running to 13 September) and a 9 October preview of Umi Ishihara's experimental film "Nocturnal Melody," alongside the online "40 Years, 40 Voices" interview series.
- Before 2020, the gallery hosted Conservative MP George Osborne's 2013 Manchester China Forum; Chan said British government pro-China trade policy restricted which artworks could be exhibited, since "the gallery couldn't be directly critical of the people the government were trying to do business with."
- Zhu's outreach programme serves east and south-east Asian residents over 50, and the gallery's events and visitor experience manager was initially hired as front-of-house while working as a cashier at the nearby Wing Yip Chinese store.
Why it matters: The 2020 staff exodus and six board resignations forced a reckoning over who runs institutions claiming to represent diaspora communities — esea contemporary's relaunch with a first- and second-generation migrant team and a 50-plus outreach programme represents a structural shift in UK arts governance, not just a rebrand.
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