Four screens in a dark room show characters in brightly coloured costumes against a starry sky

Eelyn Lee & Collaborators: Four Quadrants of the Sky 四大神獸

Installation view of Eelyn Lee & Collaborators: Four Quadrants of the Sky 四大神獸 at Bloc Projects, Sheffield, 2023. Image: Jules Lister.

…I’m gathering the students and we are leaving the brightness of the outside world (the street, the breeze, the everyday) and entering the gallery and… and the movement of the space, and the movement of the colour, and the movement of the texture, and the movement of the sound, and the colour of the sound, and the texture of the sound, and the texture of the colour, and the texture of the movement, and the texture of the light, and fluidity and crispness, and I hear the students I have brought with me move around the space, and relax into the space, and I can hear the settling of the bodies, and the settling of the breath, and I am listening to a soundscape produced by the ‘and’ that is the ‘and’ of the work and the audience, materiality as togetherness…

The Kenyan filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu, in her essay Ancestors of the Future (2016), wrote ‘I am a believer that all time everywhere, in the world and in universes unknown, is variable, flexible, and non-linear. Past, present, and future exist all at once, simultaneously and repeatedly, and sometimes in different realms.’ Something like these complex spatial and temporal dimensions is embodied—literally—in the fabric and curation of Four Quadrants of the Sky. As the lights dim, and the four-screen projection starts, the gallery seems to stretch, to become boundless. The visual spectacle of the film seems to defy both the constraints of its projection architecture and its frame ratios in its outward flight. Its soundscape layers audio textures drawn from disparate locations and actions—breaths, rustles, traffic noises as expressions of the trans-local.

On screen, performers/collaborators activate a newly constellated mythology of identity. Drawing on the formulation of four characters in Chinese celestial thinking, Lee and a core group of UK-based Hongkongers co-created four new mythical characters, named and described by Lee as: ‘Wok Hei of the East (fire, metal): a warrior embodying the alchemy of wok cooking, she will fight through any situation and is guided by the blue dragon; The Navigator of the North (air, wind): a time-traveller inviting others to find collective ways of overcoming obstacles, she carries 1000 stories in her tortoise-like shell; Lo Ting of the West (earth, water): part fish, part human and possessing tiger energies, they are a true amphibian freedom fighter; Hybridity of the South (earth, sky): an urban nomad adaptable to a variety of habitats, they shapeshift into a red phoenix form’. As the lights go up, the architecture of the gallery rearranges itself around the costumes worn by those performers/collaborators.

Four colourful outfits hang in a dark-floored, white-walled gallery space.
Installation view of Eelyn Lee & Collaborators: Four Quadrants of the Sky 四大神獸 at Bloc Projects, Sheffield, 2023. Image: Jules Lister.

As experienced in the gallery, the nuance and complexity of these characters is activated by the near-/faraway-ness of the work. Projected in light, the characters (sometimes performing in interior sets, sometimes green-screened amongst stars) could be mistaken by a lazy viewer as ‘timeless’, in the sense of a generic idea of ‘mythology’ as being cut loose from the constraints of an ordinary world that has to be lived in. The white British artist Ithell Colquhoun’s proposition that ‘myth comes from the region between sleeping and waking, the multitudinous abyss, the unceasing cauldron rimmed with pearls’ (The Water Stone of the Wise, 1943) is a gorgeous image, but one whose ungrounded nature can probably only be uncritically embraced by someone, like Colquhoun, who had the societal, colonial, and monetary privilege to be ungrounded. There are shiny, gorgeous things in Four Quadrants of the Sky for sure, but they are stitched from cellophane, denim, sparkling fabrics, paper—the material of the myth is not a-temporal, rather it is in flux, of the everyday, of the now. Four Quadrants of the Sky uses materiality to demand of an audience an interpretation of time closer to that of Kahiu’s, that ‘past, present, and future exist all at once, simultaneously and repeatedly, and sometimes in different realms’.

A darkened room: to the right, a screen showing a character in a brightly coloured costume against a starry backdrop; to the left, a costume hanging in the darkness.
Installation view of Eelyn Lee & Collaborators: Four Quadrants of the Sky 四大神獸 at Bloc Projects, Sheffield, 2023. Image: Jules Lister.

In one of the pauses when the lights go up and the boundaries of the room reassert themselves, a student starts talking about the shoes worn by each character, how they were shoes they could walk in, move in, which ones they would like to own. The chunky blue sandals worn by Lo Ting of the West. ‘I like those too’, I said, ‘though the ones I really like are The Navigator of the North’s denim lace-ups’, then, changing my mind, Wok Hei of the East’s buckle-boots. Shoes that can be worn, have pastness in their wornness, have present-ness in their utility, are activated and transformed and ‘futured’ by light and movement (the flinging, the spiralling), and the gazes of the performers and the audience looking out of and in to the provisional screen.

These material details are important. Thinking through anything, not least something as complex and constellated as identity, cannot solely be done at an abstract level. Sara Ahmed, in Living a Feminist Life (2017), wrote regarding theory that ‘to abstract is to drag away, detach, pull away, or divert’, arguing instead for a dragging back of theory to the concrete—to lives. The materiality of Four Quadrants of the Sky allows for a thinking space that is at once concrete and unbounded.

Four colourful outfits hang in a dark-floored, white-walled gallery space.
Installation view of Eelyn Lee & Collaborators: Four Quadrants of the Sky 四大神獸 at Bloc Projects, Sheffield, 2023. Image: Jules Lister.

Ursula K. Le Guin, in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986), argues for a mythmaking that avoids ideas of linear and progressive time, which allows the mythological to be not a controlling, dominant narrative, but a culturally and collectively produced fluidity. She writes: ‘Science fiction [she uses this term broadly, to encompass fantasy and speculation] properly conceived… is a way of trying to describe what is actually going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else’. Four Quadrants of the Sky employs mythology as a tool that is both fantastical and particular, to think expansively and interconnectedly—a mythological trans-local. It is an intellectual, theoretical and political work, and also a magical, gorgeous one.

I walk the students back up to the university. They are first years, a few weeks into their first semester. Given our demographic, the majority will never have been inside a dedicated contemporary art space, and will not have been privileged with a great deal of cultural capital (if any). Back in the studios they are tasked with responding to the exhibition. They barely need prompting. It’s as if some of the burdens of uncertainty (about where they are, who they are, what art is supposed to be, the terror of academia, imposter syndrome, all that bullshit that we have to carry) have been lifted from their shoulders. They get on with their varied, surprising making. One is drawing a map of Japan on top of a map of Cornwall and inventing new place names. He says he doesn’t know what he is doing. I tell him that is a good thing, right now. Another has acquired silvery pink wrapping paper from the scraps cupboard and is holding it up, concentrating. They are chatting, making friends, making work, thinking. Perhaps I am romanticizing the day. Mythologising it. Does that matter? No. ‘What did you think?’, I asked one student. ‘Lush’, she replied.

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Eelyn Lee & Collaborators: Four Quadrants of the Sky 四大神獸 was on at Block Projects, Sheffield, 15 September – 14 October 2023. Four Quadrants of the Sky 四大神獸 is one of several spatial pauses in Eelyn Lee’s ongoing project Performing Identities, which explores what it means to be East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) in the UK today.

Emma Bolland is an artist and writer based in Sheffield.

This review is supported by Bloc Projects.

Published 08.01.2024 by Benjamin Barra in Reviews

1,311 words