At its 40th anniversary, esea contemporary turns not towards retrospection, but towards the unstable, generative space of becoming. Thresholds of Becoming, curated by Director Xiaowen Zhu, gathers six artists whose practices sit within conditions of flux — ecological, technological, emotional and cultural. Across sculpture, painting, film, digital montage and participatory systems, the exhibition considers transition not as a moment to be resolved, but as a lived state: a site where identity, memory and the idea of “home” are continuously negotiated.

For artists shaped by East and Southeast Asian heritages and diasporic experiences, thresholds are not abstract metaphors. They are embodied realities — between nations, languages, kinship structures, belief systems and futures imagined elsewhere. In this exhibition, becoming is not linear progress, but a series of recalibrations: of care, belonging, and the architectures that hold communities together, even as they strain under pressure.

Material memory and ecological inheritance

London-based Filipino artist Nicole Coson opens the exhibition with Some place, within here (2024), a suspended constellation of aluminium-cast oyster shells linked by metal rings. The work draws from aquafarming structures in the Philippines, where oysters grow on submerged lattices shaped by tides, labour and ecological cycles. Transplanted into the gallery, these shells become carriers of displaced knowledge — vernacular forms that shift meaning as they move across geographies.

Coson’s practice consistently resists fixed legibility. By translating familiar objects into altered materials and surfaces, she foregrounds how memory and identity are mediated rather than preserved intact. Here, the oyster shells operate as quiet witnesses to migration — of materials, of people, of cultural practices — suggesting that “home” is not a stable origin, but something assembled through accumulated traces.

Growth, excess and technological pressure

In Insomnia (2025), Xin Liu constructs a self-contained micro-ecosystem where duckweed — a fast-replicating aquatic plant — spreads across the surface of a steel tank, fed by viscous liquid streams from mechanical towers above. Duckweed is both invasive and promising: capable of choking ecosystems, yet also identified as a potential future resource for food and fuel in outer space.

Born in Xinjiang and now based in London, Liu’s work often examines the afterlives of scientific ambition. In Insomnia, unchecked growth becomes a metaphor for how natural processes are distorted under technological and social acceleration. The work echoes diasporic tension: adaptation as survival, but also as risk. What does it mean to thrive in an environment that was not designed for you — and at what cost to the surrounding ecology?

Intertidal identities and queer futurity

Berlin- and Singapore-based artist Charmaine Poh brings together personal testimony, myth and infrastructure in The Moon Is Wet (2025), a multi-channel installation that moves between mangroves, reclaimed coastlines, data centres and financial districts. Drawing on figures such as Majie domestic workers, queer Southeast Asian caregivers and the sea goddess Mazu, Poh frames identity as an intertidal condition — neither fully submerged nor fully visible.

Poh’s diasporic and queer lens treats memory as something enacted rather than archived. Her work acknowledges how histories are often withheld, erased or rendered opaque, particularly within Southeast Asian contexts shaped by colonialism and state control. In this shifting landscape, care emerges as a political act: a way of sustaining connection amid displacement. “Home” here is provisional — something formed through ritual, longing and collective imagination rather than territorial certainty.

Architectures of solitude and vulnerability

In contrast to Poh’s layered narratives, Tokyo-based painter Minoru Nomata offers stark, solitary architectures. His diptych Resonance–1 and Resonance–2 hover between ascent and collapse: one suggesting speculative verticality, the other a landscape marked by erosion and fragility. Though devoid of human figures, Nomata’s structures feel deeply psychological — interiors projected outward.

Nomata’s work resonates with post-war Japanese anxieties around modernity, resilience and environmental precarity. These imagined architectures seem to exist after function, after occupation — monuments not to power, but to vulnerability. Within Thresholds of Becoming, they act as quiet pauses, reminding us that transformation often leaves behind empty shells, spaces waiting to be re-inhabited.

Shanshui after the city

New York–based Yang Yongliang reconfigures classical Chinese shanshui painting through dense digital montage. At a distance, works like Mountains of Crowds (2016) appear serene; up close, they dissolve into skylines, construction grids and illuminated windows. Tradition and hypermodernity collapse into one another, producing landscapes that are both familiar and unsettling.

Trained in classical ink painting in Shanghai, Yang’s practice reflects the dissonance of rapid urbanisation and global migration. His landscapes suggest a diasporic vision of “home” as something continuously overwritten — a palimpsest where cultural memory persists, but only through constant adaptation. Nature, in his work, is no longer outside the city, but metabolised by it.

Rehearsing futures of care

The exhibition culminates in Yin Aiwen’s participatory project Liquid Dependencies: what does a decentralised caring society look like? (2021–ongoing). Presented here in a newly localised UK iteration, the work invites participants to inhabit interdependent roles across simulated decades, testing how care, obligation and resources might be organised differently.

Born in Zhanjiang and now based in Rotterdam, Yin approaches identity not as representation, but as infrastructure. Her work treats social systems as design problems — ones shaped by cultural values, emotional labour and power. In the context of diasporic experience, Liquid Dependencies feels especially urgent: it asks how communities can sustain themselves without relying on extractive or exclusionary models inherited from the past.

Becoming, together

Thresholds of Becoming is not an exhibition about answers. Instead, it offers a series of propositions — material, ecological, emotional — for thinking through instability as a shared condition. Under Xiaowen Zhu’s curatorship, the exhibition mirrors esea contemporary’s own evolution: from grassroots festival to national institution, continually reshaping what it means to hold space for ESEA artists and diasporic voices.

Across these works, “home” emerges not as a destination, but as a practice: something enacted through care, memory, resistance and imagination. In the thresholds between here and elsewhere, past and future, self and system, the exhibition suggests that becoming is not something we do alone — but something we negotiate, collectively, in motion.

Thresholds of Becoming
esea contemporary, Manchester | 21 February until 17 May 2026