Editor's Letter | Zing Tsjeng

All views expressed are that of the writer.

I still remember the first Ai Weiwei artwork I saw, back in 2014. It was an unusually warm spring in Berlin, and the Chinese artist was exhibiting his largest show at the Martin-Gropius-Bau. The first thing I saw when I entered the vaulted 19th century building on Niederkirchnerstraße were stools – six thousand antique, three-legged stools sunk into the atrium floor, to be exact.

The stools initially looked almost identical, but closer inspection revealed crucial distinctions: they varied by colour and patina, in the way the grain of wood was warped and stained. I was in my 20s and new to Berlin; everything felt fresh and exciting in the way that only things in your 20s can feel. Later that weekend, we went to a club on the outskirts of the city where I was told to smile by the person on the door. The request struck me as deeply sinister. It seemed to communicate the message that I had been clocked, without even needing to open my mouth, as an outsider.

Deciding who is part of the in-group – and those who considered peripheral, if not completely on the outside – is one of the most insidious ways in which any authority exerts control over those within its borders. Sometimes you don’t even need to step a foot out of line to be instantly excommunicated as someone who never belonged in the first place.

Britain, with almost all its political parties adopting a hardline approach to immigration, has always had a difficult relationship with those who come to its shores. We happily adopt their slang, music and national cuisine, but look askance if they are too proud of their own culture. We need foreigners to prop up our NHS and take care of our elders, yet we ask that they leave behind their families and traditions in doing so.

But this porousness isn’t one-way. Growing up in Singapore, a former British colony, taught me that Britain casts a long shadow over the cultures of other places, too. My school was on a road named after Dunearn, a hill fort in the Scottish Highlands. I sat my exams in English, administered by an examination board in Cambridge. I was taught to keep my consonants crisp; that the altered vowels of the local creole Singlish were undesirable, even downright unprofessional.

The homelands and languages of Ai Weiwei and Sinéad O’Connor may be far apart, but China and Ireland share the common experience of complex, often bruising encounters with the British empire. Ireland was the first British colony and served as a testing ground for tactics that would be shipped out to the rest of the world, including divide-and-conquer strategies that entrenched difference along sectarian lines. In China, the illegal British opium trade fanned a conflict that eventually saw Hong Kong handed to Britain and is regarded as the beginning of China’s “Century of Humiliation” at the hands of European powers. At varying points in history, immigrants from both countries have been demonised, othered and considered separate and unequal by Britain.

The reverberations of these colonial histories continue to shape our contemporary lives, as Ai and the late O’Connor’s work reminds us. Crucially, however, it doesn’t mean that we are eternally damned to subjugation. Both artists have found ways to explore and resist authority and domination in all their forms – whether that is in the form of the Catholic Church, in O’Connor’s case, or Ai’s work confronting state violence. They have both been considered outsiders or traitors, sometimes even by their own countrymen.

As Factory+ Editor in Residence, I wanted to commission work that explores the unexpected confluences and echoes between Irish and East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) histories and diaspora communities living in Britain. What are the commonalities? Where do our differences lie? How do our experiences speak to each other, across the thousands of miles that separate our homelands? And what happens when they meld and coalesce into something entirely new?

Over the next month, different ESEA and Irish writers and creatives will be interrogating these ideas in verse, sound and print. My hope is that they’ll form a patchwork of stories that enrich the understanding of both Factory International shows Ai Weiwei: Button Up! and The Surge: An Ode to Sinéad O’Connor. All of them are different, but somehow – much like 6,000 wooden stools sunk into a floor – very much made of the same mould.