I couldn’t find anywhere willing to publish this, so I’m going to drop it here before it completely loses its timeliness. This is a review I penned of the first three (of four) days of the festival of performance “Living, Rehearsing…” which took place at Y.D.P. Space in London over January and February of 2026. The fourth and final event in the series will be on the 16 May 2026.
It’s a banal observation but having spent a few months in London after many years away in China, I have been forcibly struck by the embarrassment of riches here when it comes to performance events. The quantity is one thing, but it’s also notable to me how many include members of an apparently very active group of diaspora Chinese artists living in the UK.
One of those is Zhuo Mengting who since January this year has curated a series of performance events at London’s Y.D.P. Space. Y.D.P. is a relatively new institution founded in 2025 by Yan Du, a philanthropist from China, and which according to their website supports “Asian and Asian diasporic contemporary art”. Y.D.P. Space is their public face, housed in an immaculate three-storey Georgian building in the heart of London’s Bloomsbury.
The series of events curated by Zhuo (in collaboration with Erin Li and Billy Tang, Y.D.P.’s curator and Artistic Director respectively), have the overall title of, “Living, Rehearsing…”, reflecting Zhuo’s own practice of exploratory sound art, experimental music, and dance performance. So far, there have been three events under this title at Y.D.P. Space, subtitled “Soundings” on the 17th of January, “Crossings” on the 7th of February, and “Reverberance” on the 28th of February. A fourth and final, as-yet-unnamed, event will be on the 16th of May.
Each afternoon event was six hours long with a variety of long duration performances or shorter, scheduled events. For the first event the performances took place simultaneously in each room of the building, and you could enter and leave at will. For the second, Zhuo led the audience from performance to performance at specific times, and the third event was a hybrid of both forms.
The diversity of practices was immediately made apparent in the first event by Jin Hao Li engaging the audience throughout the day in workshopping his standup comedy routine; passing further into the building, Liang-Jung Chen lit the wicks of a network of suspended spindly black candles in the stark white space, as Kai Chareunsy played ambient drone sounds. Upstairs Kelvin Atmadibrata and his collaborators blended into the audience with their subtle movements, at times overlapping with the sounds of Okkyung Lee when she struck up on her cello to use the qualities of the building’s spaces and the interactions with the audience to guide her improvisations.
For the second event, Rie Nakajima manipulated her motorised sound-making constructions spread across the floor and which she set in motion to slowly build up a layered environment of micro-sounds. She was later joined by dancer Woody Kwong echoing these constructions’ staccato movements, before he moved to the other spaces in the building, popping up unexpectedly amongst the audience over the course of the day. Upstairs Osamu Shikichi desperately interacted with an installation of ice sculptures moulded from his body, imparting to them a vitality belying their frozen nature. As a light rain fall began to fall, artist KIMVI stood in the outside courtyard straining to hold a series of large white canvases over an oil lamp for an extended period of time, leaving abstract patterns of soot and water on the surfaces. Finally, Abbas Zahedi and Dave Meckin attached contact microphones to the wood panelling and windows of their room which they and the audience could interact with to “play” the room.
Part three provided a rare opportunity in the UK to experience the work of Yan Jun and Duan Yingmei, two foundational figures of the contemporary sound practices and performance art of China. Having signed up for twenty-minute time slots, a small group of us entered Duan’s room where she shared snippets from her biography in conversations and performances, asking us to also share something of our own in the same ways. Yan Jun’s performance tightly linked his gestures and vocals with feedback which vibrated through the room, the performance completed by several audience members placing plastic bags over their heads and intoning in sympathy with Yan. Over the course of the day, you could also stop by to observe Li Yilei interacting with their complex of sound-making installations of wood, metal objects, musical instruments, and electronics. Later in the day, Sriwhana Spong performed with Milo McKinnon creating a complex deepwater soundscape presenting facts and impressions of the migratory activity of European eels. On this occasion I also encountered one practical drawback of long duration events as I sadly was unable to be there for the performances by Joshua Serafin and Aliaskar Abarkas.
Another demonstration of the diversity of media embodied by “Living, Rehearsing…” appeared in the special menus of food and drink prepared by Tintin Jonsson aka Swilipino for each day. Jonsson is a chef of Swedish and Filipino heritage, and for these events served what she calls “Frankenfood” reflecting the culinary traditions from both cultures.
It’s great to experience such a diversity of modes of performance under one umbrella, and that emerging curators like Zhuo and unusual curatorial proposals are being supported by Y.D.P. in their space where the incongruity between the performances and the staid form of Y.D.P.’s historical building creates a kind of capricious energy. Here’s hoping that Y.D.P. can maintain the level of creativity that Zhuo and her collaborators have established here.
Details of each part of “Living, Rehearsing…”:
Part 1: https://www.ydp.co/exhibitions/living-rehearsing-chapter-1-soundings
Part 2: https://www.ydp.co/exhibitions/living-rehearsing-chapter-2-crossings
Part 3: https://www.ydp.co/exhibitions/living-rehearsing-chapter-3-reverberance
