Asymmetry’s director explains the organisation’s origins and ongoing mission
In a time when the disillusionment of frictionless globalism has set in, many of us have turned towards the textures of our own cultural and linguistic heritage to steady ourselves. Within this shift, the Sinophone has resurfaced with renewed resonance: not as a homeland or an ethnicity, but a loose constellation of Chinese-inflected worlds shaped by movement, encounter and reinvention. Its dispersals follow no single stream, and its boundaries remain permeable to circumstance. Rather than restoring an imagined coherence, the Sinophone offers a way of attending to how form and thinking move across time and place, and how artistic practices gather around these convergences.
Foundational thinkers such as Shu-mei Shih and David Der-wei Wang first approached the Sinophone as a terrain shaped by linguistic drift, regional histories and the multitudes of paths shaped by migration and exchange rather than by nation. Their groundwork finds echoes in the work of Joan Kee, Rey Chow and Ackbar Abbas, whose analyses of regional art-histories, media translation and the cultural conditions of modernity demonstrate how visual and textual forms are continually reconfigured through context, mediation and displacement. Taken together, these perspectives frame the Sinophone not as a coherent identity but as a method for reading how art moves, mutates and gathers meaning among many worlds.
Asymmetry took shape during the pandemic, at a moment when the channels that once enabled easy movement between China, its neighbouring regions and the wider world abruptly stalled. Borders closed and a vast cohort of overseas students and professionals found themselves suspended in interstitial spaces they could no longer move through with the same confidence. This rupture did not necessarily create a new identity but reminded us how communities gather and endure under duress, and that cultural and artistic worlds long sustained by mobility also depend on forms of relation that persist when that mobility fails. Earlier diasporas know this condition well: from nineteenth-century movements of Hokkien and Cantonese communities through the Malay regions to longer routes that intensified throughout the twentieth century, establishing heterogenic Chinese communities first in port cities such as Liverpool and San Francisco, and later expanding in global centres including London and New York. What emerged for us was a commitment to interconnection, to maintaining the infrastructures, conversations and forms of support that could hold a dispersed field together when physical circulation had become newly fraught.
Out of this contingent formation, the methodological breadth of the Sinophone often becomes clearest in the grassroots infrastructures that sustain it: Sine Screen’s itinerant screenings that assemble loosely networked film communities; the constellation of 3standardstoppage – encompassing its original space in San Francisco, Bungee Space in New York and POSTPOST Space in Beijing – which experiments with circulation and design, and folds publishing, research and social organising into shared practice; Accent Sisters’ gatherings that braid language, performance and mutual support into communal study; and the many small artist-led initiatives that have resorted to self-organising. These provisional constellations create the conditions in which ideas and materials circulate, bundling complexity rather than resolving into cohesion. Alongside this framework, artists work through the frictions and correspondences that arise across languages, memories and technologies: Shen Xin’s shifting relations of care and power; Ho Tzu Nyen’s mutable historiographies; Stella Zhong’s microcosmic recalibrations of scale; Trevor Yeung’s horticultural architectures of intimacy; Peng Zuqiang’s studies of labour and queer kinship; and Cici Wu’s luminous image-worlds shaped by diaspora and cinema. These practices need no categorical enclosure; they show how artistic forms move, gather and transform across plurilocal worlds.
These crossings and shared timings could be enduring or fleeting, but they remind us that relation is not an infrastructure to build, but a condition to inhabit.
Michèle Ruo Yi Landolt joined Asymmetry at its founding in 2020 and became director in 2023. She leads the organisation’s strategy, programming and partnerships, and oversees its public programme in East London. She regularly contributes to contemporary art and cultural discourse as well as panels and lectures internationally.
ArtReview is partnering with Asymmetry to publish a series of cultural reflections
