Burong Zeng（曾不容）
Queer East Festival | ICA London | 16 May 2026
On the same afternoon that Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” marchers shuffled down Whitehall, held apart from a pro-Palestinian march by four thousand police officers, metal barriers encircling Nelson’s Column, police vehicles lining The Mall all the way to Buckingham Palace, the ICA was quietly and defiantly doing something else entirely. Inside, beginning at 2pm and running until 2am, DAYTRIP[1] was unfolding: a full twelve-hour takeover of the building, curated by London-based filmmaker and artist Bart Seng Wen Long.
The timing felt almost too pointed to be accidental. Outside, the city was locked into an anxiety of confrontation, of hardened positions and monitored corridors; inside, East and Southeast Asian queer bodies moved through the ICA’s spaces with an unruly yet productive chaos, slipping between theatre studio, cinema, bar and workshop room while practising what Bart, in a recent interview with Run Riot, described as a longing for “the myriad possibilities of movements, from the errant heart of queerness, the poetics of migration, the trespassing of borders, the desire for metamorphosis, the imperative to move in order to survive.”[2] The contrast with what was happening outside, loud and barely a few hundred metres away, could not have felt more staggering.
(16 May at Charing Cross outside ICA. Credit: Burong Zeng )
DAYTRIP is not an easy programme to pin down, because it resists any description that implies a coherent, singular argument. That is, precisely, the point. When asked about the organising logic running through it all, the shibari workshops, the reversed roles in the life drawing class, the dream cocktail mixer, the club night, Bart articulated that the thread is “movement” in all its registers. Physical, migratory, erotic, political. Movement as survival tactic. Movement as the refusal to stay fixed and to be easily understood.
What is remarkable about Bart’s curatorial sensibility is that it doesn’t feel like curation so much as weather-making. Bart also sequences his selected short film programme, “Fast Crawl / Slow Draws”, like poetry, each film placed in conversation with the next not through argument but through resonance, interference and friction. The same logic extends across DAYTRIP as a whole, where audiences are placed inside a system of affects and asked to find their own way through.
Performances: The Body as Contested Site
(Good Boy, Bad Girl. Credit: Unlock Dancing Plaza)
The live performance programme opened with Good Boy, Bad Girl, a double bill by Joseph Lee and Paula Wong from Unlock Dancing Plaza, one of Hong Kong’s most boundary-pushing contemporary dance companies, founded in 2002. Described as “playful subversion of everyday gestures”, Good Boy, Bad Girl examines what it means to be a body that is watched: bodies as things trained, exposed, displayed and consumed.
In the first part, Lee shifted seamlessly from rope-skipping in deep reflection, pausing to speak about a pivotal moment during his residency in Berlin, a reckoning with why he dances at all, before transforming the whole register into an alluring club dance. He invited the audience, rope in hand, to follow him, then shortened the distance, drawing viewers into a tender, intimate exchange: body to body, breath to breath, sweat to sweat. In the second part, Wong arranged participants around her on a foam floor for what was framed as a workshop in paired deep stretching, playfully pedagogical and conducted through three simple principles: Don’t be a dead fish. Are you in? Master it. These are both instructions and a kind of manifesto of Unlock Dancing Plaza. Both pieces were participatory and semi-improvised, and both placed the trained bodies of the dancers in a state of constant receipt and return, receiving and returning the gaze, receiving and returning touch. The pieces were performed twice during the day, at 2pm and again as a redux in the evening.
(The Application. Credit: Burong Zeng)
At 5:30pm, CD3 Project took the stage with the premiere of The Application, a fierce performance that begins before the audience enters. The London-based collective, Nicole, Hana and Zoe, had recruited a white male participant through hookup apps and social media, then transformed the studio into a live laboratory for negotiating dominance, submission and consent. Three interviewers in full high drag with lingerie, long wigs, high heels and miniskirts sat behind a long table, watching the audience with deliberate composure. Then their interviewee arrived: formally dressed, composed, and about to be thoroughly undone.
What followed was a slow, aggressive dismantling. The interviewers approached their interviewee, stripped him down to his tie and shorts, and subjected him to a sequence of escalating BDSM-inflected acts: his face examined under portable torches, the proportions of his features measured with a ruler, his body dragged across the studio floor with microphones attached to his joints and chest, amplifying the unsettling friction of skin against surface. Red marks bloomed across his back. Black wax candles dripped onto him as he knelt in the posture of prayer, face down to the table. The long table was set spinning on its wheels, and he lay on it, enduring and/or enjoying the full weight of the encounter. As CD3 have explained, the BDSM acts here deliberately invert the apparent power dynamic: what looks like the humiliation of a white able-bodied man by three ESEA drag queens is possibly a scene in which he is being served, his own desires made material and public. The anxiety of “ghosting”, that very contemporary refusal of communication via hookup apps and social media, is embodied not through absence but through an excess of scrutiny.
Crucified Stars on the Tongue, by Japanese choreographer Osamu Shikichi, is perhaps the most quietly devastating work in the live programme. It draws from Zetsudoku, a reading practice developed by people with Hansen’s disease in Japan after World War II, who, having lost their sight and the sensitivity in their fingertips, learned to read Braille using their tongue. Shikichi takes this illness as both choreographic premise and ethical proposition: the tongue as a third hand, reorienting the body toward what remains when the more expected modes of perception are taken away.
(Crucified Stars on the Tongue. Credit: Burong Zeng)
In performance, the choreographic premise translated into a slow traversal of the studio in which Shikichi read the room through their tongue: eyes closed, elbows raised to partially obscure their face, refusing the direct gaze, refusing to be simply seen, wrapping whatever was touchable in paper and then licking it, leaving red marks where they made contact, all while a glass of deep red dye they had consumed worked through the image of blood and illness and the body that cannot escape itself. The music had the weight of spiritual redemption, a sacred theme in tension with the heaviness of flesh and contagion and the desire for transcendence. The performance ended with an unexpected act of collective eviction, the entire audiences briefly expelled from the room. (I will not describe the detail here. It is worth encountering intact.)
(Untitled. Credit: Burong Zeng)
Thai-Chinese artist Riven Ratanavanh’s new work Untitled continued at the ritualistic pace Shikichi had established, though in a register that shifted from illness toward devotion. Ratanavanh sat upright on a long table, still, elevated, in the posture of a deity receiving worship in a traditional Chinese temple. Incense burned before them, fruit offerings arranged at their feet, a deep red cloth around their waist, eyes closed, their body moving in subtle trance. One burning white candle had been placed on each side of a heavy stainless steel shackle sitting on their neck. The melted wax fell silently onto their shoulders, hardening as it coated them. At the back of the studio, harpist and vocalist Xiaoqiao, with long black hair and in a light-coloured gauze dress, performed live, the lighting shifting back and forth between the two figures in a counterpoint that felt composed down to its silences. A second performer assisted as Ratanavanh slowly lowered themselves onto the table, the candles burning down on either side. Then the audience was invited forward to lay dried rosebuds and chamomiles around the still body as the stage lights dimmed.
At 7:30pm, the shibari performance REANIMATED by hua hua and Kazumi shifted the atmosphere toward something more overtly sensorial and ceremonial. A bamboo pipe descended from the ceiling; a round grass mat lay on the floor below, fresh flowers arranged around it. Hua hua, in a long pale pink gauze dress, circled Kazumi, who wore only white shorts, building an intense field of tension through sustained direct gaze before moving at all. When she did move, it was with the precision of someone who knows exactly what shapes she wants to make: Kazumi’s malleable body was received as raw, fleshy material, then worked into curves and bends and finally into sculpture.
(REANIMATED. Credit: Burong Zeng)
As hua hua tied Kazumi, bringing her from the floor to sitting, then to standing on one leg, rotating on tiptoe, hua hua decorated both the knots and the body with bright, fragrant blooms: pale pink peonies, vivid orange birds of paradise and purple lilies. At one point, she placed a long stem of lily between Kazumi’s teeth. Kazumi held it there, occasionally casting sharp, unflinching looks at the audience, while remaining entirely given over to hua hua’s arrangement. The two moved together with an extreme tenderness, almost cheek to cheek in places, the eroticism inseparable from concentration, beauty and care. The sound throughout was calm and natural. REANIMATED felt less like a demonstration of shibari’s possibilities than a live inhabiting of them: the body as vase, as spring, as something that moves and returns your gaze all at once.
Workshops: Unfolding Desire
(Collective Divination and Filmmaking. Credit: Burong Zeng)
Alongside the performances and overlapping with them throughout the afternoon, a series of workshops occupied other spaces of the ICA. Sun Park and Chiemi Shimada led Collective Divination and Filmmaking, a hands-on exploration of cosmotechnics through tarot reading and Super 8 filmmaking. Drawing on philosopher Yuk Hui’s concept that every culture develops its own technologies through its unique relationship to knowledge and cosmos, the workshop proposed that a film could be authored collectively and owned by no-one in particular. A round table covered by a floral cloth sat at one corner of the space, tarot cards laid face down in a circle with objects resting on top of each one: crystals of different shapes, sea stones, miniature wine glasses, hair decorations and seashells. The correlation between a card and the object placed over it was not always linear; the audience was invited to choose a card and bring it to a long table on the other side of the room, where provocations about filmmaking and storytelling were laid out alongside coloured pens and pencils, questions such as What is your relationship with filming, storytelling, image-making? The white paper covering the table became a collective drawing surface. From their chosen card, participants began sketching film boards and illustrations: their ideal film made from a private reading of a drawn object. Throughout the rest of DAYTRIP, they were invited to complete their film using whatever materials the ICA offered, the building itself, the grounds surrounding it or the performances and workshops unfolding across the venue. The filmmaking also became live, unfiltered documentation of DAYTRIP shot on Super 8.
Hua hua’s Language of Rope workshop ran parallel, guiding participants through shibari not as spectacle but as conversation. Hua hua and a second facilitator started with a basic shibari knot around the ankle, using hemp rope made of natural fibre. Once participants had grown comfortable tying themselves, they were invited to work in pairs. The pedagogy that ran beneath all of this was genuinely deep: hua hua located shibari within a broader understanding of kink as a site of complex power dynamics, control, tension, release, vulnerability, trust and the vast liminal space of desires that tend to evade language altogether. Shibari becomes a particular mode of communicating exactly those desires, not through logic or words but through the non-verbal negotiation of rope, of the strength of a pull, of how tight a knot should be, of how to move together across a space with a rope between the pair, constantly renegotiating the proper distance and the level of freedom or restraint each person wants. The foundation of shibari lies in slow attention to your partner: not as an egotistic bondage play but a conversation conducted through movement and sensation. The subtle slide of rope against skin becomes its own language of heightened sensation, cutting through the filtered, logicised version of oneself. To express the unfiltered self and desires intact is a rare refuge. Within ESEA communities in particular, this kind of permission to articulate queer desire outside of language feels like something more reassuring and grounding.
Kayla Lui’s Keep Staring: Life Drawing at the Theatre explicitly staged the dissolution of the audience/performer divide, asking participants to draw and be drawn within the theatrical space itself. In the spirit of Japanese avant-garde icon Terayama Shuji’s interactive theatre, this was a small-scale but pointed gesture toward the politics of gaze. The life models arrived with their own unspoken contexts and backstories never narrated aloud but present in the room. A rolling chair with floral details sat in the middle of the space. The audience sat around the models with paper and drawing materials. The models could, if they chose, draw the audience back. Crucially, the models also had agency over their own poses, moving at a pace their inner narrative suggested, unconstrained by the obligation to hold still and be consumed as an object. What emerged was less a conventional life drawing session than a live event interpreted differently by every person in the room.
(Books in the Diasporic: Imaginary Habitats and Away. Credit: Burong Zeng)
Pubis Project’s Books in the Diasporic: Imaginary Habitats and Away was quietly moving and warmly inviting. Participants were invited to bring a publication, or a speculative idea of one, that had crossed borders with them, catalogue it, and then design a rubber stamp for an imaginary habitat where such a publication might live: a queer bookshop on a spaceship, a shared archive, a library that does not yet exist. The workshop’s origin story began with Pubis Project’s founders who discovered old Mandarin-language publications at Hackney Central Library in London. They were struck by the analogue record cards at the back of each one, two columns of names and dates, each pair marking a borrower’s arrival and return. Those paired dates echoed their own experience of border control: stamps of dates in and out of countries, the bodily rhythm of a diasporic life. Making eraser stamps carries its own lightness, a childhood memory surfacing in adult hands, but Pubis Project gave the process something more. They provided not only tools, tracing paper and carving equipment, but multiple ink colours corresponding to LGBTQAI+ flags, all mixed by hand. The standard red stamp pad was there, but so was something rarer, ink the colour of flags that represent sexualities and genders beyond heterosexual norms, lending a specific personal dimension to the act of marking a publication as yours, as home. Finding a home lies at the heart of the whole stamp-making exercise: for the unrealised publications, the untold stories, the underexplored narratives that exist outside institutional protection, growing quietly in private spaces and hidden places at their own pace.
(Sipping Dreams. Credit: Burong Zeng)
Finally, New York-based Hong Kong artist Doreen Chan’s Sipping Dreams, offered twice at 8pm and 10pm, asked participants to complete a questionnaire about their recent dreams, then served them a novelty cocktail made from their answers. The project, originally commissioned by Tai Kwun Contemporary and restaged at ICA in a new iteration curated by Goh Wei Hao, refuses the Freudian model of dreams as coded texts. Instead, desire becomes a complex flavour: something to be mixed, tasted and shared. For this iteration, Goh incorporated TEMPO napkins, a Hong Kong brand that carries an immediate insider recognition for anyone who grew up there, each written in small font with carefully chosen words about dreams, part curatorial note, part provocation. The napkins also hung from the ceiling with blue strings. The blue strings were also tied at the stem of each cocktail glass. When two participants happened to end up with the same cocktail recipe, the facilitators tied their glasses together with the blue string, creating a pair now invited to discuss the dreams that had produced the same taste. The question of how Chan transforms dream into flavour, and whether the flavour resonates and whether it lands, became new conversations with multiple layers to explore. The blue strings tying glasses together and tying napkins are new to this restaging, and they transform the piece into something more overtly connective. As a metaphor for the whole of DAYTRIP, Sipping Dreams is almost too perfect. And very tasty. After this last workshop, the short film programme, “Fast Crawl / Slow Draws”, continued to loop at Cinema 2, and the nightclubbing programme, Flow, took over the studio space and the rave went on until 2 am, which I wish I could have stayed for.
What strikes me, standing in a room full of artists and audiences in their twenties and thirties at DAYTRIP, is a particular quality of lightness. Not lightness as in lightness of feeling: the grief of displacement, the exhaustion of being perpetually minoritised, the rage at what has been lost and what continues to be lost are all present and legible. But something has shifted in how this generation expresses it. There is no performance of heaviness or suffering for the benefit of an older gaze. There is instead a boldness, an affirmation, a willingness to take up space and be ridiculous and erotic and furious and tender all at once. It carries the kind of lightness in its complexity that characterises so much of this programme: the refusal to be solemn about transgression. The genealogy of East and Southeast Asian diasporic queer life is being written in real time by these bodies, in spaces like the ICA.
Queer temporality, the dimension of time that Kara Keeling describes as governing errant, eccentric, promiscuous and unexpected organisations of social life, felt tangible here. DAYTRIP did not follow linear time. This was time as weather, as accumulation, as the body carrying its history through a series of rooms and emerging through duration, changed in ways it may not yet be able to name.
Outside, the police operation that had cost £4.5 million and mobilised over four thousand officers wound down. The barriers were dismantled and the Mall reopened when I left after midnight. Inside the ICA, for one extraordinary day, something had happened that did not need to announce itself in opposition to anything. It simply moved, errant, vital, excessive, and in that movement, made room for what is still becoming possible.
[1] DAYTRIP was part of Queer East Festival 2026. The festival is in its seventh year and celebrates LGBTQ+ cinema, live performance and moving image from East and Southeast Asia and its queer diaspora communities.
[2] https://www.run-riot.com/articles/blogs/bart-seng-wen-long-on-queer-east-daytrip-at-the-ica-and-building-queer-asian-culture-in-london/