IMPOSSIBLE HOMECOMING // CREATIVE TEAM
Our 2025 creative team for @howlyuan ’s ‘Impossible Homecoming’. A semi-autobiographical piece of performance art crossed with an exhibition tracing the history of one migrant’s journey to the UK interwoven with a nuanced and complicated story of Taiwanese sovereignty.
We tried to take a serious team photo but Howl had other ideas…
Devised and Conceived by Howl Yuan 原承伯 @howlyuan
Devised and Directed by Iskandar إسكندر R. Sharazuddin @ishbishbosh
Scenography by Ingrid Hu 胡嘉倩
Sound Design by Nicola T. Chang 張彤 @nicolatchang
Associate Direction by Rebecca Goh
Images by @eljaybriss
• IMPOSSIBLE HOMECOMING • 2025
In 2025 we co-produced ‘Impossible Homecoming’ a work presented for Confluence produced by @maykithappen and commissioned by @ginkgoprojects .
We presented a work-in-progress of a performance encounter by @howlyuan 原承伯. A personal story of Howl’s migrant journey to Bristol exploring the history of Taiwan and how seismic political shifts can reshape lives and identities.
Where is home, when everything has been uprooted?
The work began with a gentle journey through Castle Park Bristol and ended at Sparks – a repurposed shopping centre – Howl guided audience through a story of war and conflict, romantic meet cutes, and how we define home and family.
Devised and Conceived by Howl Yuan 原承伯 @howlyuan
Devised and Directed by Iskandar إسكندر R. Sharazuddin @ishbishbosh
Scenography by Ingrid Hu 胡嘉倩
Sound Design by Nicola T. Chang 張彤 @nicolatchang
Associate Direction by Rebecca Goh
Images by @eljaybriss
The latest Cipta Seni Incubator: Untold Stories workshop focused on Making Art from the Margins, and we were really fortunate to have two speakers who brought such thoughtful, inspiring approaches to the topic.
A big thank you to contemporary artist Yee I-Lann, and Howl Cheng-Po Yuan, performance maker, cultural organiser, and artistic director and co-CEO of Kakilang.
Some quick learnings:
From I-Lann, on the power of play in artsmaking.
🧩"'Play’, to me, is the most important four-letter word. No other word is as cool without play.”
🤝🏾Playing can be a powerful way to work and create with collaborators. It can lead to innovating. It can create closeness. It brings joy, fun, silliness.
🌞Power = joy and play. If a community has joy, they can move, influence, get things done.
From Howl, on artists supporting each other and creating community.
🗣️Why take a collective approach?
- To find solidarity
- To share resources
- To amplify/testify your voice
- To be together
🛠️"If something you want/need doesn’t exist, why not make it yourself?”
👐🏾We could normalise the practice of sharing and exchanging with each other. Ask yourself:
- How to articulate your need?
- How do you offer meaningful support within your capacity?
- How do you follow through with what you’ve offered?
#CiptaSeniUntoldStories is supported by the British Council’s #ConnectionsThroughCulture grant. #CiptaSeniIncubator
In our next Cipta Seni Incubator: Untold Stories workshop, we will be joined by Howl Cheng-Po Yuan, who will be speaking to our cohort about Making Art from the Margins.
We’re really looking forward to hearing about Howl’s approach to highlighting underrepresented communities.
Howl Cheng-Po Yuan (原承伯) is a performance maker and cultural organiser, currently serving as Artistic Director and Co-CEO of Kakilang. His practice explores cultural identity, mobility, and the relationship between bodies, sites, and place, and has been presented at venues and festivals across the UK and internationally. Through Kakilang, he develops cross-disciplinary projects that foreground underrepresented narratives and foster transnational dialogue. Howl served as Guest Curator for Migration Matters Festival (2020–2021) and hosts the alternative podcast Ming Strike, which brings artists and cultural workers into conversation around art, politics, and lived experience.
#CiptaSeniUntoldStories is supported by the British Council’s #ConnectionsThroughCulture grant.
(Photo by Zhiyue Hu)
#CiptaSeniIncubator
Video “Border Wonder: Waiting Between_” by Howl Yuan @howlyuan
This video can be seen as an artistic documentation of a site-specific durational performance of being not only on the border between Taiwan and China, but also on the border between the land and the large body of water, on the border between day and night. Being suspended in between.
In his poetic performance, the artist plays with ordinary objects found on the shore to produce mesmerising imagery that hypnotises the audience. Out of debris, with his body as its centre, he sculptures a huge sky lantern that will unlikely ever fly. The outer surface of the lantern looks like a patchwork blanket that does not help in creating a cozy home atmosphere, but rather preferred to be get rid of at the very end of the film.
Videos, photos, and text by Eka Zharinova @ekazha77
DIY Nights - Never Event @neverevent6226
Chisenhale Dance Space @chisenhaledance
Feb. 6, 2026
Never Event Artists
Howl Cheng-Po Yuan (he/him) @howlyuan is an art maker/writer/curator. His practices focus on transcultural identity, mobility, space/place/site, and decolonised discourse. His works span different formats but are primarily performance-based, presenting at theatres, galleries, festivals, beaches or home gardens.
For Never Event, Howl Yuan will present a two‑channel video and sculptural installation, BORDER WONDER: Waiting Between_, which was developed during the Artists Home Swap 2024 residency on Dongyin Island, a frontline islet between Taiwan and China. Merging time‑based media with found coastal debris, Yuan probes waiting as a lived suspension—an in‑between state where movement yields to stillness and light emerges from the margins.
Drawing on stranded jellyfish, marine litter, and fleeting bursts of bioluminescence, the work transposes these natural phenomena into both physical and visual fragments. Driftwood, nets, rope, and plastic are arranged into simple sculptural forms whose textured surfaces catch the viewer’s eye much like phosphorescent organisms flicker in dark waters. Simultaneously, two synchronized videos capture the subtle choreography of these objects in relation to the sea and sky: the slow swell of waves, the hush of twilight, and the faint glow that hints at hidden life.
Through this hybrid of object and projection, Yuan invites audiences to inhabit Dongyin’s liminal spaces—where departure and arrival blur, visibility gives way to concealment, and time itself seems to pause. In the deliberate pace of editing and the rough geometry of washed‑ashore materials, BORDER WONDER: Waiting Between_ reveals the profound wonder of stillness and the transformative power of the in‑between.
FREE-£12 tickets link in bio
