Studio A4 | Eelyn Lee

RESIDENCY: 6 October – 1 November

Studio A4 is a residency programme offering an uncommon opportunity for artists to develop new work in Nottingham, and work amongst resident artists at Primary.  

In October 2025, we welcome Eelyn Lee, who will spend a month at Primary. Lee was awarded the Primary Residency Prize, an award presented to an exceptional artist participating in the annual open exhibition at the New Art Exchange in Hyson Green supporting Nottinghamshire-based artists and artists of Global Ethnic Majority backgrounds living anywhere in the UK. Lee was awarded the prize for her work Four Quadrants of the Sky 四大神獸. 

Image: Eelyn Lee, Four Quadrants of the Sky 四大神獸 (2023)

Eelyn Lee is an award-winning artist and filmmaker of Hong Kong-English heritage, whose work has been presented at the Barbican, Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, National Portrait Gallery and Palais de Tokyo, as well as at international film festivals. Her films, installations and live performances explore identity, ecological grief, and archival justice – blending costume, choreography, ritual, and sound to forge new mythologies. Through immersive, time-folding narratives, Eelyn constructs spaces where histories and futures converge – inviting audiences into richly layered worlds that defy linear storytelling and cultural boundaries.

Through a rigorously developed process-led methodology, Eelyn combines collective research, devised theatre, and filmmaking to create frameworks for collaboration.

As a response to the Covid related Asian Hate, Eelyn’s recent body of work reimagines East and Southeast Asian diasporic identities. Works include, Four Quadrants of the Sky 四大神獸 [2023], commissioned by Bloc Projects; long listed for the Aesthetica Art Prize, 2025, and selected for the NAE Open 2024, where she was awarded the Primary Residency Prize. Saam Sing 三星 [2021-2024] was exhibited at Graves Gallery [Apr ’24 - Mar ’25], and in 2025, selected for Queer East and Aesthetica Short Film Festival. In 2024, Eelyn was commissioned to make, Ancestral Futures 源流之後 a street procession in honour of the first recorded Chinese people in Sheffield.

Eelyn’s latest moving image work, Anguilla Anguilla, way of the eel - an honouring of the critically endangered European Eel - will be presented at the São Paulo Architecture Biennial, 2025, and the Karachi Biennial, 2027.