On the occasion of the national East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) Heritage Month, esea contemporary is pleased to present a special afternoon with artist Yan Wang Preston, centring on her new book With Love. From an Invader. — Rhododendons, Empire, China and Me. Through spoken words, film, and participatory reflection, the event offers an intimate exploration of migrant identity, memory, and love across distance and discipline.
The programme opens with an artist talk, sharing personal experiences of working as a multicultural artist from a migrant background, followed by a reading from her latest publication. Building on Yan’s two art series With Love. From an Invader. and Autumn Winter Spring Summer, the book uses the notorious non-native species, rhododendron ponticum, as an embodiment for colonial transplantation and a metaphor for human migrants. Masterfully connecting 400 photographs from Yan’s work, 10 interdisciplinary essays and two archive images collections from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, the book encourages a deeply personal and multi-layered exploration towards what it means to live, move, and belong in a world that often marks the migrant as ‘the other.’
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After the reading, participants are treated with an exclusive screening of With Love. From an Invader, the filmic foundation of the book. To make the piece, Yan walked to and photographed one love-heart-shaped rhododendron ponticum bush every other day for an entire year. Immersed within the visual and sonic world of the rhododendrons, you will be invited to write a postcard — to a loved one, or perhaps an imaginary friend — transforming deep listening into a poetic act of connection and self-expression.
Together, the programme foregrounds tenderness, resistance, and re-imagination in shared experiences, asking how we speak across borders — and how we carry home within us. Spaces are limited, so booking is essential.
Dr Yan Wang Preston is a visual artist exploring landscape, identity, migration, and the environment through photography, moving image, sound, performance, installation, and artist books. Her work is grounded in rigorous research and immersive fieldwork, often involving physically and emotionally demanding processes.
Her acclaimed project Mother River (2010–2014) involved photographing the 6,211km Yangtze River every 100 km using a large-format plate camera, subverting historic representations of the river. Forest (2010–2017) photographed transplanted old trees in new Chinese cities, examining notions of artificial urban nature. Since 2020, her UK-based project With Love, From an Invader. documents a single rhododendron bush over a year while exploring its nature-culture habitat. The project discovers a thriving ecology, which is presented as a visual-audio installation that challenges prevalent conservation narratives criminalising the ‘non-native’ species as the ‘invasive’.
Wang Preston’s work has received international recognition, including the RPS Award for Environmental Responsibility (2023), Professional Landscape, Sony World Photography Award (2019), and Syngenta Photography Prize (2017). Her solo exhibitions are staged at venues including the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Wuhan Art Museum, Ireland Photo Museum, LOOK Photo Biennale, and the 56th Venice Biennale. Her group shows have been presented at the V&A, the National Portrait Gallery, UK, FotoFest Houston, USA, and OCAT Shenzhen, China.
She has published three books: With Love. From an Invader.- Rhododendrons, Empire, China and Me (2025), Mother River (2018), and Forest (2018). Her work appears in publications like The Guardian, Granta, and the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. Collections include the V&A, LACMA, National Portrait Gallery, and more.
Born in Henan, China (1976), Preston trained as a medical doctor before migrating to the UK in 2005 and shifting to visual art. She holds a PhD in Photography from the University of Plymouth and lectures at the University of Huddersfield.
Initiated by besea.n, every September we celebrate East and South East Asian heritage, culture, history and everything in between. It’s a chance to celebrate, acknowledge and learn about the incredible ways in which our communities have helped shape the UK.
