In this newly commissioned work, Yarli Allison produces a multimedia installation that reconstructs Liverpool’s old Chinatown and tells the stories of its lost Chinese sailors. By the turn of the 20th century, Pitt Street near Liverpool’s lively docks saw a multicultural mix of migrant workers, including the British Merchant Navy’s Chinese seafarers and their families. These communities experienced increasing racism in the 1930s, and old Chinatown eventually disappeared after the bombings of World War II and the sudden forced repatriation of Chinese seamen, leaving their British and Irish wives, partners and children behind.

Using oral history, interviews from the dual-heritage descendents of the seamen, census data, digital mapping and virtual reality, and working with queer performers, Allison rebuilds this lost Chinatown as a digital landscape with imagined inhabitants’ daily lives: making visible these forgotten diaspora histories. A variety of ‘artefacts’ created by the artist - watercolour drawings, a miniature diorama, a letter - retell the experiences of intergenerational grief and loss through a queer and empathetic lens.