Yarli Allison: In Petri Dish We Sing

Richard Bright: Can we begin by you saying something about your background?

Yarli Allison: I think I have moved too much. I was born in Canada, grew up between continents, raised in Hong Kong, spent time in Paris, and am now based in London. This constant sense of displacement has deeply shaped how I work: in medium, scale, and the way I assemble things. Each medium I use becomes a language of its own.

As a child, when physical spaces were unstable, the online and gaming worlds offered refuge: a kind of boundary-less cyber-shelter and imagined belonging. That experience still anchors my practice today.

My languages traverse between sculpture, installation, drawing, film, performance, tattoo, and CGI realities, always seeking the form reflecting my researched stories. By relying on my own hands (perhaps a little too much), the labour of making becomes a way to think through things, to feel my way forward for solutions when things don’t make sense during making.

RB: What is the underlying focus of your work? In particular, what are the thinking processes and knowledge practices that guide your artistic research?

YA: I usually begin with a question: ‘what if’. For instance, my current practice centres on the intersections of grief, belonging, and speculative futures, often through queer and migrant perspectives. So when creating In Virtual Return You (Can’t) Dehaunt, I asked: can a virtual reconstruction of a lost home bring closure to grief? And what happens when it is not just a home, but an entire street erased during the war? Could such a space, rebuilt through digital tools like virtual reality, help to heal collective memory when oral histories are brought together?

I often collaborate with anthropologists, scientists, other creatives, and community members. I see the art process as something expansive and cross-disciplinary, but also as a form of social resistance, a collective approach that pushes back against the ways dominant systems flatten individual experience.

Perhaps that is why I am drawn to invented characters grounded in scientific possibilities. In works like Datafication and In Petri Dish We Sing, these imagined spaces become places where knowledge can be built from the bottom up, it’s plural, relational, and situated, guided by a queer feminist way of thinking.

Yarli Allison: In Petri Dish We Sing. Installation View

RB. Have there been any particular influences to your ideas and work?

YA: When creating what I called, a “DIY Asian sci-fi” work In Petri Dish We Sing, I was deeply influenced by writers and activists Rupa Marya and Raj Patel. Their book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice explores how our bodies are inseparable from social and environmental systems, how racial violence, economic precarity, and pollution all manifest as toxins within us. This understanding of systemic and embodied pain mirrors how I imagine healing methods.

I am also inspired by people very close to me, such as my late uncle, a gynaecologist who left a prestigious hospital, rejecting “tablet-oriented” medicine.

He returned to hand-based healing, treated my spine without surgery, metal plates, nor screws. He once diagnosed a girl with lumbar cancer before “western doctors” did, and he had an unusual connection with the spiritual world: He treated a patient who claimed to be haunted by tuning her brainwaves through Qi. These holistic approaches are often dismissed by modern medicine that was formed based on colonial science and categorization, but for me they were real human experiences that continue to shape how I design encounters in “stem cell clinic”.

Work In Progress (mapping the lost street) – In 1875 We Met at the Docks of Liverpool

In another project, using virtual reality, In 1875 We Met at the Docks of Liverpool, I reconstructed Europe’s largest Chinatown before it was bombed during WWII and traced my family’s journey. My ancestors were among the 50,000 ethnic Chinese seafarers sent worldwide from the late 19th century to around 1947. Many came to Liverpool via Britain’s first Asia shipping line to work in the Royal Navy fleet during WWI and WWII. I wanted to bring these personal stories to light because they are deeply connected to me.

Beyond this, Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, speculative fiction, and queer ecology continue to shape how I think about world-building and how art can construct alternative logics of care and coexistence with the dominant perspective.

In Petri Dish We Sing

RB: Can you say something about your recent work In Petri Dish We Sing?

YA: In Petri Dish We Sing is part film, part installation, and part speculative research, currently exhibited at the Brent Biennial 2025.

It imagines a world a hundred years from now where embryonic stem cells have become a sustainable raw material forming the very fabric of a city’s infrastructure. In this world, people with uteruses are no longer exploited for reproduction but become powerful bio-entrepreneurs who decide how their cells are used, gaining autonomy and reshaping supply chains.

I was interested in exploring what happens when something as intimate as our cells, carrying generations of memory, becomes part of economic and architectural systems. What happens when inevitable dark web services with ethical concerns emerge? Can biotechnology heal us holistically, or will it reproduce the same extractive structures?

As I wrote the film, it brought together all my languages again: scientific research, character narratives, a poetry-rap song, Cantonese karaoke pop, and healing rituals woven with dream-like scenarios. The “futuristic botanical” installation, created in collaboration with florist Orin Chung, expands the narrative through dioramas, fictional medical tools, and a grotto-like environment called the “stem cell clinic,” accompanied by diagrams and a research zine that map the complex infrastructure and ideas behind it.

In Petri Dish We Sing (Video Still, featuring Jackie Lam and Yarli Allison)

RB: For this project, you worked in close collaboration with researchers and scientists. Were there any challenges and compromises involved in this?

YA: While I work with metaphor, affect, and ambiguity, I understand that scientists are trained to focus on facts, statistics, and precision. The challenge was to maintain scientific integrity without losing the poetic and political charge. Our collaboration thrived on exchanging knowledge and imagining possibilities beyond the present, and through that process, our ideas continued to expand.

Most of our conversations were informal and are documented on my website and in the zine, yet they often turned toward deep ethical questions around representation, consent, and speculative responsibility. How can we imagine futures involving human cells without repeating extractive logics from the past? What happens to privacy when stem cells become easily obtainable? Then it’s hard to ignore genetic modification possibilities in humans, but what about ethics? So, on and on.

We explored these questions openly, such as the idea of cellular memory. A genome scientist shared examples from colonial histories, showing how stressors such as war or famine left marks on grandparents’ DNA that were passed down through generations, an idea that became central to the healer’s practices in the film. Another social scientist encouraged me to imagine what a feminist cell might look like, rather than relying on frameworks inherited from mainstream medicine. Understanding the importance of decolonising medicine and science was crucial, and it ensured we remained aligned in our approach.

In Petri Dish We Sing (Video Still)

RB: What future projects are you working on?

YA: I’m currently developing a new series of dioramas and drawings as a continuation of In Petri Dish We Sing, which will be shown at Tomorrow Maybe Gallery at Eaton Hong Kong during Lunar New Year 2026.

This new body of work returns to the language of drawing on paper and handmade surfaces, connecting back to how I was first trained. It allows me to expand my research into the everyday lives and afterlives of speculative communities. It feels almost like documenting a world that does not yet exist, asking how we might live, die, or care for one another within the shifting realities of medical science.

Lately, I’ve been reading This Is Assisted Dying: A Doctor’s Story of Empowering Patients at the End of Life by Dr. Stefanie Green, and it has deepened my interest in end-of-life ethics and care. I hope to continue this line of inquiry through digital humanities and speculative methodologies.

Ultimately, my future work continues to centre on “alternative futures” and “imaginative coping mechanisms”, whether through human, plant, or object worlds, as ways to navigate this ongoing time of crisis.

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The work In Virtual Return You (Can’t) Dehaunt was shown at Videotage Hong Kong in 2020, and FACT Liverpool in 2022 (curated by Annie Jael Kwan).

The work In 1875 We Met at the Docks of Liverpool, was a commission by Annie Jael Kwan for FACT Liverpool for 2022.

The work In Petri Dish We Sing is currently exhibited at the Brent Biennial 2025, Metroland Cultures, curated by Annie Jael Kwan, for Metroland Cultures. Credit to curator Annie Jael Kwan pointing to the direction of the research of cellular memory, also Rupa Marya and Raj Patel’s publication “Inflamed”.

All works are supported by Hong Kong Art Council, Art Council England, and Canada Council for the Arts. For full credits of each work please visit www.YarliAllison.com

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https://yarliallison.com/

All images copyright and courtesy of Yarli Allison

Art, Creativity, Imagination, Installation, Science