Aidan Chan (RCM) - 2025-26 Students
aidan.chan@rcm.ac.uk

Legibility and Non-Legibility in Diasporic ESEA Performance: Conjuncture through Practice Research

The project argues that a specific configuration of forces – the culture industry’s demand for programmable diversity, a racialised imaginary shaped by the history of Orientalism, and conditions of political and economic instability – together produce conditions under which “authentic” diasporic performance is both structurally demanded and structurally impossible. Non-legibility is theorised not as the achievement of authenticity but as the refusal to continue performing toward its simulation. The methodology combines conjunctural analysis with critical autoethnography: Aidan’s own practice as a concert pianist and his anti-racist political organising are treated as primary analytical material, subjected to the same structural scrutiny as the forces that shaped them.

The project contributes to discourse on identity and cultural production, musicological scholarship on race and performance, and to the development of practice research methodologies grounded in materialist analysis.

Aidan Chan is a concert pianist and PhD researcher at the Royal College of Music, funded by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership. His practice research, supervised by Dr Maiko Kawabata (RCM) and Dr Broderick Chow (CSSD), examines the material and ideological conditions which produce legibility as the condition of participation for East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) diasporic artists in contemporary Britain and investigates the possibilities and limits of non-legibility as a mode of refusal.

Principal supervisor: Dr Maiko Kawabata