LIMEHOUSE NIGHTS

June 2019

Exhibition at The General Assembly | Diaspora Summit

"Exploring how Orientalist imagination distorted Britain’s first Chinatown — and how those narratives endure."

Thomas Burke’s Limehouse Nights (1916-1920) was a collection of short stories that fictionalised the lives of Chinese migrants in London’s first Chinatown. Written through a lens of Orientalist fascination, Burke’s tales positioned the Chinese community within narratives of crime, vice, and exoticism. These texts not only reflected but also helped construct a cultural imaginary that has shaped how Chinese presence in Britain has been perceived and misrepresented.  The Chinese population in Limehouse peaked at 337 based on the 1921 Census, far fewer compared to the fictionalised mis-representation that continues to haunt migrant communities today.

During archival research at Liverpool Central Library in 2018, Donald Shek revisited this work as a means of interrogating the entanglement of fiction, representation, and racialised identity. His project re-examines Limehouse Nights through a contemporary visual practice, drawing attention to the mechanisms by which literature and media have historically produced and circulated stereotypes of Chinese migrants.

By critically re-framing these narratives, Shek situates Limehouse Nights within broader questions of hauntology, authorship, and the politics of representation. The work foregrounds the silences and distortions within British social history, while asserting the importance of re-narrating migrant experience through authentic and self-determined perspectives.