(Re) Orientating the Industry: Pioneering East and Southeast Asian Representations in Music

Make it stand out

Growing up in the 90s, I was sometimes teased for looking like Mutya Buena from The Sugababes. As a Japanese British person, I looked nothing like her (she is of Filipino Irish descent). But at the time, Mutya was one of the only East and Southeast Asian - aka ESEA - artists in British popular culture that people knew of. Before that, it seemed like Yoko Ono was the only ESEA artist to have captured the British public’s attention in a major way, decades before - even though this attention culminated in a demonisation of Ono for breaking up The Beatles. 

The portrayal of ESEA people in the British media has been, at best, invisible and connected to a form of the model minority myth - quiet, studious and apolitical - and at worst, a depiction of us as a form of foreign threat, reminiscent of “yellow peril”. I still have lasting, painful memories of Ting Tong the Asian mail order bride, a racist and transphobic character played by Matt Lucas on the riotously popular Little Britain in 2005. 

Dr Diana Yeh, a Chinese British academic, aptly describes to me Chinese British cultural practices (with wider applicability to the ESEA community in Britain) as “‘visible but unseen’, present in the social and cultural fabric but rendered invisible within the social and cultural imagination.” So we are here and you see us, but our capacity to create culture, and for that to be accepted and embraced as part of British culture, is overlooked. This feeling of being “visible but unseen”, of being here but not really belonging, is a fitting reflection on my career in the British music industry throughout my 20s and 30s. During my formative years as a member of the industry, I rarely met any other ESEA professionals, and those that I did meet were rarely in senior or creative positions.

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Today, ESEA representation in popular culture is getting better, particularly in the USA. Pixar’s animated feature Turning Red (2020) was their first film to feature an Asian lead, while indie film Everything Everywhere All at Once and its lead actress Michelle Yeoh swept the Oscars. Right now, everyone is watching A24’s Past Lives and reading R. F. Kuang’s Yellow Face. In the UK, Rina Sawayama (who I have the pleasure of working with) has been leading the charge on the music front for years. She succeeded in expanding the eligibility criteria of both the Mercury Prize and BRITs awards (to now allow artists who have resided in the UK for more than five years to be considered), and her 2022 album Hold The Girl made her the highest charting Japanese artist in the UK. 

In addition, over the last few years the ESEA acronym has gained popularity in the UK, which has helped to galvanise various diasporic communities under one umbrella. We’ve seen so many collectives and communities spring up, in and outside of the arts, around the ESEA cultural identity, and a groundswell in activism and community organising. Inspired by this phenomenon, I co-founded ESEA Music in September 2021 as a community for ESEA artists and professionals in the UK music industry. Our aim is to improve ESEA representation and strengthen our sense of belonging and authorship in popular culture. 

ESEA Music has now existed for two years, and has over 400 members. Through many conversations with our members, and witnessing our embrace of our newly collectivised ESEA cultural identity as a community within music, I’ve come to better understand and appreciate the real nuances of our experiences. From feeling “othered” in our professional lives and surroundings to finding joy in making new diasporic connections, from feeling underrepresented in our industry to fostering a growing sense of activism, these shifts in identity and action have become evident through our meetups, creative collaboration and shared spaces ranging from in person events to WhatsApp groups. 

I felt inspired by this newfound sense of power in togetherness, a feeling I hadn’t realised I had needed whilst I was coming up through the industry in those early years. I wanted to find a way to collect and document our collective experiences, to form some sort of archive of our community in the music industry at this point in time. I was interested in what we could learn about each others’ experiences, and how we could show others outside of our community the ways we exist and move through the industry, and the challenges we face in doing so. Seeing the power to do this that existed innately within ESEA Music itself, we developed a survey named “(Re)Orientated” (with help from Afreen Saulat from design studio 100Kicks). 

I felt inspired by this newfound sense of power in togetherness, a feeling I hadn’t realised I had needed whilst I was coming up through the industry in those early years. I wanted to find a way to collect and document our collective experiences, to form some sort of archive of our community in the music industry at this point in time.

The name “(Re) Orientated” contains a reference to the academic concept of “Orientalism”, as popularised by Edward Said, which I explored as part of my MA studies in culture, diaspora and ethnicity. I was drawn to the concept as a title, given that the theory describes a particular (typically, imperial) lens through which Asian countries and people have historically been viewed by Western writers, academics and artists. With the report being the first of its kind to survey the experiences of ESEA artists and professionals in the UK music industry, the title felt like a fitting invitation for readers to now, for the first time, see our community on our terms – through the voices of ESEA Music ourselves.

Having worked in this industry for over 15 years, I felt a complicated mix of emotions as I read the survey responses. One was validation. From always feeling like one of the only, or often the only, ESEA person in a room or a team (the average rating for how well represented the respondents felt in their cultural identity in the industry was 4 out of 10), or from feeling disappointed at the lack of ESEA artists and professionals in the UK (speaking for myself, I can name the “biggest” ESEA British pop acts like Rina Sawayama, beabadoobee, Griff and Jax Jones on one hand).

In particular, the responses from our members detailing their specific experiences as ESEA women, trans and non-binary people in the UK music industry really hit home for me. Many people’s reflections highlighted the enduring influence of stereotypes that typecast Asian women as both submissive and hypersexualised - a phenomenon rooted in colonialism and Orientalism - which I have experienced in my career, and my time in Britain. 

“I can sometimes feel that people see me as “cute” due to my Asianness and therefore don't expect as much from me, maybe doubting that I can be assertive and confident.”

“I feel that representation is limited and I feel pressured to be a particular box that fits the narrative that already exists. Super cute, girl-next-door Asian, ‘out there’ avant-garde tattooed/piercing-heavy Asian, sexy/sultry Asian, hyper-talented Asian, or the funny Asian. There aren't a lot of shades or sliding scales or spectrums that can SUCCESSFULLY exist. If you don't fit in the ready-made boxes, you need to adjust or get out. That's how I've felt. I don't see many Asians who are on the median.”

As an artist manager working predominantly with Asian artists I am building a career through cultivating meaningful relationships with them. The survey responses from ESEA artists reflected the deeply personal and varied ways in which their identities influence their music. For example, around 60% of ESEA artists felt that their music is very connected to their cultural identity. However, one artist said: 

“Although I’ve felt empowered to make a record about my identity I do worry about it being tokenized at all, it originally felt very cathartic but I can’t tell if it feels conclusive or just more confusing. For this reason, my next record will not be about identity in the same way.”

This impressed upon me the importance of artists having access to ESEA people on their teams (be they creative, production, marketing or other teams), in order to better support these aspects of their work, expression and wellbeing. 

Having co-founded ESEA Music over two years ago now, this survey has reminded me of why community groups like this are such an important part of the fabric of the British industry. With every mentor meeting, community gathering, music writing camp and initiative we have spearheaded, we are taking steps to improve representation, support artists in expressing themselves most truthfully through their art, and make room for the unique experiences of ESEA people at all intersections of identities. Community is so important, and I’m so glad we have found each other. 

Words: Tiger Hagino Reid | Images: Koti Shimada