Absence unsettles what we think we see. In this three-part series, guest curator and artist Lihong Liu brings together reflections and conversations that circle memory, migration, loss, and the uncanny. Through an interview with printmaker Paul Coldwell, she considers how printmaking materialises loss, trace and afterimage. In her own essay, Drawing the Uncanny Home, Lihong Liu reflects on her practice-based research that renders the experience of migration through near-invisible drawings and installations, where near-invisibility becomes both erasure and shelter. The series concludes with a dialogue on art education across China and the UK, tracing how different research cultures shape artistic identity, research methods, and belonging.

Illustration confronts the ethical challenges of how histories are narrated and shared. In this three-part series, guest curator and illustrator Sharpay Chenyue Yuan explores how artists navigate authorship, collaboration, archival work and memory-making. Both through her own work and interviews, she explores how practices converge on the idea that history is inseparable from politics, yet diverge in methods: while Serena Katt foregrounds authorial presence to fictionalise reality and reach emotional truth, José García Oliva recedes, distributing authorship to communities and seeking authenticity through reproduction and collaboration. The series concludes with an interview about Yuan’s own work, reflecting on how illustration can become a tool for collective storytelling and reimagining archives through shared experience.