Image Credit: Photo of Bart Seng Wen Long.

Growing up between myth, cinema and moments of quiet rupture, London based artist, filmmaker and creative producer Bart Seng Wen Long learned early that identity isn’t fixed – it’s shaped in fragments. From childhood encounters in Singapore that lingered for years to the first time watching films like Taiwanese Yi Yi (Dir. Edward Yang) and Iranian Taxi (Dir. Jafar Panahi) – those formative experiences now echo through his work: tender, strange, and deeply attuned to people who exist just outside the frame.

Today, Bart operates across curation, performance and nightlife under his Anti-Bart moniker, building spaces that feel like living ecosystems. His work resists neat categorisation, instead embracing movement – emotional, physical, political – as both method and message. As he puts it, the thread running through his latest project is “the myriad possibilities of movement… the errant heart of queerness… the desire for metamorphosis.”

That ethos finds a natural home in Queer East Festival – a vital platform for contemporary Asian culture in all its forms, from bold cinema to experimental performance, drawing in anyone curious about global, diasporic creativity. As part of the 2026 edition (running until 6 June), Bart co-curates DAYTRIP: Queer East x ICA Takeover on Saturday 16 May – alongside Yi Wang, Queer East Festival & Programme Director. Together with their beautifully curated collective they transform the building into a full-spectrum cultural playground.

Expect shibari workshops, radical performances, dreamy cocktails, a poetic shorts programme and a club night curated by Princess Xixi – held together by Bart’s instinct for atmosphere and connection.

If you want to feel what culture looks like when it’s fully alive – DAYTRIP is where you’ll find it. Step inside. Stay a while. Move between rooms, bodies and ideas. This is yours to savour. Enjoy!

What were your formative experiences – from childhood, your teens, your early twenties – that quietly shaped who you are as an artist? Places, people, moments of strangeness, things you stumbled into that you only understood later had changed you. And how do those early experiences still live in your values and the way you work today?

A few situations come to mind: a totally mundane encounter with rubber cleaning gloves in the toilet when I was 5; a friend I made at daycare when I was 7 or 8 — she had an intellectual disability and because of that, the child care worker assumed it would be a bad idea if she got too attached to me, so they separated us physically… I had a dream about her maybe 10 years later, in the dream we were swimming class partners and again, the swimming coach separated us at the end of the dream… I still think about her a lot; my experiences during military conscription were very influential on my adult life (I can’t say much about it, just that it was a lot of absurdity and pathos); everyone whom I’ve had an intimate relationship with; the first time I saw these two films – Taxi by Jafar Panahi and YiYi by Edward Yang.

Image Credit: Photo of ‘The Language of Rope’ by Hua Hua. Experience a workshop as part of DAYTRIP Takeover at the ICA (Sat, 16 May) → queereast.org.uk Hua Hua → borderlineshibari.com

DAYTRIP runs the full spectrum – shibari workshops, Unlock Dancing Plaza, a shorts programme, life drawing, cosmotechnical filmmaking, and a club night with Princess Xixi. That’s an audacious thing to hold together under one roof in a single day. What was the organising logic – is there a thread running through all of it, or is the chaos itself part of the point?

The thread running through it all is the myriad possibilities of ‘movements’ – from the errant heart of queerness, the poetics of migration, the trespassing of borders, the desire for metamorphosis, the imperative to move in order to survive. I hope it would be a very, very rich experience for the audience, equal parts visceral and critical.

Your shorts programme Fast Draws / Slow Crawl has a description that reads almost like a poem – labourers filming themselves in a moving truck, a person mutating into a bus, a fairy emerging from a pinwheel. How do you curate a shorts programme? How do you know when a selection is right?

I’m not trained in film programming (or really even in any kind of programming), so I’m not sure if my answer would be that constructive, but basically I approach it like poetry. The film, its place in the sequence, all its internal elements/logics/lores, and how they interact with the other films within the sequence.

Image Credit: Photo of Joseph Lee, performing in ‘Good Boy, Bad Girl’ as part of DAYTRIP Takeover at the ICA (Sat, 16 May) → queereast.org.uk Photographed by Yu-ting Fang. Joseph Lee → unlock.com.hk

The ICA is a very specific venue – institutionally loaded, historically significant for queer and experimental culture, but carrying its own considerable weight and expectations. What does it mean to take it over for a day, and does the building itself change what’s possible?

I really like the ICA as a venue that champions experimental art, and thought that they have the best cinema programme in town, so yes there is an innate level of pressure to stage this event there. But at the same time, it’s been so incredibly busy that I haven’t had much time to think about the stress.

Image Credit: Bart Seng Wen Long photographed by Jonny Kaye.

Rubber Dreams is one of the most genuinely original projects in London right now – connecting colonial plantation history, natural rubber supply chains, and latex fetishism as a single through-line. When you explain it to people, where do you start? And which part do people find hardest to follow?

Thank you so much for your kind words about Rubber Dreams. I found it challenging to explain it to others too, especially because I am very verbally awkward in person. These days I would follow our script – ‘it’s about rubber as both commodity fetish and fetish commodity’ – because it just fits the scope of the project so perfectly.

To be honest, I haven’t met anyone who has difficulty following even my super patchy description of the project. I think it is actually quite intuitive because everyone knows rubber and almost everyone knows people like to fuck with rubber in some ways.

Film Credit: Trailer for Queer East Festival 2026. queereast.org.uk

You’ve talked about having a soft spot for “losers, freaks, and geeks” – people and things that lack power or capital. But you’re also working increasingly with major institutions: the ICA, Somerset House, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Singapore International Film Festival. Does that tension change the work? How do you keep the politics intact as the rooms get bigger?

I don’t think it has, but I also wouldn’t want to frame myself as being somehow exceptionally confrontational or brave. There have certainly been some brushes with the opps, but I’m glad that so far I have only been working with institutions with sound politics and they’d looked out for me.

I think a lot has changed since I said those lines. A lot of terrible things have happened, and the future looks extremely bleak. It is very understandable for people to feel nihilistic, like nothing seems to matter, and it’s every one for themselves and god against all – but still, I think, you don’t have to look too far to find that there are so many people worth fighting for or learning from or to love. Increasingly I feel like it’s not about whether someone is impoverished in terms of power and capital that I would/should have a soft spot for, but much more about the capaciousness of their heart, the bravery they carry, the kind of ingenuity that only someone who really cares about others have. And those are very precious things worth keeping alive in this world.

Image Credit: Sirui Chang (Princess Xixi) has curated ‘FLOW’ – a multidisciplinary club and performance programme as part of DAYTRIP Takeover at the ICA (Sat, 16 May) → queereast.org.uk Photographed by Minsett Hein. @xixi_asinshe @min.sett.hein

You came at filmmaking sideways – through photography, curation, performance, research – because making films in Singapore felt impossible. Now you’re making a feature. What did that long detour teach you about storytelling that going direct never could have?

The truth is I came from filmmaking directly – I went to polytechnic to study filmmaking and it was the best education I’ve ever had. Afterwards, I went on this long detour, because of a few reasons: filmmaking is very resource-intensive; I am more interested to pursue experimentation in my filmmaking than conventional productions (though nothing wrong with the latter); exploring other mediums is really fun; and I like a little challenge.

As for your second question – because I came from filmmaking directly, my storytelling fundamentals are very conventional, and it’s both a safety net and a threshold I want to breach. That said, these days, I can’t watch anything that follows a conventional approach (be it in their narrative structure, visual style, thematic explorations), and I really relish in watching something unusual and inspired. While other mediums and the way they function also inspire my approach to narrative structures, the most significant ‘inspiration’ for me is found in real life and vernacular expressions found in real life.

Run Riot readers are always hungry for the places and communities that people who actually live and make work in this city hold dear – not the obvious ones, but the ones that genuinely matter to you. Can you recommend three cultural spots or communities in London – spaces, collectives, venues, scenes, whatever form they take – that you’d want our readers to know about or show up for?

Exhibitions by Starch @starch.sg
Performance events by Future Ritual @futureritual
Gigs by Scobe Collective @dumbassburke

Find Bart at antibart.com and @antibart

Queer East Festival 2026
Present DAYTRIP Takeover
16 May 2026, 2pm-2am
ICA
The Mall
London SW1Y 5AH

Tickets & info → ica.art
Tickets & info → queereast.org.uk

DAYTRIP is curated by Bart Seng Wen Long and Yi Wang (Queer East, Festival & Programme Director).