‘Art Has to Fight Back’: Daniel York Loh on Mountains and Seas

We sit down with writer, actor, and musician Daniel York Loh, a man on a mission against “desperately safe work.” As his new show, Mountains and Seas, reimagines a 4th-century BCE myth for a “broken and violent” present, he tells us why “compassion means rage,” and why art has a duty to fight back.

Daniel York Loh is not interested in ‘safe’ art. In a world he describes as “broken and violent,” the writer, actor, and musician believes that to create anything else is a failure. His new work, Mountains and Seas – Song of Today 山海 · 今日之歌, is a direct response. The new interdisciplinary show—created with performance artist Xie Rong and composer Beibei Wang—blends poetry, live painting, AI animation, and music to confront climate crisis, rising fascism, and the “splintering” of the human experience.

The show takes the 4th-century BCE Chinese text, The Classic of Mountains and Seas, as its starting point, but this is no dusty adaptation. It’s a work of what York Loh calls “Science Ancient Fiction,” a political, poetic exploration of a world at the brink. We spoke to him to find out why this ancient myth became his chosen lens for the story of now.

From Ancient Myth to ‘Science Ancient Fiction’

The original Classic of Mountains and Seas is a fantastical text, a compilation of myths, beasts, heroes, and folklore. For Daniel York Loh, its power lies not in its age, but in its boundless sense of the unknown.

“When I read The Classic of Mountains and Seas, I was struck by the sense of possibility in the world it describes, the same way as when I read the Herodotus histories,” he explains. “There was a sense back then, 2000-odd years ago, that people literally didn’t know what existed on the other side of the nearest mountain—let alone across the seas. It was a world of possibility.”

As his new show, Mountains and Seas, reimagines a 4th-century BCE myth for a “broken and violent” present, he tells us why “compassion means rage,” and why art has a duty to fight back.

He contrasts this with our present, a world suffocating from its own surveillance. “Now we have a world in crisis but with little of that possibility. We know every corner of that world… We can fly anywhere, bomb anywhere… My script mentions ‘mass communications and satellites in the sky so we can see a fly stretching its wings on the other side of the planet’.”

The show, which unfolds in fifteen fragments, weaponises this tension. In the ancient text, some creatures can cure madness while others can cause it. York Loh’s script drags this concept into 2025.

“Our show poses that question: is there a chance that, just maybe, something from an ancient world of possibility could heal a world that’s achieved so much of that possibility but which seems more and more broken and violent by the year?”

‘I was playing in punk rock bands when I was 14’

To understand how Mountains and Seas works, you first have to understand York Loh’s artistic DNA. He is, in his own words, “instinctively multidisciplinary.” This isn’t a new trend; it’s his native language.

“Music is just in me. It was my first ever art form,” he says. “There’s a Bruce Springsteen lyric, ‘We learned more from a three-minute record… than we ever learned in school’. That was me. I was playing in punk rock bands when I was 14. I played in a pub blues band when I was 16 – a bunch of older guys who didn’t know anyone else who had a guitar so they had this idiot mixed race kid with glasses and spiky peroxide hair playing rhythm guitar!”

That musical-first instinct informs everything. He won the 2014 Perfect Pitch award for an original musical, Sinking Water, and his creative work with Kakilang (where he was formerly Associate Artistic Director) has consistently pushed at theatrical boundaries.

“In 2020 the first show I created with Kakilang, Invisible Harmony 无形的和谐, was made with an extraordinary dancer, Julia Cheng, and this opened up a whole other world for me. I love working with dancers, musicians, composers etc. It becomes a form of ‘total theatre’. And Mountains and Seas is created with Xie Rong who is an ‘action artist’… It’s a whole palette of expression and human poetry.”

Waging War on ‘Desperately Safe Work’

This multidisciplinary approach isn’t just an aesthetic choice; it’s a political one. It’s his way of fighting back against an industry he sees as risk-averse and obsessed with reductive labels.

“Honestly I’ve written so much about so many things in so many different forms, but it’s a question of what I can get programmed/commissioned,” he says frankly. “This is a challenge for everyone but for someone who’s racially difficult to pigeon-hole, from a working class background, and who’s politically expressive… that presents a huge set of challenges.”

His frustration is aimed at what he calls “a void of… desperately safe work.”

**Mountains and Seas – Song of Today, Daniel York Loh, photo Jamie Baker**

While his acclaimed works like The Fu Manchu Complex or The Dao of Unrepresentative British Chinese Experience have often been framed as being about identity, he sees that as a misreading.

“I’ve always aimed at my work being mythic and universal,” he states. “So when I’ve tackled ‘identity’ I’ve looked to challenge societal norms and make that search for identity inherently human, and not the kind of performative identity ‘celebration’ which I see a lot of and which… comes a bit too close to ‘race nationalism’.”

He recalls the fight to get The Fu Manchu Complex produced in 2012, a satire on toxic race phobia. “People were actually saying ‘but that kind of racism doesn’t exist anymore’ which sounds incredible now. The final speech in The Fu Manchu Complex actually foretold Brexit.”

This is the thread that connects all his writing, from the Chinese Labour Corps in Forgotten 遗忘 to his new mythic text. “If there’s a thread in my writing,” he reflects, “I’d say it’s the trauma of being lost and broken and trying to find a Dao (Way) through a violent and splintering world.”

‘The Purest Artists I’ve Ever Worked With’

For Mountains and Seas, that “Way” is found through collaboration. The show is built on a creative triumvirate: York Loh’s text, Xie Rong’s live art, and Beibei Wang’s percussion. According to York Loh, the chemistry was immediate.

“I won’t lie, it actually all clicked on the first day we workshopped together,” he recalls. “Xie Rong had already created an animation using my text… Then we were in a rehearsal studio in the bleak midwinter with Beibei’s extraordinary percussion, Jennifer Lim performing my text, two incredible dancers… with Xie Rong painting the floor/herself/all of us and it was honestly electrifying.”

His reverence for his collaborators is palpable. “I’ve learned EVERYTHING. Xie Rong is the purest artist I’ve ever worked with. She has an incredible depth of focus and feeling… The art just seems to flow through her and resonate outward. Her practice is all about compassion—but in a way that’s the polar opposite of sentimental. Compassion means rage as well.”

“Beibei is probably the purest musician I’ve ever worked with,” he continues. “So instinctive, so naturally creative with sound… I love that it’s a percussionist creating the music as there’s such a strong rhythmic pulse in the whole piece. I’ve seen her drumming on a block of ice. Put her in your living room with two sticks and she’ll turn the whole place into an orchestra.”

The company is rounded out by performers Jennifer Lim (as ‘The Wanderer’), dancers Tash Tung and Fan Jiayi, Beijing Opera vocalist He Song Yuan, and flautist Chen Yu Xiao. “Honestly,” York Loh says, “I don’t think you’ll see many shows like ours.”

‘I want to be there when the world ends’

But how does wonder survive in a piece staring so directly into crisis? For York Loh, the two are not in opposition.

“Honestly I’ve written so much about so many things in so many different forms, but it’s a question of what I can get programmed/commissioned,” he says frankly. “This is a challenge for everyone but for someone who’s racially difficult to pigeon-hole, from a working class background, and who’s politically expressive… that presents a huge set of challenges.”

“Well we’re looking at all those elements globally, geopolitically and across thousands of years and that in itself is wondrous,” he says. “Recently I saw the footprint of a creature that predates dinosaurs on a beach in Arran, Scotland, and it filled me in with wonder.”

It’s this blend of wonder and dread that defines the show. “If we knew the world had to end and was going to end, how many of us would say ‘I want to be there when the world ends’? Because it’s the end of everything and that in itself is awe-inspiring.”

This isn’t a comforting myth. The protagonist, in a “jetlag fever dream,” flies over a world encountering creatures not just of myth, but of “politics, colonialism, racism and climate destruction,” searching for the one that can “cure madness.”

This search is not abstract. York Loh is explicit that the show’s “rage” and “compassion” are aimed squarely at the present.

“A large element in the show is very much around the plight of Palestine, which is a subject very close to both our hearts,” he says. “A Palestinian trade unionist I’ve worked with often says that ‘in trying to liberate Palestine, Palestine has liberated the world’ and I think this true. There’s now no hiding or concealing or avoiding the utter savage destructiveness of the Western and developed world. Now we know.”

This, it seems, is the core of Mountains and Seas – Song of Today. It’s a show that refuses to look away, demanding that the audience, and art itself, abandon comforting illusions.

“The world is in trouble,” he concludes. “Everything we hold dear is at risk. In Western societies we live with the idea ingrained in us that as a species we are constantly progressing. We’re being rapidly disabused of that notion now. And our leaders and media have shown they’re very willing to lie to us and gaslight us and turn us in on each other nakedly and brazenly.

“We have to resist and we have to resist now.”

Featured Image: Mountains and Seas – Song of Today, Beibei Wang, photo Jamie Baker