Late Thursday - Performance: Rehearse the Painting

Presented by Mengyao Qin, Rehearse the Painting is a live, multidisciplinary event at the Estorick Collection, bringing together dancers, poets, musicians, painters and sculptors to respond to the museum’s collection through their own practices. For this late opening, the museum becomes a theatre: a space where artworks are reinterpreted, bodies move, and new encounters between image, sound and performance unfold.

Mengyao Qin is a London-based Chinese artist working across painting, installation, costume, and performance. Her practice explores painting as a performative medium capable of moving between body, architecture, and event. Drawing from dance, theatre, music, film, and mythology, she approaches painting as a choreographic and performative language. Through fabric-based installations, wearable paintings, and site-responsive works, she investigates how painting can function simultaneously as image, stage, costume, character, and event. Her work creates encounters between movement and stillness, intimacy and spectacle, fantasy and lived experience.

Qin was awarded the Stanley Picker Project Fund Award 2026. She is artist-in-residence at the Grand Hotel Birmingham and has exhibited internationally, including at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Ikon Gallery, Stanley Picker Gallery, Sanyu Art Museum, and Sichuan Art Museum.

The performance is part of the Estorick Collection Student Takeover programme and everyone is welcome. Student Evening Takeovers are made possible with Art Fund support.

Our welcoming caffè offers authentic Italian refreshments. Bring friends and enjoy an aperitivo in our conservatory.

Free entry for full-time students from 17.00.

*Free with an admission ticket valid for the same day.