Yingbang James Xu

Yingbang James Xu, born 1995 in China, is a theatre director currently based in Hong Kong. He studied Acting at Chongqing University and later received an MFA in Directing from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts.

He is a founding member of the Floating Boat Project, a collective concerned with migration, geopolitics and contemporary social issues. His work explores how the everyday experiences of marginalised individuals can be interwoven with diverse textual materials. He creates contemporary theatre through documentary, devising and intermedia practices.

His recent works include The Last Performance, which examines the predicament of actors under artistic censorship; a devised adaptation of Dawn King’s Foxfinder, reflecting on the conditions of survival in post-2019 Hong Kong; and Everywhere (text by Huang Suhuai), inspired by the Foxconn factory suicide incidents. In his academic research, he continues to explore how theatre semiotics can be used to activate the audience’s capacity for associative and metaphorical interpretation under conditions of limited freedom of expression, and he has published on this subject.