The Art of Shapeshifting: Jianbo Between Worlds

A lyrical master with a visual universe that speaks for itself, London rapper Jianbo speaks to Dance Policy Editor-in-Chief Sophie Yau Billington discussing the artist’s creative journey and the importance of emotion in his work as he heralds a shift towards more contemporary and club-ready sounds.

Over the last decade Jianbo has become all but a Grime, Drill and UK rap staple, no doubt helped by the force of his weighty Hong Kong-inspired creative rulebook which includes an impressive string of music videos. Today we meet at Mondo café in Peckham, an eclectic café-sandwich-bar. The venue carries a retro vibe akin to that of Jianbo himself. Sitting across from me on a bench out back he wears a simple black shirt and jacket, no frills or fuss.

The rapper and MC has come straight from home where he’s been recouping energy from a weekend of performing and producing. Margins United at Archives, Tottenham is just one of his recent London performances. Though he tells me that he stayed out late after the event, he also sent himself to the studio to work on some new music with Hyperpop producer PeterParker69 the next day. Jianbo likes to keep things experimental, and after the release of two successful albums, for him, this step away from his steady brand marks a fresh new start.

Jianbo is known not just for his varied and expanding music tastes, but also for the creative universe that exists around him. Known for paying homage to his Chinese and Vietnamese heritage in his expansive visual output, this year the famed MC says he’s been partying on the regular, which has affected his use of colour. He explains that of late, his visual palette has changed from warm natural light to late-night coded cool tones owing to a change in his varied emotional state. Tragically the artist lost close friend Dominic Morgan, known to friends as Dom, who passed away in the early part of 2024. Since then for Jianbo, making music has meant expressing intense grief, though recently he’s been on the hunt for new emotions to inform his creative output.

‘I've been through a lot of our sadness but because of that, my reaction is just to really enjoy my life. I’m having a lot of fun, and the music's joyful and reflects that, it's independent, and that's kind of where my videos are heading as well. There’s a massive DIY attitude, there's a change in fashion, there's a change in the lighting, you know? There's a lot of change. And I think between projects is always the perfect timing to make that shift’.

Jianbo heard the news of Dom’s death three days before he shot the music video for ‘Cradle 2 The Sky’, the first track on his recently released album ‘Everything for the Family’. At the time his mind was clouded by the loss of his friend, after which it fell to him to communicate the news to all of their friend group in London. Proving that he’s not one to let people down, Jianbo chose to go ahead with the planned shoot under the direction of collaborator Alexander Do. Going ahead may strike people as an odd choice to make. Explaining why he made the choice that he did, Jianbo speaks in earnest, ‘I just felt like he would have wanted me to do the video, even though I felt sad when I watch that video, I just see my own face and I know where I was mentally right this time. I think in the end, it actually contributes to it artistically, so it was worth doing.’ The video that Do and Jianbo created together now stands in formal tribute to the artist’s lost friend.

Despite its fitting name the rapper penned the track months before Dominic’s passing. In the music video for it, he’s dressed as a Chinese emperor residing in an English countryside manor. ‘The running joke was that we were in a giant English colonial manor house, and there was irony in the fact that we were dressed [with] me as an emperor of a dynasty in China and Rasheed who's Lebanese, dressed like an Ottoman Prince, you know, so that was the whole thing. It was always like a justice and irony thing.’ The accompaniment is soulful and Radiohead-esque, serious, though the wit of the filmic concept is met by wit contained in the lyrics, for example ‘some girls don’t know what they’re wining for, how long shall we stay then’. Jianbo has a tendency to use humour to cross over and use his output to address more serious matters. At one point the lyrics centre on a single statement or question - the repeated line, ‘What’s all the violence for?’. It’s at this point in the video that Jianbo's regal character is shown holding a large rifle, injecting comedy back into the mix. He originally wrote the with the gangs of his home of South London in mind, a testament to his values. ‘When I was writing the lyrics I was thinking about people dying in South London, it’s senseless, you know? That's the reality. The violence is senseless.’

In his line of work, Jianbo might not be a stranger to calling things how he sees them, but he’s also more than familiar with the art of holding family close. He’d rather stand up to violence than let it get the better of those close to him. For the rapper, wearing his dual Chinese and Vietnamese heritages proudly on his sleeve is part and parcel of that. Many of his music videos and collaborations involve his heritage, and no matter how large or small the set he always has his ‘chosen family’ present in some capacity on set. Asian or not he explains that his identity as a Londoner is nothing separate from this. On the contrary, it’s what makes him a Londoner, he tells me.

‘I feel like a Londoner through and through. I’m always trying to give a bit of that flavour and stand up inside this multicultural city…There’s nowhere else in the world where I think it's just more acceptable to be from anywhere and just wear whatever you like and express your background in that capacity.’

Even when faced with losing some of his closest friends,Jianbo spent the course of his staggered album release platforming the creative expression of those around him. Collaborating with others at a time where many creatives would’ve closed themselves off, Jianbo used his empathy andgrief to propel himself forward.

‘I really wanted to lean on my friends and family through this project, which was so much about the amount of value that I give to people in my life. That album being inspired by the passing and best friend, that shit hurt me, because I love the guy so much, you know? And when I realized that it kind of gave me perspective on all the people that were still in my life.’ I was like, “well, you know, a lot, there's a lot of power and value in just being here today”, so that's kind of where my heart was… I gave a lot of the friends who helped me direct the last music videos a lot of creative freedom, and it was more collaborative than it’s probably ever been for me.’

Trusting in those around him, this summer the artist found himself reaching new heights in his creative career, performing both at Gilles Peterson’s four-day festival We Out Here and an unplugged acoustic Drill performance at theV&A. The artist wants people to know that despite his success his ideas of openness and generosity come from a genuine place. ‘I want people to express themselves, probably more so than I ever did prior to that moment…I felt like, if there's any time for me to show them how much I value them, was just to let these people run away of their ideas and embrace their ideas in the same way that people always embrace my ideas.’

In part because of his strong creative ambition and collaborative nature, aside from their music, Jianbo and his teams are commonly recognised for their rich and varied visual portfolio. When asked what lies behind his relationship with music videos, he emphasises the rarity of seeing Asian people represented in the UK Rap and Drill scenes.

‘I think people forget how much of a different climate it was,in like 2020 or whatever, to make music as an Asian artist. … I really wanted people to see what I look like. People always say things to me like, “Oh, you don't sound Asian, you sound Black, you sound whatever, and that's fine, but I just wanted people to know… [because] when people did know, they were like, “Wow, what the hell?”. It was interesting to them as well as being shocking… so not only did I manage to represent the Asians here in London, but there was a bit of a shock factor involved. I knew that was part of the impact I was gonna make when I started releasing music, so that’s why I was invested from the get-go with the videos.’

Jianbo’s recent video releases are undoubtedly slicker than they were during his beginnings, but they continue to carry the imaginative essence that they did when he started out. In the ‘S.H.A.O.L.I.N’ music video Jianbo embodies characters in several different universes, playing not only an astronaut, news reporter, and basketball player, but also Chinese takeaway worker and WWE wrestler in all of three minutes forty-nine. In the music video for ‘Chinatown Alley’, which came out two years later he similarly embodies a man getting his fortune told, a mahjong player and a warrior. It's clear the rapper doesn’t tire of putting on a performance, but being an Asian artist who uses his platform to break through the ice of representation, what’s his experience of inhabiting different worlds? Does he mind playing the ‘Asian uncle’, ‘the Asian astronaut’, the Asian warrior for all these videos? Finishing his sandwich he says:

‘The reality [of] being East Asian from South London is that my whole life, I was a bit of a token about where I went. It didn't really matter who I was chilling with, there was always a level of knowing how to just be universally likable, which sounds like a funny thing to say, but there's something that transcends. There's something quite human about, like, about that kind of experience having to tap into the core of people just presenting a version of yourself which is honest.’ Linking back to his acting experience the rapper says he doesn’t get easily overwhelmed. ‘You gotta just play the character sometimes and enjoy it... It's a new opportunity. You just step into it. It's just like being little kids, and there’s something to be said about having a childlike mentality with doing it artistically’.

Perhaps the rapper’s strong attitude may have gotten him to where he is now but having played a part, or hundreds of parts, for so many years, a route back to centre sounds like it could be on the cards.

‘I'm always that sort of person where if something’s going left, I go right eventually. I've done this for myself, and at this point in time, it's like I put so much of my values into the production value and music itself. Now I'm just making shit based on my own self enjoyment and the visual side of things are formed by the same mentality, you know. So, I feel like I'm working with much smaller crews moving forward and doing something that’s very much more like the essence of me.’

Finding solace in oneself is an admirable step after going as far as catching the attention of international production houses. Last year Stink Films offered to produce two music videos for the rap artist straight off the bat, and though one remains yet to be released, ‘For The Honour’ was directed by Director and 3D animator Dan French, who made the video solely on Unreal Engine, a tool most commonly used to produce video games. As the story goes, French and Jianbo had known each other for a long time, and when the opportunity arose they began to discuss the concept together to figure out what Jianbo’s universe could look like. As the piano backing rolls against Jianbo’s sultry bars, the result is a Bladerunner-esque cityscape lined with UV lit hydroponics plants and rain-soaked warehouses. ‘He turned it into my version of Gotham City’, Jianbo comments proudly.

As his technology-forward approach shows, Jianbo isn’t afraid to explore things that feel outside of his usual repertoire, and this goes for both his visuals and his sound: ‘New era Jianbo, the sound is different. It sounds a lot more contemporary. It's designed to be played out loud with your friends, because my life right now is sort of a lot of fun and I’m partying a lot. I'm meeting loads of people all the time so it’s more than just being spiritually healed from the last year or last two years, I'm excited about life again, because what a joy it is to be alive.’

Mature and heartfelt in his approach to life, the artist's renewed outlook comes from a place of having lived life to its fullest, in every sense of the word. His emotional state ranged from intense highs to ultimate lows as his real life imitated his art and he was forced to again inhabit several different worlds.‘That year that Dom died was full of a lot of different emotions because I also did my first ever World Tour right, played Glastonbury and travelled around the world. That was really, really exciting and fun, and then also really, really hard and tiring and depressing inside. I flew back during my Asia trip that year only for a few days to go to my boy’s funeral, and then flew back again. I just felt like I was constantly living the multiple realities of myself.’

Indeed, Jianbo’s life of multiplicity is core to the idea behind his new video release, ‘None of Us’, where he again appears as many different characters, though this time he does so in a more personal capacity. Shot on a motion-controlled camera with a robotic arm, ‘None of Us’ sees Jianbo put himself in the shoes of a surly suited Texan high roller, a K or J adjacent pop star and a tortured gang prisoner undergoing brain experimentation. Each character mouths the track’s bars with role-appropriate emotion surrounded by similarly appropriate aggressors, poker players and supporters. Relaying how his varied life had led him to communicate this through film, Jianbo comments, ‘My mind was kind of just imploding a little bit. It's kind of hard to see sometimes who you are when you go from such highs to such lows and back and forth constantly, you know? I just felt like that video was kind of that feeling in a nutshell’.

Watching the video and focusing on the blue-wigged portion of the video it doesn’t seem a far stretch to speculate that the character of the Asian popstar represents the extreme joy in Jianbo’s life during his East and South East Asia tour. ‘It was the greatest part of my life, you know, right? Every day was a party, I was flying around and doing shows and then partying until unforgivable hours, literally just living a fun life every single day and escaping my reality to some extent’.

Coming from a place of darkness after learning of his friend’s death, the rapper was able to find a place of respite halfway across the world. ‘I got to Tokyo and it was great, because there's all the people I could meet who wanted to have a good time but also didn't know [Dom]’ The pair had intended to meet when Jianbo arrived in East Asia, but three weeks shy of touching the tarmac, tragically this wasn’t to be. The

‘I guess, in some essence, I really wanted to show [Dom] what life had turned out for me. You know in some way, I just wanted him to be proud of me… but he loved me in such an unconditional way, he could not give it a shit [about my music career] really, I loved him, you know, he would have rated whatever I did.’

Rocketing off into the sky and repeatedly crashing back to earth takes a toll, but it also teaches impressive resilience. Likewise, frequently codeswitching and shifting between worlds is a marker of ability to adapt. What advice does he have on surviving in the game? He gives us a positive note, ‘You could do it. You do it by saying that you should.’

Jianbo’s album ‘Everything For the Family’ (2025) is now out on Apple Music, Bandcamp and Spotify.

His new music video release ‘None Of Us’ is now out and available to watch on Youtube now. [Alternatively we might consider including the video in the article].

Written by Sophie Yau Billington

Edited by Zak Hardy