Contemporary Canadian Art – Chun Hua Catherine Dong

Solo Exhibition – Gallery 101

Exhbition: Feburary 12, – March 12, 2022
In-person vernissage: Saturday February 12, 2:00-5:00 PM
Artist talk (online): Tuesday February 22, 7:00 PM
Gallery: Gallery 101
Address: 280 Catherine Street, Ottawa K1R 5T3

Featuring VR, performance photographs, video, and neon and 3D-printed sculpture, this exhibition explores new digital possibilities for bridging gaps between memories and experience, and mediating contemporary culture with rich traditions preserved from Dong’s Chinese roots. In the space of digital experimentation and representation, Dong blurs boundaries of here and there, then and now, and the binaries of gender, merging states of being so close yet so far away.

This exhibition consists of five works:
“Reconnection,” performance photograph, 2021, 32”x 48”
“Mulan,” 2022. VR
“Becoming Fenghuang,” 2022, vidoe, 5:12 minutes.
“I am A Rainbow,” 2019, neon sign
“When I Was Born, My Father Said I Was Just Another Mouth to Feed,” 2021 – on going, 3D printed sculptures

Residency – International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), Brooklyn

I am very pleased to announce that I am in residence at International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in Brooklyn, Oct 1 – Dec 30, 2021, supported by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec. For more info about this residency, please visit here

Solo Exhibition – Art Gallery of Hamilton

Solo Exhibition: Chun Hua Catherine Dong
Gallery: Art Gallery of Hamilton
Guest curator: Tara Ng
Exhibition date: September 4, 2021 – January 2, 2022
Address: 123 King Street West, Hamilton, ON, CanadaL8P 4S8

This is the first major Canadian solo exhibition of works by Chinese-born, Montreal-based artist Chun Hua Catherine Dong. Working with performance, photography, and video for over a decade, Dong examines issues related to gender, cultural identity, migration, and diaspora. Chun Hua Catherine Dong presents photographs from the artist’s series I Have Been There (2015–ongoing) and Skin Deep (2014–20), in which brilliantly coloured traditional Chinese brocade silk fabrics play an important symbolic role in her exploration of her hybrid cultural identity as a Chinese Canadian immigrant and her ambivalent relationship to her homeland.

I Have Been There is an ongoing performance exploring themes of death, belonging, and diaspora. Each time Dong visits a new city, she creates a beautiful silk duvet that she places over her body as she lies on the ground in front of historical sites, tourist attractions, and other significant places or events. Dong’s performance is based on a funeral tradition in her hometown in which the daughters of a deceased person each make a duvet to place over their loved one’s body. As the only member of her family to immigrate to Canada, Dong adapts the ritual to her own particular circumstances and repeatedly performs it around the world as a poetic expression of her diasporic identity and engagement with different cultures and spaces. Occasionally attracting the attention of police and security personnel in certain places, Dong has also begun to view her performance as a political act that tests the democracy of public spaces.

Skin Deep explores the relationship between the concepts of shame and face in Chinese culture. Shame, or losing face, functions as a form of social control that prevents individuals—particularly women—from acting in ways that might disrupt the status quo. In Skin Deep, Dong explores the concept of losing face in a series of photographic self-portraits, combined with an AR (Augmented Reality) component, in which she conceals her face in the same traditional Chinese silk fabrics that comprise the background, signifying the loss of individual identity and absorption into a cultural identity. This condition reflects not only Dong’s experiences as a young woman in China but also as a Chinese immigrant in Canada.

For more info about this exhibition, please visit here

featured on the front of Vie des arts Magazine

I am very glad to see a picture of myself at my studio is featured on the front of Vie des arts Magazine. It is accompanied by an article, written by the deeply fantastic writer and artist, Didier Morelli, published on the magazine as well. This issue is on the booth on July 9, 2021.
For more about the article Didier Morelli wrote, please visit here
(Photo credit: Renaud Lafrenière)

Artist Residency -Charlevoix, Quebec

I am very pleased to announce that I will have an artist residency in Charlevoix, Quebec, to document the contemporary Charlevoix landscape in 2021-2022, presented by Musée de Charlevoix and Rencontres internationales de la photographie en Gaspésie, in collaboration with Loto-Québec.

Musée de Charlevoix and Rencontres, in collaboration with Loto-Québec, announce the selection of Chun Hua Catherine Dong to carry out a photography mission that will document the contemporary Charlevoix landscape in 2021-2022.

A Montreal visual artist of Chinese origin, Chun Hua Catherine Dong uses performance, photography and video in her work. In 2015 she began the travel-based performance I Have Been There, which she aims to continue in the framework of her mission in Charlevoix. The artist has carried out this performance in 13 countries, 33 cities and more than 200 different places.

“During the residency, I will use Chinese embroidered fabric to make a duvet,” she explains. “As a way of engaging with Charlevoix’s unique landscapes and cultures, I will lie on the ground of forests, river banks, historical sites and landmarks, covered by the duvet.” Her performance will be documented so as to produce a series of photos and 360º videos to be presented at Musée de Charlevoix, in 2022, and at Rencontres internationales de la photographie en Gaspésie, in 2023.

Chun Hua Catherine Dong’s project is inspired by a tradition in her hometown in China. “When an elder dies, her daughters make duvets with silk fabrics to cover their deceased parent’s body. For me, as a person living alone in Canada without family and children, the question of who will bury me after I die sometimes bothers me. In response, I make my own duvets and perform this ritual publicly and repeatedly wherever I go to simultaneously celebrate death and my own existence.”

In a time where travel has been difficult, the artist has felt it right to return to nature, here in Québec, a place she calls home. “Through inserting my body into Québec’s landscape, I hope this work opens conversations about immigration, home and belonging, questioning how we continue to see ourselves in each other, and how we work together to present a contemporary Québec that is grounded in the inclusiveness and equality that we all deserve, regardless of race and culture.” More information on the artist: chunhuacatherinedong.com

This project is the fourth contribution to a long-term photographic mission that will cover the entirety of the Québec landscape between now and 2024-2025. Through this mission, Rencontres is also seeking to establish a national photo archive collection devoted to the Québec landscape.

Contemporary Art in the Public Space – CAFKA Biennial

CAFKA Biennial -Contemporary Art in the Public Space
Date: May 27-June 27, 2021
Location: Various bus shelters, ION stations, and billboards throughout Waterloo Region and Cambridge

I am very pleased to announce that my work “I Have Been There” is presented by CAFKA – Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener. Nine pieces of 47”x68′ and six pieces of 48”x70” photographs are exhibited at various ION stations and bus shelter stations in Waterloo region. Two pieces of 10ft x20ft billboards are installed in different locations in Waterloo.

Chun Hua Catherine Dong presents “I Have Been There,” an on-going public intervention performance that explores belonging, diaspora, and existence in public spaces. Each time Dong travels to a new place, she creates a beautiful duvet with Chinese traditional embroidered silk fabric. Covered by the duvet, she lies on the ground in front of historical sites, landmarks, tourist attractions, and other significant places or events around the world. She repeats this performance as a poetic expression of her diasporic identity and engagement with different cultures and spaces. Working within the gap between body as image and body as experienced reality, Dong uses her body as a primary material in her work, creating visual narratives that enable audiences to experience performance unexpectedly and directly in public spaces. She started this performance in 2015, and has performed in 15 countries, 33 cities, and over 250 different sites.

For a local press, TheRecord’s article about this work, please visit here
For more info about this work, please visit here
For more info about CAFKA Biennial, please visit here

This public art project is generously supported by the region of Waterloo.

Screening -THEY at Chinese Women Artists Video Art Festival

Screening: THEY
Festival: Chinese Women Artists Video Art Festival in Mexico City
Date: Feb 2- 7, 2021

THEY
The film available upon request
2017
29’20

Ellas es una instalación cinematográfica de cuatro canales que lleva al público al mundo de cuatro mujeres para examinar de cerca su vida cotidiana ritualizada, sus obsesiones, sus luchas y sus determinaciones de ser quienes son. Las cuatro mujeres son diferentes, pero se reflejan entre sí: se enfrentan a transiciones difíciles, relaciones ambivalentes y deseos que las perturban mientras celebran sus propias existencias de una manera subversiva pero casi meditativa. “Ellas” en esta película son tanto singulares como plurales, refiriéndose a las mujeres como individuos únicos que son plurales, pero cuyos cuerpos han sido marcados como el otro.

Mi enfoque del tema en esta película está subrayando los cuerpos de las mujeres como un sitio para la transgresión y resistencia social y política. Mediante el uso de gestos simbólicos, ritmos poéticos y repeticiones, esta película revela una reflexión compleja sobre cómo las identidades están mediadas no solo a través de las pantallas sino cómo nos llegan a través del tiempo. Esta instalación se basa en tradiciones cinematográficas y de performance, esforzándose por crear nuevas narrativas visuales que permitan al público experimentar la dimensión temporal del cuerpo directamente, al mismo tiempo, proporcionando una clave para comprender el poder corporal en la era digital.

For more info about the work, please visit here
For more about the Festival, please visit here

Group Exhibition – Human Learning. What Machines Teach Us

Exhibition: Human Learning. What Machines Teach Us
Date: February 05th, 2020 – April 17th, 2020
Opening: February 4th, 2020 6-8pm
Gallery: Centre Culturel Canadien, Paris
Address: 130 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Paris

Produced by the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris as part of the official programme of Nemo, the Biennial of Electronic Arts Ile-de-France, in partnership with Elektra (Montreal) and with the support of Région Ile-de-France.

Human Learning. What Machines Teach Us is an exhibition that documents the world using the technologies that shape it. The works in the exhibition feature a large variety of styles: interactive devices that make us learn their playabilities, generative installations whose processes are entirely autonomous and digital creations made out of digital forms.

The concept of artificial intelligence emerged in the 1950s. It served as a vehicle for an imaginary world immediately adopted by science-fiction writers who endowed machines with the ability to “think”. In the 1980s, the idea that machines could themselves learn, by deduction, appeared. This is known as “machine learning”. Finally, since the turn of the millennium, the term “deep learning” has been used for the processing of vast quantities of data by computers.

We have taught everything to machines and continue to supply them so that they pursue the “desire” for autonomy we would like to grant them. Isn’t it time that we started thinking that we, too, learn from them by observing their specificities or qualities? If there is one community that observes the world to give us its interpretations of its transformations, it is the artistic community.

Artists have always made use of the tools and materials of their times. Thus, more and more of them are turning to the creative potential of digital technologies, which are also used by researchers in their laboratories. In doing so, they accept what the machines offer them while adding an element of unpredictability to their creations. Sometimes, they distance themselves from their works, which run so that their modes of actions may be observed better. Machines or robots are also the subjects of photographs or films that other artists produce to encourage new forms of empathy in us. It is not an application or a service that does not work as soon as it opens. From the special-effect filters of mass-market software to the networks of artificial neurones that artists share with researchers. They both learn and appropriate these technologies by rubbing shoulders with them.

We have a certain proximity with the works that emerge from the use and/or observation of the technologies that shape our relationship to the world, to others and to ourselves. Recognizing the technologies of our daily lives in an artistic context makes us envisage them differently. Knowing that it is through contact with others that we build ourselves, it is about time to think about the “mechanical” other we increasingly frequent without being too aware of it. Dedicating an exhibition to machines and ideas or the resulting aesthetics amounts to accepting their teachings.

Works by Matthew Biederman, Emilie Brout & Maxime Marion, Grégory Chatonsky, Douglas Coupland, Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Emilie Gervais, Sabrina Ratté, David Rokeby, Justine Emard, Louis-Philippe Rondeau, Samuel St-Aubin, Skawennati, Xavier Snelgrove & Mattie Tesfaldet, with an exterior installation by Olivier Ratsi.

Guest curators: Dominique Moulon and Alain Thibault
Associated curator: Catherine Bédard

Exceptionally open on Saturday April 4, from 10am to 6pm for Paris Art Fair.

For more info about the work, please visit here
For more info about the exhibition, please visit hereand here

Solo Exhibition – In Transition

Solo Exhibition: In Transition
Exhibition: January 2nd to February 2nd 2020
Vernissage: Thursday, January 16th 2020 from 5 – 8pm
Artist Talk: Thursday, January 16th 2020 at 5:00pm
Gallery: Downtown Gallery at Ottawa School of Art
Address: 5 George Street , Ottawa, Ontaria, K1N8W5

Free to the public – Everyone welcome

A hyperreal vision of our near future, exploring how humans and robots coexist and bind together with one destiny. Through performative gestures and expressions by creating different interactions between a robot and the artist herself, this work provides an alternative perspective for a better understanding of ourselves, our bodies, our emotions, our responsibilities, and our relations with non-human others. In Transition also raises questions about binary system, about how to challenge boundaries of self/other, culture/nature, and human/machine, moving beyond traditional gender, feminism, and politics, creating a new social relation that expands and amplifies humanity.

For more info about the work, please visit here
For more info about the exhibition, please visit here

Film Screening – Queer City Cinema

I am very pleased to announce that my four channel film “They” will be screened at Queer City Cinema as part of Bad (Ass) Bodies, presented by Performatorium Festival of Queer Performance 7 and Queer City Cinema Film Festival 16.

Screening time: 8:30 pm, September 20, 2019
Festival: September 18-21, 2019
Address: Regina Public Library Film Theatre, 2311 12th Avenue, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada

For more info about Queer City Cinema, please visit here
For more info about my work, “THEY,” Please visit here
The film available upon request

“The focus of Queer City Cinema 16 and Performatorium 7 will centre on marginalized bodies – those that are often viewed as less than, unhealthy, burdensome, defective, dangerous and threatening – and those artists that use their body to confront stigma, to resist and defy perceived and systemic attitudes, to activate awareness and insight, and to engage a rethink towards empathic impulses. Bad (ass) Bodies will see films, performances, workshops and discussions involving Fat, HIV+, aged, disabled, diseased and abject Queer bodies.”

Gary Varro
Executive & Artistic Director
Queer City Cinema & Performatorium

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