Exhibition – Page 2 – Chun Hua Catherine Dong

Two Person’s Exhibition – Musée de Charlevoix

Two Person’s Exhibition: September 23, 2022 – April 30, 2023
Gallery: Musée de Charlevoix
Address: 210 Chem. du Havre, La Malbaie, QC G5A

MISSION PHOTOGRAPHIQUE CHARLEVOIX

Charlevoix a été le cadre d’une mission photographique destinée à documenter le paysage québécois. Depuis le passage dans la région du photographe d’origine hongroise, Gabor Szilasi, en 1970, qu’en est-il des paysages de Charlevoix ?

Un demi-siècle plus tard, une photographe professionnelle de la relève, Chun Hua Catherine Dong, en résidence dans la région, livre sa vision contemporaine et critique du paysage. Cette artiste née en Chine met en scène son propre corps et l’utilise en tant que monument humain.

Le contraste est frappant. En cinquante ans, la photographie a évolué à une vitesse fulgurante. Obtenus au terme d’un patient travail en chambre noire, les tirages argentiques de Gabor Szilasi ramènent à la vie une technique traditionnelle en voie de disparition, à l’image des espaces qu’il documente, équipé de son appareil à chambre 4 X 5 et de son Leika.

Pour ses créations, Chun Hua Catherine Dong utilise le plein potentiel de la photographie numérique, explorant les technologies de la vidéo 360 degrés et de la modélisation virtuelle dans des performances immersives d’avant-garde.

ette exposition est un concentré de la vaste récolte d’images de ces deux artistes, inspirés par le caractère unique d’une région rurale et de ses paysages mythiques.

For more info about the work I show at the Musée de Charlevoix, please visit here. For more about Musée de Charlevoix, please visit here

Solo Exhibition – TRUCK Contemporary Art

Exhibition: May 27 – July 2, 2022
Gallery: TRUCK Contemporary Art
Address: 2009 10 Ave SW, Calgary, AB, T3C 0K4
Opening Reception:May 27, 2022 – 6 PM to 10 PM (M:ST)
Gallery Hours: Wednesday to Saturday – 1 PM to 6 PM (M:ST)
Artist Talk: June 3, 2022

Featuring virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), 3D-printed sculptures, video, and performance photographs, At the Edge of Two Worlds explores new digital possibilities for bridging gaps between memories and experiences, whilst mediating culture and identity through the lens of gender and diaspora. It speaks to the ways in which gender is explored, lost, created and re-created, and how digital diasporic experiences have shaped the notion of home and self with the rise of digitalization and globalization. In the space of digital experimentation and representation, Dong blurs the boundaries of two worlds: here and there, actual and virtual, culture and nature, human and animal. Futures are envisioned, which dissolve binaries and borders, creating a new social relation that sustains different ways of living and diverse beings as an act of survival.

For more info about this exhibition, please visit TRUCK Contemporary Art’s website

Group Exhibition – Doris McCarthy Gallery

Exhibition: May 5 – June 25, 2022
Gallery: Doris McCarthy Gallery
University of Toronto Scarborough
1265 Military Trail
Toronto, ON, M1C 1A4

Now You See Me is an exhibition that brings together artists who consider the power dynamics of image-making through their distinct practices. Dayna Danger, Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Gaëlle Elma, Leila Fatemi, Kablusiak, Meryl McMaster, and Vivek Shraya variously identify as women, femme, and non-binary, and use photography to explore issues related to gender and cultural identity.

Employing tactics of performing, concealing, and revealing their bodies and those of their collaborators, the artists produce works that challenge normative, colonial assumptions. They address pressing political realities that are closely tied to their personal histories, and reveal paradoxes inherent in representations of racialized bodies. Although the works in the exhibition are generated from different perspectives and experiences, they share a reckoning with the historical and contemporary uses of the camera as a tool to perpetuate degradative narratives. Asserting themselves as directors of their own images, the artists pose questions about the complex cultural and gender-related politics that underlie self-representation, shifting perceptions of the politics that inform image-making with sharp critique and blatant defiance, while kicking the door open for new stories and conversations.

‘Now You See Me’ is curated by Sandy Saad-Smith and is a Core Exhibition in the 2022 CONTACT Photography Festival.

For more information, see https://dorismccarthygallery.utoronto.ca/…/now-you-see-me

Solo Exhibition – New York

Exhibition: March 11 – April 2, 2022
In-person vernissage: Friday, March 11, , 6:00-9:00 PM
Artist talk (online): March 31, 2022, 6:30 PM
Gallery: Arcade Project Curatorial
Address: 56 Bogart, Brookyn, NY 11206

Cleavage refers to mitosis, a fundamental process for life. During mitosis, a cell duplicates all of its contents, including its chromosomes, and splits to form two identical daughter cells. Dong’s work explores the immigrant journey of identity: a splitting of the self into parts. The immigrant separates from their country of birth, entering their adopted country as the “other”. The immigrant becomes a person of two lands, not fully fitting in with either. When the immigrant returns to the land of their birth, they are not at home – they are visitors, tourists. The “home” that they hold as a memory is idealized in their mind. It doesn’t exist in the physical realm.

Skin Deep (2014-2020) 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. The series explores the concept of losing face in a series of photographic self-portraits, combined with an AR component, in which they conceal their face in traditional Chinese brocade silk fabrics that also comprise the background, signifying the loss of individual identity and absorption into a cultural identity.

Mulan (2022), a VR installation, inspired by the aesthetics of Beijing opera, splits the titular legendary heroine into two dueling warriors – shifting from singular to plural and back again. Mulan’s intense palette and undersea setting are references to Nudibranchs, colorful hermaphroditic mollusks that cannot self-fertilize and, despite having all the necessary equipment, require another to complete the reproductive cycle.

When I Was Born, My Father Said I Was Just Another Mouth to Feed, performance video (2010) and 3-D printed sculptures (2021), suggest that this cleavage of identity isn’t always complete: a ghost of the parents and their actions remains imprinted on the child. The bear’s four ears suggest a part of the child that has not completely separated. The bear’s pose is reminiscent of the prostration of both prayer and corporal punishment — a superimposed gesture of both hope and shame.

This exhibition has been made possible thanks to generous support from the Canada Council for the Arts.

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

Group Exhibition – He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen, China

I am very pleased to announce my second museum exhibition in China is held at He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen. My four channel VR video installation, “Meet Me Halfway” is exhbited there.

Group Exhibition: In Working: Women In Art Practice
Museum: He Xiangning Art Museum
Exhibition date: December 29, 2021 – March 27, 2022
Address: He Xiangning Art Museum Hall 4-8, Shenzhen

For more info about this exhibition, please visit He Xiangning Art Museum

For more info about “Meet Me Halfway, please visit my website page here

Exhibition Supervisor: CAI Xianliang
Chief Exhibition Adviser: WANG Huangsheng
Curators: LI Beike, LIU Xiyan
Co-Curators: YU Xiangzhi, CHEN Zhuoer
Coordinators: CHENG Bin, FAN Ning
Public Education & Promotion: LUO Siying
Publicity: FANG Hua
Exhibition Assistants: DING Ziying, LIN Yue
Exhibition Design: WANG Yaxing, BREEZE Design

Artists: CHANG Yuchen, Chun Hua Catherine DONG, Gayle Chong KWAN, Alison KUO, Hua JIN, Serena LEE, Beili LIU, Duoni LIU, Susan Pui San LOK, Jennifer Wen MA, Yeu-Lai MO, SHEN Cai, Naormi Meijia WANG, Alice WANG, Yiy ZHANG, Linda ZHANG

As one of the serial events of “Culture China”, “The Overseas Chinese Artists Invitational Exhibition” has been officially hosted by the He Xiangning Art Museum annually since 2020, and has become one of the major academic projects thereafter. He Xiangning is an outstanding female artist in modern Chinese history, and the museum named after her has always maintained a strong focus on overseas Chinese art as well as female art. “In Working: Women in Art Practice – The 4th Overseas Chinese Artists Invitational Exhibition” takes a close look at the overseas Chinese female artists and attempts to explore the diversity and possibilities in today’s social works.

The focus of this year’s exhibition is that, in a history of production going through agriculture, industry and intellect, being productive forces of labor, female artists across the ages have done contribution physically, emotionally and intellectually. By investigating their artistic creations, this exhibition takes the public on a journey to rethink the efforts of overseas Chinese women in the new era for social development, cultural exchange and intellectual innovation in the context of globalization.

The exhibition invites 16 female artists who have lived overseas for a long time or have long been traveling between China and the abroad, to present their art practice till now in a multidimensional way, ranging from video recording, artistic expression to spatial reconstruction. Some of the artists celebrate women in the times with delicate and sensitive emotions, some explore the meaning of housework with keywords such as repetition and superposition, and some imagine the future with a vision beyond gender. These works demonstrate the overseas Chinese women’s observation, reflection and feelings on individual, collective, world, history and society.

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.

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

Group Exhibition – Meaningful Code

Group Exhibition: Meaningful Code
Curated by Katie Micak
Exhibition date: October 26 – January 12, 2020
Opening reception: Thursday, November 7, 6 – 8 pm
Address: Living Arts Centre
4141 Living Arts Drive, Mississauga ON L5B 4B8

Meaningful Code looks at the ways in which artists are engaging with emerging technologies and tools in order to speculate on what our collective future might look like.

Featuring works in video, animation, 3D printing, photography, digital collage, augmented reality, AI and hacking, these works explore how we are integrating technology into our lives, how digital futures might change the ways we see ourselves, and what it might mean to live alongside artificial life forms.

For more info, pleas visit here

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