I am very pleased to announce that I am having a solo exhibition at VU.

Solo Exhibition: For You I Will Be an Island
Gallery: VU
Address: 580, Côte d’Abraham, Québec
Date: January 10 – February 23, 2025
Opening reception: January 10, 5-9pm

Often called the Mother River of China, the Yangtze bordered Chun Hua Catherine Dong’s childhood as she grew up along its shores. Having left her native country behind, Dong seeks to reconcile her memories and future visions of that landscape, now distant in both time and space. She employed generative AI to produce images of her home city in the future, the results showing waves crashing against the shores and flooded buildings. Behind these unreal images is the reality that the annual floods the Yangtze has experienced for centuries, which have proved devastating time and time again, have worsened in recent decades.

During one of her trips to China, Dong anchored her body in the present moment next to objects from her childhood and these menacing visions of the future. Souvenirs from her life with her now-deceased mother, along with food her mother once prepared, are juxtaposed with images of a nourishing yet chaotic river. Deeply attached to these original waters, Dong positions herself, before ruins of the past and future, as an island occupied by hopes for a more habitable world, along with the rituals and gestures that must be made to achieve it.

An exhibition presented in collaboration with Mois Multi.

I am very pleased to announce that I made a brand new body of works currently exhibiting at article in Montreal.

Solo Exhibition: I Wonder How I Wonder Why
Gallery: articule
Address: 6282 St-Hubert,Montréal, Québec, Canada H2S 2M2
Date: November 1 – December 14, 2024
Opening reception: November 1, 5-8pm

Dong transforms a scientific laboratory into an imaginative stage where the boundaries of gender, power, and social control are redefined. Through a blend of VR video, animation, light, 3D-printed sculptures, and ready-made objects, Dong combines elements of scientific presentation with childhood memories, creating an immersive, sensory-rich experience both experimental and personal.

Drawing on early encounters with Western culture while growing up in China, Dong uses the song “Lemon Tree”, by the German band Fool’s Garden, as a symbolic, aspirational fantasy of Western life: bright, carefree, and filled with promise. For Dong, this fantasy was shaped through cultural exports like music, media, and fashion, offering an idealized, unattainable version of the West. In this project, Dong bridges the gap between the imagined promises of Western life and the complex realities of growing up in the East, transforming bittersweet childhood memoirs into acts of resistance and empowerment.

Dong uses the laboratory as a metaphorical site where fantasies are deconstructed, reassembled, and transformed. The lab becomes a space of transformation – not simply for scientific experimentation, but for challenging cultural constructs, reimagining identity, and crossing geographic and ideological boundaries. “I Wonder How I Wonder Why” is a space where East and West, science and imagination, reality and fantasy intersect, inviting reflection on how personal and cultural narratives shape our understanding of ourselves and the world, and how these narratives can open new possibilities for self-expression.