mother – Chun Hua Catherine Dong

Group Exhibition – MOMENTA Biennale de I’image

Exhibition: The Life of Thing
Presented by MOMENTA Biennale de I’image, Montreal
Curated by María Wills Londoño and Audrey Genois
Date: Sept 4-Oct13, 2019
Opening: September 4th at 5:00pm
Address: Galerie de L’ UQAM
1400 Rue Berri, Montréal, QC

Under the theme The Life of Things, MOMENTA 2019 explores the nature—or even the personality—taken on by objects conveyed through images. Through the eyes of 39 artists from 20 countries, the biennale examines the economic, social, and cultural contexts in which material production is prevalent. With respect to the issues of consumption that characterize the contemporary world, these thingified objects are given dizzying visibility even as, ironically, they are rendered invisible by boundless accumulation. For its 2019 edition, the biennale brings out universes that are constructed between individuals and their environment, highlighting transferences that take place between subject and object.

MOMENTA transcends the polarization between the symbolic and the functional in the economies of the object. To this end, the biennale’s four thematic components offer different ways of imagining the relationships between human beings and objects. Encompassing a variety of ideas tied to questions of consumption, these components intersect in various ways to shed light on the works shown. They allow us to envisage the complexity of the connotations and resonances of things in contemporary societies.

For more info about Mother, please visit here
For more info about MOMENTA Biennale de I’image, please visit here

Performance – I Still Look For You in Crowds

I am very pleased to announce that I will have a performance at Neutral Ground Artist Run Centre in Regina on March 30, 2019, curated by Blair Fornwald, presented by Dunlop Art Gallery. There will be conversation/ talk after the performance.

Performance time: 7:00pm, March 30, 2018
Artist talk time: 8:00pm, March 30, 2018
Neutral Ground Artist Run Centre, 1835 Scarth Street, Regina, CA S4P 2G9

In conjunction with the exhibition, Are You My Mother?, Dunlop Art Gallery, in partnership with Neutral Ground Artist Run Centre is pleased to present a new performance artwork by Montreal-based artist Chun Hua Catherine Dong, exploring the passage of time and feelings of grief following the loss of her mother in 2016. Featuring Regina-based dance artist, Johanna Bundon.

Chun Hua Catherine Dong is a Chinese-born, Montreal-based visual artist working with performance, photography, and video. She received a MFA from Concordia University and a BFA from Emily Carr University Art & Design.

for more infö, please visit
https://www.reginalibrary.ca/dunlop-art-gallery/browse-exhibitions/1397539
https://www.neutralground.sk.ca

Group Exhibition – The Breadth of Distance

I am very glad to announce that I have a group exhibition. The Breadth of Distance, at L Space, Humber Galleries, Toronto

Exhibition: February 4, 2019 – April 5, 2019
Opening: Wednesday, February 6th, 5-8pm
Curated by: Alize Zorlutuna
Address: Humber College, Lakeshore Campus L Building, 19 Colonel Samuel Smith Park Drive, Toronto, ON M8V 4B

we carry continents,
cross oceans,
traverse vast distances while still.

the scent of comfort,
is also longing.
what goes unsaid,
a kind of knowing.

how do elsewheres live in the body?

in dreams?
half-remembered tongues.
in what cannot be named.

Bringing together photography, video, installation, and sculpture, these artworks shift across geographies, cultural perspectives, and time. Considering grief, longing, care and resilience, they articulate how relationships to place, representation, and belief shape who we are and how we move in the present.

This exhibition asks us to reckon with how we came to be here on this land. Whether we are Indigenous, multi-generational settlers, or recent immigrants, our current moment demands we think through how we might build mutual understanding and empathy while recognizing our many differences.

For more info, please visit Humber Galleries here

Solo Exhibition – DongGang Museum of Photography

I am very pleased announce that I will have a solo exhibition at DongGang Museum of Photography, Gangwon-do, Korea, as part of DongGang International Photo Festival. It is my great honour to be selected as “ The Artist of The Year,” by DongGang International Photo Festival. And my work “ Mother” will be exhibited in the museum, June 14-Sept 21, 2018.

For more info about “Mother”
for more info about DongGang International Photo Festival
for more info about DongGang Museum of Photography

“Mother” consists of 14 photographs and a video dedicating to my absent mother. Absence is a form of presence. Since my mother passed away, I went back to China where I was born and found 14 mothers who are my mother’s close friends and relatives. I bought a pair of floral embroidered traditional Chinese shoes to each mother as a gift, because my mother always loved the floral embroidered shoes. We took photographs together at each mother’s home where the mother wears the new shoes and I wear her cloth. After taking photos with each mother, I invited all mothers to come together for a group portrait.

This work seeks consolation and restores narrations of the past through visual expression of memories and loss, exploring relationship between life and death, human existence and universal emotions. I use re-enactment as a method of revisiting and re-imagining past to create scenarios of my mother visiting her birth place and meeting her childhood friends. Through using my own body to present my mother’s present, I reunite with my mother and become her. This work reveals how the mother/daughter relationship is experienced as a site of empowerment, and how memories cross time and space to create a new experience that not only transcends life and death, bridges past and present, but also transforms emotions and realities. “Mother” is an embodiment of a melancholic longing for an unrecoverable past and a memento mori: a reminder of the inexorable passage of time and the beautiful transience of human life.