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The Other Words

Date: January 30, 10:00am – 13:00, 2016
As part of Duration & Dialogue Performance Art Festival/Symposium
Followed by a conversation with Johanna Householder (OCADU)
Chun Hua Catherine Dong with Robert Black

i feed pre-masticated rice to a naked man for three hours at Katzmann Contemporary

This performance issues communication and linguistically phenomena with minimalistic gestures. It refers that the sense of authenticity, integrity and beauty of resource language get lost in translation. The rice in this performance is a metaphor of text. I am sitting on a desk, translating a big plate of text to my reader who is devouring this plate in its translated form. My reader may understand the subject, but the quality of what he/she has consumed is definitely not the same as the original once. In fact, translating a text is like chewing up rice and then feeding it to somebody else. In performance, what I feed to people is still rice. However, this transformed rice has already lost its flavor and nutrition. It is the same in translation, clarity and fluency of source text might still be kept in a target text. However, the source text and the target text can never be the same because fidelity in translation is the root that translators strive to approach but it can never truly be reached.

The processing of eating and feeding rice to the others is a process of self-translation, a communicative situation, from one cultural context to the other.  My body in this performance is a cross-cultural mediator, rendering my experiences into the both languages. In this performance, I am not producing another original, but a reflection of difference that tailors reality and identify to suit conscious ideological needs.  What I offer is not unbiased textual fidelity, but a taste of the otherness in cultural communication.

photo credit: Johannes Zits

Visual Poetics of Shame – Exhibition at The New Gallery

 

Exhibition Date: Jan 8- Feb 6, 2016

For more info

http://www.thenewgallery.org/visual-poetics-of-embodied-shame/

 

The Inner Circle

Performance, 3 hours at The New Gallery, Calgary, Canada

i use salt to build circles around a Gardenia twig, and lay in front of the circles, face down, keep still for three hours. (photo credit: Ashley Be)

The Surface – Solo Exhibition at PAVED Arts

Exhibition Date: November 6 – December 12, 2015

 

 

The Borders

I built a USA map with plaster, carving gaps between each state, and then i casted my hands in, facing down and keeping still for 3 hours. Audiences were told to pee on the map. The audiences’ pee gradually fill up the gaps and create borders between each state.

” The Border,” Performance. 3 hours at ABC No Rio, New York,  as part of “The Embodiment Ball (Bearings), “curated by EstherR Neff   (photographs courtesy of artist)

Yellow Umbrella – An Unfinished Conversation

” Yellow Umbrella – An Unfinished Conversation,” 2015, Performance, two hours at Select Art Fair in New York, represented by Franklin Furnace, a work by Chun Hua Catherine Dong.

“The Yellow Umbrella—An Unfinished Conversation” is a performance that involves twelve performers engaging with yellow umbrellas. The umbrella is a symbol of protection and resistance. This performance seeks an intersection where aesthetics and politics ignite each other, exploring how symbolic and situational behaviors impact on our perception in regards to specific social movements and activism. It is relevant to open conversations about how to transform social and political landscapes through embodied gestures, examining relationships between the citizens and the place they live, between what they have lost and what they have gained in social political transformations.

Performed by Liliana Argumedo, Lean Aron, Hilary Brown, Ann Chiaverini, Jessica Cipriano, Kristin Draucker, Julie Edwards,Marie Christine Katz,  Kim L Rouchdy, Maria Sprowls, Mira Fister-Tadic,   Mary Williamson,

Freedom, Democracy, and Vote

 

45 minutes at Grace Exhibition Space, 2015

photo credit: Maria Fernada Hubert and Chun Hua Catherine Dong

Text will come soon

Come Home

 

1. I place a handkerchief on floor, fill the handkerchief with a bowl of rice, and tie it to a rice ball.

2. I press the rice ball on my forehead and call my name to come home three times with my local dialect, and then replace it on floor.
3. Audiences are encouraged to participate. When one makes rice ball, one will be suggested call out one’s name to come home with one’s own language, take the rice ball to home, put it beside one’s pillow for three nights, and then cook the rice and eat it.

90 minutes at Songs For Presidents in New York, 2015, 100 handkerchiefs, 100 ribbons, 70 pounds rice, and a suitcase. ( curated by Frances Cooper, photo credit: Mark Hayes and Frances Cooper)

The Lost Twelve Years – at Rapid Pulse Performance Art Festival

 

The Lost Twelve Years, 2015. Performance, 25 minutes at Rapid Pause International Performance Art Festival in Chicago

step 1. pinch my forehead until there is red dot appears
step 2. use a spoon to scratch my neck until there is red line appears
step 3. draw pink circles on my belly
step 4. throw gold paper to audience
step 5. pour ink on my back from a tea pot
step 6. shoot myself with ink

After living aboard as a Chinese for 12 years, I noticed there is a tremendous change inside me: something that has nurtured and cultivated me has gradually faded and forgotten. The gesture of shooting myself with ink is a political gesture. It is not only an apology for my twelve-year absence but also a manifestation that reveals my urgent needs to renew my lost tradition and culture. The ink is an essential material for Chinese traditional painting and calligraphy. In my performance, the ink is not to be used as an artistic tool to reproduce the appearance of the subject, but to be used as a weapon against myself. this performance examines relationships between me and the place I live, between what I have lost and what I have gained. This performance is also a ritual meditation. In this suicidal ritual, I baptize myself with Chinese ink in order to be saved from fear of loss, preserve my identity from the process of self-transformation, and to capture my stray soul in a foreign land.

photo credit: Tongyu Zhao.