The Yellow Umbrella

source: alleventsin

“The Yellow Umbrella – An Unfinished Conversation” est une performance de 60 minutes mettant en scène 12 interprètes en interaction avec des parapluies jaunes. Ici le parapluie jaune n’est pas seulement un symbole de protection, mais aussi un signe de résistance. “The Yellow Umbrella” est en quête d’un croisement où esthétique et politique sont le catalyseur l’une de l’autre, examinant la façon dont les comportements symboliques et situationnels déterminent la perception que nous avons d’un mouvement ou d’un changement social donné.

Participant performers: Zoe Bacchus, Kelsey Duffy, Bailey Eng, Alida Esmail, Lucy Fandel, Maggy Flynn, Brittney Gering, Olivia. Faye Lathuilliere, Natalie Montalvo, Kim L. Rouchdy, Mira Fister-Tadic, Mary Williamson.

Artiste d’origine chinoise, Chun Hua Catherine Dong se voue à la performance, à la photographie et à la vidéo. Elle a obtenu un baccalauréat en beaux-arts de l’Emily Carr University Art + Design et une maîtrise en beaux-arts de l’Université Concordia. Elle a été invitée à se produire dans de nombreux festivals de performance artistique et lieux de diffusion à l’échelle nationale et internationale. Son travail a été présenté en Amérique du Nord, en Europe et en Asie. Chun Hua Catherine Dong est lauréate de nombreux prix, dont la bourse Franklin Furnace pour les arts d’avant-garde qui lui a été décernée à New York, en 2014.
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source: facebook

“The Yellow Umbrella—An Unfinished Conversation” is a performance that involves twelve performers engaging with yellow umbrellas. In this work, the performers all wear white surgical masks and grey dresses. They stand in a row, repeating ten gestures. They hold each gesture for two minutes and then move to the next one in a sequence. 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 our perception in regards to specific social movements and activism. It is relevant to open conversations about transforming 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.

This work was made possible, in part, by the Franklin Furnace Fund supported by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
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source: youtube

The Yellow Umbrella—An Unfinished Conversation is a 60-minute performance that involves twelve performers engaging with yellow umbrellas. It was performed MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels), Montreal, Canada on Feb 7, 2015. 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.
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source: chunhuacatherinedongwordpress

Chun Hua Catherine Dong, born China, is a visual artist working with performance art, photography, and video. She received a M.F.A. from Concordia University and a B.F.A from Emily Carr University Art & Design in Canada. She has performed in multiple international performance art festivals and venues, such as, International Performance Art Festival in Chicago, Infr’Action in Venice, The Great American Performance Art in New York, Kaunas Biennial in Lithuania, Grace Exhibition Space in Brooklyn, Dublin Live Art Festival in Dublin, Select Art Fair in New York, Place des Arts in Montreal, Internationales Festival für Performance in Mannheim, and so on. She has exhibited her works in New York, Boston, London, Delhi, Dublin, Helsinki, Moscow, Turin, Tornio, Toronto, Venice, Montreal and Vancouver. Her video work has been screened in Mexico, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Colombia, Spain, The Netherlands, Finland, Poland, Greece, Romania, Croatia, Denmark, Sweden, Scotland, USA, and Canada. Among many other awards, she is the recipient of the prestigious Franklin Furnace Award for avant-garde art in New York in 2014. Her performance is listed amongst the ‘‘Top Nine Political Art Projects of 2010’’ by Art and Threat Canadian magazine. Dong now lives in Montreal.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Body is political. Dong considers performance as an attitude rather than a medium, an ideology rather than a style, a situation rather than an action. She is interested in blurring boundaries between personal and political, between private and public, between performance and everyday practice. She has established her body as a visual territory, and a primary material in her artwork to activate social commentary on immigration, race and gender. Through encapsulating these global issues in microcosm or magnifying personal predicaments until they become universally visible, she presents the body as a defined and experienced reality, and locates herself at the nexus of author, artwork and audience.

Her work mainly deals with cultural intersections brought on by globalization, asking what it means to be a citizen of the world today. It is relevant to open dialogues about “deterritorialization” and “disessentialization” in culture and how to transform socio-political landscapes through gestures. The gestures in her work are symbolic and metaphoric: at times subversive, meditative, subtle and/or humorous. But they mostly express her desire to transform the everyday political life into art, striving to install a model for social transformation that possibly could create a new way to look at utopia.

In her earlier works, the body represented an ideological confrontation or political alienation. She used silence as a method of protest to call attention to issues in the context of multicultural society, giving voice to those silenced or to raise visibility to those made invisible by dominant ideologies. In her newer works, she views the body as a bridge connecting east and west, past and present, creating a new version of hybridity and striving to transcend and mend.
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source: hemisphericinstituteorg

Chun Hua Catherine Dong ,artista canadense nascida na China, com mestrado em Artes da Concordia University, já atuou nacional e internacionalmente na Kaunas Biennial; no Festival Infr’Action, Itália; no Festival für Performance, Alemanha; e no Place des Arts, Canadá. Sua pesquisa tem apoio do Canada Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
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source: chunhuacatherinedongwordpress

Chun Hua Catherine Dong is a Chinese-born artist working with performance art, photography, and video. She received a B.F.A from Emily Carr University Art & Design and a M.F.A. from Concordia University. She has been invited to participate in multiple international performance art festivals and exhibitions in North American, Europe, and Asian. Among many other awards, she is the recipient of the Franklin Furnace Award for performance art 2014.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Life itself is a performance. Dong considers performance as an attitude rather than a medium, an ideology rather than a style, a situation rather than an action. She is interested in blurring boundaries between personal and political, between private and public, between performance and everyday practice. Body is political. as part of her interest in identity politics and postmodern feminism, she utilizes body as a disturbance in order to explore ruptures in society.
Initially working in painting and drawing, she has been using performance art, photography, and video since 2009. She has established her body as a visual territory, and a primary material that she uses in her artwork to activate social commentary on immigration, race and gender. Through encapsulating these global issues in microcosm or magnifying personal predicaments until they become universally visible, she presents the body as a defined and experienced reality, and locate herself at the nexus of author, artwork and audience.
Her work mainly deals with cultural intersections brought on by globalization, asking what it means to be a citizen of the world today. It is relevant to open dialogues about “deterritorialization” and “disessentialization” in culture and how to transform socio-political landscapes through gestures. The gestures in her work symbolic and metaphoric: at times subversive, meditative, subtle and/or humorous. But they mostly express her desire to transform the everyday political life into art, striving to install a model for social transformation that possibly could create a new way to look at utopia.
In her earlier works, the body represented an ideological confrontation or political alienation. She used silence as a method of protest to call attention to issues in the context of multicultural society, giving voice to those silenced or to raise visibility to those made invisible by dominant ideologies. In her newer works, she views the body as a bridge connecting east and west, past and present, creating a new version of hybridity and striving to transcend and mend.
She also uses body gestures as a form of investigation and representation in her interest in ethnographic research to explore cultural phenomena in order to understand social life of humans. Through focusing on the interaction between politics, aesthetics, and memory, she examines relationship between citizens and the place they have lived, between what they have lost and what they have gained in the rapidly changing city.
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source: facebook

Le travail de Chun Hua Catherine Dong aborde les manières d’approcher la déterritorialisation et la désessentialisation dans notre monde où les cultures sont prises pour acquises de même que la façon de traiter et de transformer les paysages sociaux et politiques à travers les actes du corps. L’artiste examine les multiples facettes des combats d’une femme liée à une identité, un genre et une sexualité pour révéler la lutte et le conflit enracinés dans les individus et les groupes ethniques.

Les oeuvres de Chun Hua Catherine Dong manifestent une réalité construite où les frontières entre privé et public, sujet et objet, art et vie, sont brouillées. Elles sont l’expression profondément ressentie d’une réalité subjective explorée par les moyens du langage, du symbolisme et du geste. Le travail proposé transcende l’expérience personnelle et la réalité. Memento mori rappelant le passage inexorable du temps, il incarne le désir mélancolique d’un irrécupérable passé.

Chun Hua Catherine Dong est une artiste de la performance d’origine chinoise et résidant au Canada. Elle a été invitée à performer sur la scène internationale, notamment au 4th International Festival and Conference for Live Art and Performance Studies en Finlande et au International Multimedia Art Festival à Burma. Son travail de performance apparaît dans le palmarès des neuf meilleurs projets d’art politique de 2010 du Art and Threat Magazine, parmi des artistes reconnus internationalement tels Rebecca Belmore et Wafaa Bilal. Sa recherche actuelle Performance Ethnography: a Method of Inquiry in Research of Visualization, est soutenue par le Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada, le Département des arts de l’Université Concordia ainsi que le Conseil des arts de la Colombie-Britannique.