Chun Hua Catherine Dong’s work discusses ways to deal with “deterritorialization” and “disessentialization” in our world where cultures are taken for granted and gestures transform social and political landscapes. The artist examines the multifaceted struggles of a woman associated with identity, gender, and sexuality in order to reveal the struggle and conflict rooted in ethnic individuals and groups.

This exhibition explores failure in romantic relationships through reconfiguring personal memories in order to mend and translate emotions. The body of work presented includes photographs and a durational performance. The series of photographs is divided into diptychs acting as mirrors in which the absence of the other is reflected as a form of presence. The performance, which will continue throughout the exhibition period, invokes Chinese tradition to deconstruct the symbol of marriage.

Chun Hua Catherine Dong’s works are evidence of a constructed reality that blurs boundaries between private and public, subject and object, art and life. They are deeply felt expressions of subjective realities explored through language, symbolism and gesture. The proposed work transcends personal experience and reality. It is an embodiment of a melancholic longing for an unrecoverable past and a memento mori as a constant reminder of the inexorable passage of time.

 

Chun Hua Catherine Dong is a Chinese-born performance artist living in Canada. She has been invited to perform internationally, notably at the 9th Kaunas Biennial in Lituuania, Infr’ Action International Performance Art Festival in Italy, the 4th International Festival and Conference for Live Art and Performance Studies in Finland, and The International Multimedia Art Festival in Burma. Her performance is listed amongst the “top nine amazing political art projects of 2010” by Art and Threat Magazine, along with international well-known artists such as Rebecca Belmore and Wafaa Bilal. Her current research, “Performance Ethnography: a Method of Inquiry in Research of Visualization,” is supported by Canada Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Concordia University Faculty of Fine Arts and British Columbia Arts Council.

Exhibitions  

Participating Artists: Chun Hua Catherine Dong (Montréal)
Curator(s):
Credits: Image : Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Absent Husband (détail), 2012. Photo : Hua Jin