Chun Yin Rainbow Chan (陳雋然) is a Hong Kong-Australian interdisciplinary artist working across music, painting, performance and installation. Through tales of love and loss, her work explores themes of cultural representation, (mis)translation and matrilineal histories. She is researching women’s folk songs and bridal rituals of the Weitou people (the first settlers of Hong Kong) to whom she has ancestral ties. Her highly anticipated EP “Stanley” was released on UK label, Eastern Margins (2021). She has performed at renowned places across the world including Sydney Opera House, Vivid Live, MONA FOMA, SXSW Festival, Iceland Airwaves, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, and Tai Kwun. She has exhibited with Firstdraft Gallery, Liquid Architecture, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Gallery Lane Cove, Granville Centre Art Gallery, I-Project Space (Beijing), Penrith Regional Gallery, and Artspace. “Songs from a Walled Village”, her documentary for ABC Radio National, was a finalist in the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union Prizes 2021. In 2022, Chan won FBi Radio’s SMAC “Artist of the Year” and was also recognised in the “40 Under 40: Most Influential Asian Australian Awards” for her leadership in arts and culture.
Bio
As Far Away As Heaven From Earth
哭嫁 or ‘bridal laments’ refer to a marital mourning ritual of the 圍頭 (Waitau/Weitou) people, the first settlers of Hong Kong. To Waitau women, arranged marriages signified a kind of death. Upon marriage, a bride’s ties to home were severed and she would remain an outsider to the groom’s family. She would perform a lament cycle which involved singing and weeping in front of loved ones for three days. Chan has Waitau ancestry through her mother who never learnt the laments as the ritual faded in the 1960s. With the help of her mother as translator, Chan has relearned these songs from elderly Waitau women in Hong Kong’s New Territories since 2017. In As Far Away As Heaven From Earth, Chan reimagines a vegetable-inspired lament through a diasporic lens. The new installation comprises silk paintings and multi-channel sound. Chan transcribes the songs onto silk through Chinese brushwork, punctuated by teardrop-like pearls. Sonically, Chan reworks the laments into electronic compositions using vocal manipulation, field-recordings and conversation fragments with her elders. Exploring themes of loss, rebirth and matrilineal knowledge, Chan illuminates the diasporic psyche of connection/disconnection, and keeps the dying oral tradition of bridal laments significant to a contemporary world.
