CHUN HUA CATHERINE DONG
Mulan, 2022
video made with Virtual Reality
Chun Hua Catherine Dong is a Chinese Canadian multimedia artist who explores global feminism through performance, photography, video, VR, AR, and 3D printing. Their VR video Mulan was originally presented at Times Square, New York City, in 2024 on 95 large digital billboard screens from 41st to 49th street as part of Midnight Moment Project.
For this project, Dong combines Chinese folktales, marine biology, and the virtual world to explore gender in relation to the plasticity and plurality of the body. Mulan is a legendary Chinese folk heroine, who, according to lore, disguises her gender identity so that she can take her elderly father’s place in the army. Later, Mulan is honoured by the emperor, but declines his offer of a high office position, and returns to her hometown where she reveals her gender.
This folktale has long been performed at the Beijing Opera, an institution that has an established history of male actors playing female roles. Using virtual technology to create a fantasy world, Dong re-interprets Mulan from a contemporary feminist perspective and raises questions about binary social constructs. Dong’s rendition references well-known performance artist Marina Abramovic’s Rest Energy (1980), where Abramovic holds a bow and her performance partner Ulay holds the bow’s string with an arrow pointing at Abramovic’s chest. Dong’s Mulan presents a similar tension between the two suspended characters.
The work is also inspired by colourful hermaphroditic organisms that live deep in the ocean, mostly around Southeast Asia, called nudibranch. Dong’s fantastical brightly colourful environment is filled with the extraordinary colours, striking forms, unique defenses, and ambiguous gender identities of the nudibranch. Using 3D VR tools, Dong presents an imaginary underwater fantasy world where Mulan and nudibranch co-exist and become one. The non-binary “double” protagonists wearing Beijing Opera costumes are staged on a large rainbow nudibranch holding a staff between them. Through this symbiotic relationship, Mulan becomes not only a hybrid being but also part of a marine ecosystem. Dong imparts an alternative world, where the boundaries of self/other, culture/nature, and human/animal are fluid, and suggests that there could be a new social system that supports different ways of living and contains diverse beings to sustain and survive.
Artist Biography
Dong uses the body—often their own body— as a primary material in their work to activate social commentary on gender, identity, and immigration. Magnifying personal predicaments so they become universally visible, Dong presents the body as an embodiment of dynamic human relations. Dong is interested in working within the gap between the body as image and the body as experienced reality.
Dong received an MFA in Intermedia from Concordia University and a BFA at Visual Art from Emily Carr University Art + Design in Canada. Dong has exhibited their works at The International Digital Art Biennial Montreal (BIAN), The International Biennial of Digital Arts of the Île-de-France (Némo), MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image, Kaunas Biennial, The Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne in France, Quebec City Biennial, Foundation PHI for Contemporary Art, Canadian Cultural Centre Paris, Museo de la Cancillería in Mexico City, The Rooms Museum, Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, DongGong Museum of Photograph in South Korea, He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen, Hubei Museum of Fine Art in Wuhan, The Aine Art Museum in Tornio, Bury Art Museum in Manchester, Art Museum at University of Toronto, Varley Art Gallery of Markham, Art Gallery of Hamilton, and more.
Mulan, 2022
video still, video made with Virtual Reality
photo courtesy of the artist