Love[f]Art #10 | Rainbow Chan

Hosted by Amanda Love, the LoveArt podcast brings listeners into direct conversation with contemporary artists, extending the work of the independent art advisory, LoveArt, based in Sydney, New York and Athens.

The series draws from Love[f]Art, LoveArt’s ongoing program of intimate, in-conversation recordings with artists, originally conceived in 2020. Filmed in the most unlikely of settings—the guest powder room at the Love residence—the project strips things back to a one-to-one exchange, focusing on ideas, process and the conditions that shape contemporary practice.

This episode features Rainbow Chan, an interdisciplinary artist working across music, performance, painting and installation. Her practice explores (mis)translation, diasporic experiences, globalisation’s effect on modern Chinese society, and deeply personal tales of love and loss. The installation for Love[f]Art comprises silk painting, back-strap loom weaving and sound. Chan transcribes the lyrics onto silk through brushwork, calligraphy and embroidery.

Recorded in December 2022, at the time of the work’s installation, the conversation offers a direct insight into the thinking behind the piece, and the broader concerns that underpin her practice.

Further information on Rainbow Chan can be found here.

Additional information, including the video version of this podcast, is available here.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello and welcome to the tenth iteration of Love Art's nano project, Law for Art, where we multitask this um purpose-built isolation chamber, our mini-guest bathroom, now well and truly returned to its proper but still one-on-one use, as a kind of um boîte belize, in which we aim to counter the increasing size and complexity of much institutional contemporary practice with expirations but of a different scale. Here on Gadigaland, so I do pay respects to the Ayora Nation and all their elders, we investigate the tiny and the one-to-one to showcase and exhibit the strength of current artistic expression, which is, by necessity, innovative and ingenious. I'm Amanda Love, and it's my great pleasure to introduce our latest site-specific installation, I cleft uncovered, by the young, by the illustrious Chan Yin Rainbow Chan, Sydney-based, but of Hong Kong Chinese descent. Rainbow is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans musical production, performance, painting and installation, and primarily focuses on, I suppose you must say, the mistranslation, the diasporic, and experiences of a deeply personal uh nature concerning tales of love and loss. Her artistic career started in pop music, and it's actually through this experience that she turned to visual practice. And this alone, Rainbow was a finalist in the New South Wales Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship, which I have to note was presented by Artspace. Big shout-out to Artspace, along with Create New South Wales and the National Arts School. She was also recognised in the 40 under 40, most influential Asian Australians Award for her contributions to arts and culture. And she also won Artist of the Year in the FBI SMAC Awards. Songs from A World Village, her documentary for ABC Radio National, was a finalist in the 2021 Asia Pacific Broadcasting Union Awards. And her pop music record, Stanley, was released on UK label Eastern Margins. In 2020, she was a selected member of the eight prestigious art space studio artists, and she has exhibited in a number of important institutions for emerging artists, including Sydney's First Draft, Liquid Architecture in Melbourne, and Sydney's Fore Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, as well as i Project Space in Beijing. And in her spare time, Chan teaches contemporary music at Sydney's Conservatorium and sits on the board of Foray Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Rainbow, hello. Hello. And welcome. Where are you now?

SPEAKER_00 3:09

I am dialing in from uh Melbourne. So I'm on the Rudendry lands of the Kulin Nation.

SPEAKER_01 3:16

And what are you doing down in Melbourne?

SPEAKER_00 3:19

I'm playing a show tonight at the Toburg Night Markets.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

Oh, excellent. Um, I wish we could be there to see it. Um, we'll get a taste on Sunday, hopefully. Uh well, isn't we'll we'll come back to talk about a plethora uncovered in dead. But first, um, you're clearly uh extremely creatively diverse um in that you you know you work across multiple mediums, including uh having an established musical practice, um which we just spoke of, and what you're you're you're doing now. Um should we start then there with your with your music career? I I mean how does it inform your visual arts practice?

SPEAKER_00 3:59

Um yeah, so I've been doing music for about 10 years, and it really was a catalyst for me to move into art. Um, I think when I first started making music, I wasn't quite prepared for the way that one's body becomes very visible in a public domain and in the format of pop music and when you're on the stage all the time. So I guess my naive self thought, you know, I could just write some breakup songs and perform and sing about my broken heart, but I didn't realize that in that kind of climate 10 years ago as well in the music industry where representation was really quite a big issue, really. It's very male-dominated, um, not many people of colour on lineups. Uh, I realized I couldn't exist as a as just someone with no identity. I had to always talk about my um being a woman or being a Chinese Australian and talk about it, um, but not kind of on my terms. It was always through other people's gaze. And the way that I was able to sort of reclaim a bit of agency over these conversations was through visual arts. I found that being a more expansive discourse to discuss some of these things I was going through and trying to interrogate, I guess, notions of authenticity and representation. Um, and in the format of a three-minute pop song, it's very hard to have a meaningful, substantial conversation about that. But art was a great way for me to be able to bring music into a more interdisciplinary forum and context to discuss some of these ideas.

SPEAKER_01 5:50

So, so in hindsight, um, as this is played into your contemporary practice, I mean, would it be fair to say that your interest is fo is is is specifically focused on those intimate connections that you tease out between representation technology and myths in what's now a globalized world? And and here, I suppose I'm particularly thinking about um Shanzai ad campaign, the work that you first showed uh at first draft in 2016. I mean, am I right to see here an uh inverted links to artists like Ai Wei Wei, in particular words like his hand jar branded with Coca-Cola logo, for instance, but but where his work speaks to China's engagement with the West, yours is turned to the much more cosmopolitan concept of shenzai, which I must say I I had never heard that word before, and I've found it fascinating um looking into it. So I'd love it if you could walk us through this work and um and this mutable and and quite controversial specific um concept, you know, uh which you call I did by the Shanza.

SPEAKER_00 7:06

Yeah. Um so this was the first work where um I was able to um exhibit in more of a gallery context and work with installation. So this work had objects as well as a video and music, um, where I created essentially a fake ad campaign for various um found images and objects of counterfeit goods that had been circulating over the internet. Um, and then there was a live music component to it as well, where somebody actually dressed up as me and mimed an entire performance as me. Right. Um, so what I found really interesting about the concept of shanzai, and I admit that when I made this work, it was also the first time I had heard of this term. It was a buzzword that sort of exploded in China in 2008. So the most searched word on their version of Google. Um, and it was, yeah, just this kind of realization of a phenomena which um Chinese brands were blatantly counterfeiting Western brands. So as you can see at the top here in this slide, you have a this is not butter, unbelievable, which is obviously a copy of um um what is what's the brand again? I can't believe it's not butter. Uh so that's an object that I found searching through the internet, and then the rest of the images are created by um through stock images. And um, same with this Apple shampoo, that is that was also on their version of sort of like eBay, and it was available to purchase for a while, and that description, original, revolutionary, surprising elegant, was actually part of the description of the product. But all these things are really interesting to me because they disappear very quickly off the internet as well. As soon as people realize it's fake, and then the authorities kind of catch on after a while.

SPEAKER_01 8:59

Well, these um in the in the late, um, in the late 80s, I worked in Hong in Hong Kong for a major British law firm um as an intellectual property lawyer. And my clients were people like were these luxury bland crimes. Um, and my job was to um uh prosecute um people who were making all these fake products. And I used to, you know, be I have to um execute these very what were very rare orders in the West, which were actually a search and seizure order where you'd have to go out new territories with um, you know, security, and you'd actually go in and take the the the company by surprise and confiscate all the goods before they could be destroyed. And then you would prosecute used that evidence to prosecute the um the case. So it's sort of fascinating to hear you talk about this, you know, that was what was 10 years later than than that time.

SPEAKER_00 9:58

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm from Hong Kong, so growing up as a kid, counterfeit goods was just such a normal part of everyday life. You'd have street vendors selling fake watches, fake all Evil Time bags just on the side of the road. And it would be very normal for everyone to wear fake things. And if you wore actual branded things, people would just assume it's fake anyway. So um I think that was something that I discovered um when I moved to Australia. You know, I think I had some t-shirt on that said Nicky Nouse instead of Mickey Nouse, and all my friends laughed at me in primary school, and I realized I'm like, oh, there's this um sort of different notion of property ownership and um yeah, intellectual property that was quite different, I think, in the West. But what I think is quite interesting about the contemporary context now is that it is a very globalized and capitalist um world that we live in. And I think those binaries that um people often attribute, you know, Eastern people or Chinese people are more prone to counterfeiting for some, you know, philosophical reason or something in their culture that's about rote memorization and repetition and copying, you know. Um and whereas Western people is very much about um individualism and property ownership. But I'm interested in these, in these projects I've done in looking at how it's no longer, those binaries no longer apply because we all play, you know, the game of global capitalism. And it's actually a lot more complex than just saying East versus West.

SPEAKER_01 11:35

And do you think um the internet has um um and social media has, when you said that, you know, if you wore anything in Hong Kong as a child, they'd want to assume it was fake anyway. Do you think there's uh now um a primal assumption of lack of authenticity about much that you find, including people and personas that um proliferate the internet and um social media?

SPEAKER_00 12:01

Yeah, I mean, it's very unlikely that anyone's gonna post a picture of themselves on the internet without a little bit of you know photo editing, whether it's tup-chups or um even just adjusting the light. But it also, you know, this kind of collapse of the virtual and the in real life, I think, particularly after, you know, COVID and us having these couple of years being so online anyway, that blurring between um fake, real, digital, physical, it's so fluid. And I think that that's where a lot of um interest actually can be generated, these sort of hybrid identities or augmentation of oneself through um digital um, you know, things, even as things as pedestrians, like Instagram filters and people um, you know, preferring to look like this particular version of themselves instead. And then you have other things that are even more kind of um grand, um like AI, like full-on AI idols, like people who who are artists and who are uh AIs um and will write hit songs and become become a full-blown music, music um persona.

SPEAKER_01 13:17

Well, which I think is really possible now, paint your portrait, I mean create a portrait for you, but and usually I just read about that yesterday. It's causing a bit of trouble with intellectual property rights.

SPEAKER_00 13:28

Yeah, yeah. And I and I think like what's an interesting version of that too is the there's that um town in China where they do all the oil painting replicas. I think it's called Dafang. And um they have factories and factories of people who are very, very talented at the painting, and they just spend their life copying the masterpieces and selling those. And so I think um so that's kind of like a manual version of the of the copy, um, where there's physical labor, really intense sort of training that um is invested in that, in that um, in that platform.

SPEAKER_01 14:05

Well, all that gets very back to um lack of authentic where does lack of authenticity lie? Because I mean, and that's the heart of fine art practice, isn't it? I mean, that's the the theory of the image or the aura of the object. I mean, that that can be those objects are first class paintings. Um, you know, there's everything in them except for the aura of the original. Um, and that's what where they're they're inherently rendered um false or fake. And and this gets, I mean, obviously, you know, this this has strong parallels to many strat postmodern strategies that were widely employed or have been widely employed since the late 60s. I mean, it's the artist Sturdevant it was is a classic example of of wrapping using all of those strategies and putting them into an artistic practice, a fine art practice. Um would you say that um uh this shanzai is a parallel strategy, or would you or do you find its roots are deeper than that? Or do more contempt, you know, is it an updated version of sort of riad?

SPEAKER_00 15:13

Yeah, I think also it's very culturally specific as well. So I think really stems out of this very strange context that um of contemporary China, where you know it's come from, this very state um and communist um controlled market economy um into since the late 80s, into kind of like capitalism on steroids, where it's just you know become such a um, it's the world's factory, it um, although now it's you know in a bit of decline, but like in this period when Shanzai was really happening, it um yeah, it was hard, it's kind of like dealing with this very strange acceleration of capitalism and also to do with this, um, I guess the version of like the American dream, but the Chinese dream, where a lot of the population who had lived in um under a lot of repression for many years all of a sudden had this newfound freedom and also encouragement by the state to pursue um uh more capitalist ventures and a big push to kind of create all these things. Um, and inevitably, when when there's kind of rogue capitalism, I kind of call I call it the rogue flows of capital, um, these sort of gray markets pop up. Um and the question also is like when when there are products that are actually created by Chinese factories that are by the real brands, um, and then there's sort of these gray markets that pop up, maybe there's an oversupply, and then they sell that off, but they don't have the authentication or the label, that's no longer the real object, even though it's made by the same factory. So um, yeah, I think this whole idea of like aura is really interesting because the reality might be, you know, you have these same parallel things, but this idea of aura, ownership, creativity is um something that's intangible, but because it's intangible, it's also very prone to um appropriation and use up being usurped.

SPEAKER_01 17:20

Yeah. Um fascinating, Although we must move on to the like the following year, because you were included in a group show at Sydney's 4-A Center for Contemporary Asian Art. And this was a work which was um poetically titled To Inclose One's Mouth, which I feel had a decidedly more personal tone, would you would you say?

SPEAKER_00 17:41

Yes, yes, definitely. Uh yeah, this was um a really wonderful show. Um, and it was the first time that I was able to realize quite a big work in in the large scales. Um so this one involved 40 meters of silk, and um, there was a performance element where I'd go into the gallery over the course of one month and paint these calligraphy poems on over least 40 meters of silk. And the poem title to enclose one's mouth um comes from the character in Chinese for the word return, which looks like you can see it in front of my hand there, is the two little squares that are sort of enclosed in one inside of each other, so it looks like the frame. So the poem was thinking about um a sense of home and returning, but what does that look like when you don't have anywhere to return or what you imagine to be your original home no longer looks like what you imagine, sort of in your nostalgic and romanticized memory. And it deals with, I guess, um, themes that a lot of people of the diaspora deal with on a daily basis. So I being from Hong Kong and moving to Australia when I was quite young at six years old. I never quite fit in with like so-called Australian culture. But also when I went back to visit my family in Hong Kong, they would always say, You're so westernized, or you, you know, you can't speak Chinese very well, or your writing looks um you don't know how to write. And so in this work, I really wanted to amplify some of those tensions. So the poem itself was written in English because that's the only um I'm my Chinese is not good enough to write original um content. But I use Google Translate as a way to um render this work or these words into a sort of imperfect translation. And another thing is I use Google Translate quite often to actually communicate with my parents, which is a real source of shame for me. Even though it's quite funny, it is quite funny, and there's often mistranslations that really can't be. Do they speak about it? Do they know? Do they yeah? I'll be like, I'll be like, oh, you're talking about the Nikki mouse. Yeah, it's it's very, I guess it's playful, but then there are these moments where I really want to articulate something, and especially as I get older and what I'm talking about is more complex. I want to be able to say, you know, some deep things to them, but I have to use this to um, you know, be mediated by Google Translate app, which is yeah, it's a it's a it's a strange thing, and it doesn't always get it right. So where we have to kind of navigate that a little bit. But yeah, I guess that you know, to to communicate with your own parents with a device is strange.

SPEAKER_01 20:37

I'm sure a lot of people wish they could communicate with their parents through an app that typical translation in daily life, especially, you know. Um but um just out of interest, do you do you notice any glaring biases or inherent sort of um ways you're being pushed or channeled into a certain kind of language structure or certain gaps in goo in the language structure that was provided?

SPEAKER_00 21:01

Absolutely. So in the app, there is only traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese. And what they mean when they say Chinese is actually Mandarin. So I speak Cantonese, but there is no Google Cantonese setting. So what I'm really translating into is into Mandarin. So even from there, there's another step of them having to translate the Mandarin back into Cantonese and sort of uh, yeah, there's just this kind of, you know, the in the intimate um feelings you want to have when you're communicating to friends or close ones suddenly has like an extra couple of barriers to get to a particular concept or a particular word.

SPEAKER_01 21:46

I always had it in in my mind that Mandarin doesn't have nearly as many hardcore swear words as Cantonese does.

SPEAKER_00 21:55

Yeah, Cantonese swear words are so colourful. Um And very, very vivid. Um yeah. But what I've realized is that there's like now there's all these other um apps and like YouTube tutorials or um other sort of insta Instagram platforms that are very much about trying to protect Cantonese or advocate for Cantonese. So now like um yeah, I use those as well. So um very, very glad for these. I guess like a realization of something like, say, Google, which is so monolithic, um, but it really flattens um the nuances. You know, if you're thinking about Chinese, what does that even mean? There's like 56 recognized ethnic minority groups in in China, and then even amongst that, there are lots of diverse sort of um family groups within that and dialects within that. So I always think it's quite, yeah, it's quite funny that you only have one tab for such a diverse um uh group of people. Um, but precisely that's what this work sort of interrogates as well. Again, it's playing with this idea of supposed Chinese-ness and authenticity. If you don't know how to read Chinese, you'd see this and think, oh yes, the ancient art of calligraphy. Yet when you actually know what's going on, what I'm writing as well is just um, it's sort of a bit like gibberish because I'm actually repeating each word 10 times before I move into the next word. And that was a way to um allude back to the horrible experience of going to Saturday Chinese school as a kid where you're made to write lines over and over again to rote memorization, learn Chinese. So, yeah, there's all these things that are interjections or interventions in this work.

SPEAKER_01 23:46

I mean, so it seems to me that in this exhibition you you you really are conflating the personal with the public by considering authenticity in terms of how it operates in society, but also as one aims to be their authentic true self or to be and do what is uh authentic to their own experience. Uh, was this the first time that you've worked with this kind of medium?

SPEAKER_00 24:10

Yeah, it was. Um, so I'd never worked with silk before. And um with calligraphy, I as a kid, uh, another thing that my parents tried to get me to do to stay connected to my culture was I did painting Chinese brush painting lessons as a kid. So I had a little bit of training in calligraphy, um, but my specialty was in chickens. I was a painter of chickens. Um, so yeah, definitely there was this um trying to use this very specific and anecdotal experience of being a third culture kid, um, but doing it in a way that's a little bit warped. And um, and and what was interesting is because 4A is located in Chinatown in Haymarket, and this work was on the ground floor, a lot of um elderly or older Chinese people saw what I was doing and came in and was like, Do you know what you're writing is rubbish? Do you know what you're writing is mistake? Why are you doing this? And that then me having to um I guess communicate the idea of the work. So I think what was really fascinating about this process of this work is realizing that my work is not just cross-cultural, but it's intergenerational as well. And that the experiences of um, you know, people in my parents' generation, of my generation, like they're so different. Once you migrate and you it's just yeah, you kind of um have to be able to realize that it's very nuanced and it's not one size fits all.

SPEAKER_01 25:48

And that's not just in Chinese culture either. I mean, I mean that that I think that intergenerational um shift has sort of suddenly been exacerbated in the in the current last say 10 years. I think that shift has got larger than it maybe was, you know, previously, sort of um after, you know, for generations after post after World War II. I think it was more homogenous. Um maybe um but you know it seems to me that um after this work that the getting the subject matter that you you explored in the Shan Zayak campaign work, obviously, I mean, and we've already touched on how complex it is, but it was obviously very inspirational and perhaps even haunting for you because you returned to it as a basis for your MA NFA thesis in 2019, didn't you? Because this culminated in a work called Gloss, um, which I I know has taken on various forms, but which was exhibited at the Cement Fondue in 2019 as an installation and performance, I believe. I wondered if you could talk about this with us.

SPEAKER_00 26:57

Yeah, so you're right. And I was very much haunted by these counterfeit goods that was seemed to be just popping up all around me after I had kind of seen, you know, seen it um before my eyes. And and I ended up, I think what was really um fascinating for me was I finally got to actually go to mainland China for the first time in between 2016 and 2019 on a few artist residencies. Um, and there were just so many things in my imagination growing up about China that was um, yeah, so many myths, you know, that were sort of exploded when I actually got there or um were a bit different to what I'd imagined. But one thing that really captured my interest and imagination were yeah the prevalence of these counterfeit goods, but also how they're sort of on the fringes um now and in sort of more lower socioeconomic um places or rural places, whereas the city centers like Beijing and Shanghai, you wouldn't see any of these things. And people are so rich that they, you know, they they buy the real things. So um I became very interested not only in the um conversations about sort of eastern-western notions of ownership and authenticity, but about class as well and how the counterfeit object is very intersectional and it looks at it's a it's a really contested site of power in so many ways. So this ad campaign was a full-blown pop-up store where I created a persona here. Her name is Chamel, and um, based on the Chamel number five perfume, which I found in the discount store, and the shoes there as well that I'm wearing, I found in a supermarket in Guijo. And I just was so amazed at the way that it conflated all these designer um, you know, logos and into this very hybrid platform shoe, and it became the basis for um a lot of um the goods that I then generated. So, for example, the dress was came from the shoe. Um, and then um uh at the time my hair was very short, that's not what I looked like. Um and I kind of amplified a lot of the feminine stereotypes that were projected onto me when I first made music. Um, and so it was another way of looking into the politics of representation um across culture, across gender, and doing it in a sort of cheeky and humorous way, using counterfeits as a way to explore the notion of authenticity and using hybrid, using the theme of hybridity as a way to generate new ideas as well. So, yeah, this was it was very fun. The the live performance um was really enjoyable where I actually went around the room and sprayed people with the perfume. Um, people were very interested in smelling it. Um, but then also if you read into the discourse around fake perfumes, there's all this um, I guess these myths about oh, fake perfumes contain traces of antifreeze and urine and all this stuff. So, but there's this, I guess, uh a tension between fascination. Hey? What was that? Do they kept coming away? I have no idea. It does, yeah, it's a big question mark. So it depends if you want to believe it, if you don't want to believe it, but I think it's more about that that that tension and that sort of fascination and fear. I think that's what's the most attractive thing.

SPEAKER_01 30:36

I was also really interested in that in that concept of um Shanzhai, the symbol of resistance through um uh through like its grassroots, you know, this um association with grassroots innovation and irreverence for copyright. Um I just wondered if that's played in, or you see that playing into contemporary politics uh in China.

SPEAKER_00 31:02

Yeah, I think so. I think there is this um understanding of how these sites of resistance are very ephemeral and very much um very innovative and very resourceful because it knows that inevitably there's gonna be some sort of pushback or crackdown or some sort of authority is gonna stamp it out. And so um Shanzai really became a symbol of um, I guess I mean, I don't want to be too like a generalized here, but for a while, for this small moment in China, it was a symbol of resistance, of um kind of uh yeah, anti-author authoritarianism. Uh and and yes, I think um it also, I guess, in some ways dances around censorship and um particularly on the internet um where you know it's heavily censored, um, things like counterfeits, things like um copies are a way to refer to something that you know might be a issue, a social issue, but do it in a way that the through wordplay or through visual puns be able to get away um the uh the the the challenges of citizenship.

SPEAKER_01 32:26

And um uh again, you know, getting back to the personal, I mean, how did you how did you trace the connections between what we've been talking about globalism, consumerism, and authist and um authenticity, etc., in China with your own personal history? Because as we'll see in the works, you can see for the New South Wales Visual Um Arts Emerging Fellowship this year, and of course the related works for our nano project space, uh, you've now taken on a decidedly personal tone with your practice, haven't you?

SPEAKER_00 32:58

Yes, I have. So after doing so much work about globalization and um thinking through luxury brands and um, yeah, I guess signifiers um of a very contemporary and globalized culture. I started to think about well, what's gonna what's at stake here once you know the world becomes really flattened in terms of our culture and even just like the internet um uh and language and what what languages are gonna be able to adapt to a digital world and what's not. And so that was the point in time in my practice where I realized um that my own family history actually has very, very important um things to offer uh with in these um conversations about um you know what what's what's gonna survive globalism. Um so this was uh uh a moment in time where I turned to my mum, who is of the Wei Tao um clan, uh, and they are the first settlers of Hong Kong who settled in the new territories of Hong Kong in the Song dynasty around 900 AD. So her family can be traced back to the very first family, the Tang clan. Um and Wei Tao people had their own dialect, their own culture, um, rituals. Uh basically, yeah, it was, you know, had their kind of own society. And then when the British came, um, I guess that changed a lot. And now, especially after the 60s, after the kind of mass migration of mainland Chinese people into Hong Kong as well as urbanization, uh, Wei Tao culture is basically has disappeared. Um Wei Tao people were farmers, they live a very they lived a very agrarian society, and there's no more farmland basically. Everything's either turned into little villas or shopping centres or roads and stuff. So um buildings. I yes, exactly. So I realized that you know this is disappearing. And in terms of language, my mum can speak the dialect, but when she went to primary school, they were um discouraged, uh even sort of ostracized if they spoke the dialect because it was seen as lower class and you know what the village people spoke. So um, like many people in her generation, they assimilated and learnt Cantonese, and she didn't pass it on to us. So when I asked her a couple of years back, I said, Mom, can you teach me the Wei Tao dialect? She was surprised, but also really happy that there was this interest in me. And she said, Oh, you know what? I actually think that you might be interested in learning the music of Wei Tao people, because not only then can you learn the words and the language, but you can learn about the lifestyle because the songs are very holistic in in terms of talking about land and harvesting and and rituals. But my mum didn't learn the songs because she her generation started to go to school. And so, in the last couple of years, I've been reconnecting with these elderly Wei Tao women in Hong Kong at a community center called Mong Yu Ta Tao. And there are these women about uh are in their 80s, 90s, there they are, so cute. And um, they're the last group of women who sang these songs as a form of education, as their form of passing on knowledge to each other. The oral history oral history, that's right. And especially there was one particular ritual, which um the work for the fellowship as well as for love, um love for uh love for art um is uh is based on these bridal laments, which are um songs that women would sing in preparation for their wedding day. Now, why would they lament during their wedding? Because weddings back then were arranged, and so um for a young girl, for a young woman, becoming a bride actually signified a sort of death for them. They they saw it as a spiritual death, and also once they were married off, they weren't really allowed to return to their home anymore. So, this ritual of the bridal amendment, which involved singing for three days and also crying for three days in front of family and friends, was a way to say goodbye to their loved ones and to be able to, I guess, um express their pain and suffering in this very performative and ephemeral space. And then once they did the ritual, they had to just be obedient wives, be obedient daughter-in-laws, and just lived a very, very repressed and horrible, hard life. I know. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:01

So this brings us to um, you know, it does bring us spirit to a clear dumb cupboard. And I'm because that's which includes I was trying to it's here on this on this side, but it's under where I've got the computer, and I can't I can't um pick the the piece of paper up which has got uh stuff vegetable lament. Um which um you might read out, you might you might read for us, but but um let's um you know take us through which order do we'd like to look at the works here that we've got the lament, we've got the work we can see behind me, which is um um one of your um silk ladies. Is it silk ladies?

SPEAKER_00 38:44

Yeah, it's silk, yeah, yeah. So it's using silk dye.

SPEAKER_01 38:49

Right, and then we have uh the work on the on the right, which um you can't see in this video, um but which is uh sort of a kind of app-like um some description.

SPEAKER_00 39:04

Yes, I guess we yeah, we could start with the painting. Um so this yeah, vegetable lament is another um example of a bridal lament, um, which uses vegetables and and various fruits as metaphors for the bride's pain. So it starts off talking about um the spinach, and then um and when I first came across all these different vegetables, I had no idea why they were seeing about these particular vegetables. And it was only when I spoke to my mum that she was able to translate for me the symbolism behind it all, because it's all very, very nuanced, and you have to know the particular characteristics of those vegetables to understand why they've used it. So the the first line about the spinach is um about it being sort of at night time, there's no shadow of the spinach and it cries until the morning. So I'm like, what the heck does that mean? And my mum explained that it's because you have to you have to cut the spinach when it's most tender at this particular time when the sun's about to go down. So then by the nighttime, the the the spinach has been cut so there's no shadow. Um but because it's been cut where the wound is or where the where the stem has been cut, it's weeping out this sort of sap-like substance that is gonna keep flowing until it hills over in the morning. So it's so that's when it starts crying. So, and that is a metaphor for the bride weeping, you know, crying a lot. And so each little vegetable has some sort of deep meaning like that expressed in the lyrics, and the lyrics of each line are only seven syllables long each. That's a very specific Weitau lament structure. So within those seven characters, you're expressing this like a plethora of like um, yeah, just knowledge and and and meaning. And what's fascinating is these women, you know, it is oral tradition, so these women can hold hundreds of these songs in their heads, but they don't even know how to write their own name.

SPEAKER_01 41:16

Psalms are purely relating to um um emotional states that don't have any kind of they're not there's no recipe, there's no sort of you know, like cultivation notion of cultivating or plant history or plant use or anything in them. Is there? It's should it particularly just relating to mood and these romantics sort of notions of the soul?

SPEAKER_00 41:42

Uh actually, both, both. So they're quite clever in that there's like there's elements where it is very uh expressing their their pain, but then hidden within that, there's these um instructional things about okay, so maybe it's something like I can't think of one specific one off the top of my head, but it could be about, you know, there's a particular month where you need to plant this vegetable or this fruit. And so it could be something like, oh, you know, the the corn is sad at May or something, and then say, Oh, because you have to plant corn in May. That's not actually an example, just making one up, but there are other signs.

SPEAKER_01 42:24

Peanuts cracked open, cleft uncovered, strands of silk bind rows of corn, long being captive, weathered and worn, loofah is tied in reminds me of my mother, is one verse.

SPEAKER_00 42:37

So, yes, so with that one, um say the the like those ones are all characteristics of the each of those vegetables, like the loofah one. It's because um the shape of it is very you have kind of um these very um like segments, these sh these very neat kind of roads. And so, yeah, this idea of being orderly of being tidy, like following in your mother's footsteps when you become a bride. So that's embedded into that vegetable. Um, but other um laments and other um not necessarily limits, but other songs are definitely very instructional that tell you how to create a certain recipe for a cake using what type of flour and how to grind up that particular flower in what way using what tool. Um, when it's a festivity like a lunar new year festival, what do you have to do in the morning? What do you do the night before? And like all these very specific ritual acts are sung in these songs. Um, and so for me to relearn them now, it's not only learning these very old ancient melodies, but it's also learning their lives that they're what how people lived.

SPEAKER_01 43:55

And the piece on on my right, which is the the hat.

SPEAKER_00 44:01

Yes. He's one of us, yes. So this hat is a traditional farming hat worn by Weitawa women and Hakka women as well, as Koda Lergmole, which means a cool hat. So essentially that's it's lying flat right now, but where the inner circle is is where um you would put your head through. Um and then the black fabric, there's actually um another piece that's sort of squished under the hat there, but it goes all around, not unlike a um a Kubra is almost called the Aussie hat. Um so the the black fabrics to um provide shade and keep insects away. Um and uh this hat was gifted to me by the community of elderly women from before that I mentioned from the Long Yot Tal um Community Centre, because um when I first met them, I was personally really nervous about the meeting. I, you know, was worried about um not being able to communicate with them, not being able to speak their dialect. And you know, I was I felt like a bit of an outsider, you know, coming from Australia to meet them. And I was just so nervous and I was scared of like making a mistake or, you know, being um yeah, just like not very knowledgeable. But as soon as I stepped through the door, they were so excited to see me and they just put this hat on my head straight away and said, You're one of us. And almost I had to hold back tears because it was so warm and welcoming. And um, yeah, there I am in the hat, very, very stoked there. Um, so yeah, I guess um my sort of I really wanted to actually um just keep that this particular work very simple and highlight the the coded meaning behind the hat and how it's a you know it is a woman's hat, it signifies a very particular type of labor and and class and history. But with the embroidery that I've um sewn into the bottom, one of us, um, I've sort of I've written it well from right to left because that's how we read Chinese writing. But I just want, you know, an audience to to come across this and read it backwards and take their time to kind of decipher the meaning again and realize that oh, it's syntactically backwards. But the braid on that one too was created by one of the grannies and gifted to me, and she spent three weeks hand weaving that with a backstrap loom. So again, just really wanted to make this work very intergenerational and highlight the skills of the women.

SPEAKER_01 46:42

Rainbow, thank you so much. Um, it's been such a joy to speak with you, and I can't wait to see your performance on Sunday, which we will try and record parts of and put up on them on the website, perhaps. And thanks also to my fabulous colleague Isabella Chow, who's produced and facilitated this and the whole of our Love for Arts series. So goodbye, Radio, goodbye, everybody, and um have happy holidays. See you next week. Thanks so much, Amanda. See you.