Chun Hua Catherine Dong
© Photo Credits: Chun Hua Catherine Dong, 2024.
I Wonder How I Wonder Why by Chun Hua Catherine Dong
Exhibition from November 1st to December 14, 2024
Opening reception on November 1st, from 5 to 8 PM
Lemon Tree Party - Discursive Activity on November 23, 2024 at 4 PM
Dong transforms a scientific laboratory into an imaginative stage where the boundaries of gender, power, and social control are redefined. Through a blend of VR video, animation, light, 3D-printed sculptures, and ready-made objects, Dong combines elements of scientific presentation with childhood memories, creating an immersive, sensory-rich experience both experimental and personal.
Drawing on early encounters with Western culture while growing up in China, Dong uses the song “Lemon Tree”, by the German band Fool’s Garden, as a symbolic, aspirational fantasy of Western life: bright, carefree, and filled with promise. For Dong, this fantasy was shaped through cultural exports like music, media, and fashion, offering an idealized, unattainable version of the West. In this project, Dong bridges the gap between the imagined promises of Western life and the complex realities of growing up in the East, transforming bittersweet childhood memoirs into acts of resistance and empowerment.
Dong uses the laboratory as a metaphorical site where fantasies are deconstructed, reassembled, and transformed. The lab becomes a space of transformation - not simply for scientific experimentation, but for challenging cultural constructs, reimagining identity, and crossing geographic and ideological boundaries. "I Wonder How I Wonder Why" is a space where East and West, science and imagination, reality and fantasy intersect, inviting reflection on how personal and cultural narratives shape our understanding of ourselves and the world, and how these narratives can open new possibilities for self-expression.
© Photo Credits: Chun Hua Catherine Dong, 2024.
Chun Hua Catherine Dong (she/they) is a Chinese-born Tiohtià:ke/ Montréal-based artist. Dong’s work has been exhibited at The International Digital Art Biennial Montréal (BIAN), MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image, Mac VAL in Paris, Quebec City Biennial, Foundation PHI, and many other galleries. Dong was a finalist for the Contemporary Art Award at Le Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec in 2020, awarded with Cultural Diversity in Visual Arts by the Conseil des arts de Montréal in 202l, and long-listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2024.
Writers' Club
I Wonder How I Wonder Why
Text by Mina Lee - October 25, 2024
After another busy day out, I come back to my apartment – my home, my cocoon – where I live by myself, thousands of miles away from my family. Do you also open your fridge as soon as you come home from work? Well, I do. While the exhausted body is aggressively asking for some tasty rewards, I also look for some comfort that I am familiar with.
I Wonder How I Wonder Why is an imaginary space reflecting Catherine Chun Hua Dong’s life experience as a woman, immigrant and artist. The Chinese-Canadian new media artist and long-time traveler, Dong has created a fantastical science lab, an imaginary stand-in for places they was not allowed to visit as a kid. Welcome to the “lab fantasia.”
No matter how chaotic my refrigerator is, there’s always space for my Kimchi jar and Korean snacks in colorful packages - that’s the something rewarding and comforting I am looking for. Yes, these are my ‘drugs.’ On my stove top, I go rogue with my kimchi, middle eastern spices,an ample amount of maple syrup, and bacon. I pollute the Korean-ness with diversity, less ‘authentic’ but entirely unique, as I proudly am after more than a decade of immigrant life. I cook my drugs in my little lab without judgment.
The space you’ve entered is a fantasy lab, a space where a lot of ‘cooking’ happens. You find lab tools, chemical containers, light-emitting diodes, bears, metal chains, excitement. There is something extremely girly about the installation; it is too bright and colorful for a lab. Having been excluded from school labs for being a girl - for the sake of protecting their reproductive organs, they were told - this is how Dong reimagines those forbidden spaces.
I sit down with my food, turn on the TV and play the cheesiest anime that I love. I follow the adventures of a beautiful heroine, the cute, fragile but magical lady with long silvery blond hair. Despite the absurdity of the story and aggressively honest objectified-sexuality, I learn something about relationships, heroism, and fantasy.
Dong’s exhibition draws on childhood memories and nostalgia for their Chinese upbringing. Touching the bright yellow and colorful wig hair, some bizarre artificiality is felt, which may be quite distracting to the visitors’ eyes with its extreme brightness. The typical picture of a science lab is disturbed by the bunches of the wigs in fluorescent cartoon colors, like tangy-acidic lemons that are chained to the installations but looking extremely vivid and alive.
The contrasting juxtaposition continues with Dong’s other installation pieces. A sleuth of bears under tempered glass. An SOS signal. Cabbage. We observe the stirred, mixed and reshaped mind of the artist who traveled and lived all over the world with cabbage leashed to them like a pet, a memory of home always by their side..
As the dinner ritual ends, I lay down and ‘embroider’ anything and everything that happened today onto my imaginary canvas. I reflect, regret, and imagine a fantasy where I am the colorful haired heroine. ‘Isolation is not good for me. Sitting on my own lemon tree, I am stepping around in the desert of joy’ in my fantasy. ‘Well, nothing ever happened, though.’
The 3-channel video in this fantasy lab can be experienced as a free navigation of a young girl’s imagination. The seemingly random placement of multiple objects are one’s varied experiences, imaginations and emotions, carefully curated by Dong’s unique life trajectory as a traveler, immigrant, and woman. Traditional Northeast Asian embroidery works were how past generations of Asian women could freely explore their imagination: calmly, secretly and beautifully.
In these imaginary worlds presented in I Wonder How I Wonder Why, ‘everything will happen’ and you are free to ‘Wonder Why, Wonder How’ in the most light and unburdened mind.
* Quotes from the lyrics of the song <Lemon Tree> by Fools Garden
For any questions or requests concerning accessibility to the event or our gallery space, please contact James Goddard via email or by phone at 514-842-9686. For general accessibility information, please visit our dedicated page.
Please note that with the increase in COVID 19 and flu transmissions, masks must be worn for the duration of the events
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