Artist Rainbow Chan
When Rainbow Chan and her family moved from Hong Kong to Sydney in 1996, she was six years old and excited by the prospect of a long holiday. "I realized it only after a year," said the artist and musician. "It hit me and I said, ' Oh my God, this is my new home. '"
As the second youngest of four children living in Sydney's north-western suburbs, this sense of abandonment continued into her teenage years. Like many children of the diaspora, he feels alienated from his ancestral heritage. "For years, I hated being Chinese or Asian and going to Chinese school on Saturdays when the other kids were playing soccer, gymnastics, or volleyball," she recalls. "I want to be Australian, whatever that means - I see myself as Western."
But Hong Kong insists—Chan returned only once as a child, but her family's visits and the media she consumed made her hometown distant and ever-present. "The understanding of Hong Kong was always through stolen DVDs and VHS from the local shop in Eastwood, where you bought your stuff but also borrowed a million stuck tapes," he said.
His latest work , The Bride's Cry, explores those early roots. The show premiered at Sydney's Liveworks this week and heads to Adelaide's Ozasia Festival in early November.
Bride's Mourning is Chan's interpretation of Weitou ceremonies, the lost culture and language of Hong Kong's early settlers. It is a language raised by mothers and not passed down to their children, especially since Weitu is a patriarchal culture but is under pressure to modernize and speak Cantonese. "There's a lot of stigma and shame around the language," Chan said.
Since childhood, Chan studied music. She played saxophone and piano and sang in a children's choir — she jokes, "it was very, very elegant." He began to follow the path of music when he was 14 years old and experienced his first heartbreak. "I started writing songs to explore grief and I started performing them and I think it was something I understood, I liked it, " he said. "I found myself in pop music."
At the same time, Chan rediscovered the Cantopop music of his childhood and found new things to appreciate in it, a love that only blossomed when he entered college. It was there that he began to clarify and understand the racism that had plagued him for years. "I started researching and building a lot of these systems and structures. I did art in college, so I thought about that kind of thing all day: studying the culture of hate," he laughs. " Why do I hate being Asian? Ah Eurocentric patriarchy. Or colonialism."
Sydney's underground electronic music scene is growing. Chan found himself with artists such as his regular collaborator Marcus Weill. He attributes the growth to "accessible access to music" and Sydney's strict pre-lockdown regulations, where venues like FBI Social and The Pit have become home to up-and-coming local artists.
"It was a conflict of more streams, more YouTube channels, to figure out how to produce something like Ableton or GarageBand without an engineering degree," he said. “The music that was coming out was very, very electronic… I was 20 or 21, fresh out of college, and it was really fun.
Prejudice still runs rampant in the music world—Chan himself constantly challenges sexist and racist assumptions. "It wasn't a struggle between me, it was a struggle with how people would see or understand me as an Asian woman, and I felt that way," she recalled. "They thought my stuff was manufactured by someone, and it was very upsetting."
Although today the tableau has changed a lot and there is a lot of diversity on the stage, the memories remain. For Chan, it's a reminder that representation still matters. "When I was young, I didn't have a lot of role models...there were just white men doing shows or marches," she said. "Thank you, I think people will understand that other people's voices are good and that not only are they different, but they are people who make decisions.
"When I talk to a lot of young women who are 10 years younger than me now, it always hits me to hear people say, 'It's great to see you doing your work because I think it's already out there and it's like that.' to go . for me'... He was somebody, but something.
Chan's career is like a chameleon: As Rainbow, Chan has released several EPs and albums. He is a visual artist; And this is the experimental techno project that Chunyin started in 2013. Chunyin is really dark and weird when Rainbow Chan "bursts out"; Rainbow is Chan's "gothic sister," as the artist says. "Sometimes I make a slightly different hat," says Chan. “With the Chunyin project, I really wanted it to not be about my voice; I still see the project as more of a sculpture... There is a liberation in myself as a face, a person or a voice.
In 2020, performing artists Chan, Weil and Eugene Choi collaborated on Wong Kar-wai's 2000 Hong Kong classic Mood for Love for the Theater and Music Awards, staging and performing at the Sydney Opera House. In an interview about the project, Chan told me he admired the film, which "uses art as a strategy to question things we're not allowed to talk about."
He did the same in his last job. For centuries, until the 1960s, Witu women performed the groom's cry before marriage. You will be isolated in the attic for at least three days and three nights, where the woman will perform her songs for family and friends: left with painful memories of the life and identity she gave up to become someone else's wife. You could say it was his farewell.
Chan learned about the system five years ago when he traveled to Hong Kong with his mother and aunt and met elderly women sharing their songs in the village of Lung Yuk Tau. "When I heard these songs and sang along with these women, I was very moved," she said. "I felt time and space collapse and I was standing in front of all these women - it was spiritual and incredible."
He was also impressed by the subtly progressive nature of the songs: a quiet rebellion against total control. "These unknown, disappearing songs are like women's songs - I think the fact that they are very complex in terms of lyrical content is very important to try to capture the emotions of the actors." While he knows his destiny is lost.'
Lamentations is rich in metaphors that express what cannot be said out loud - plants and animals, the agricultural way of life. Chan considered writing his own version because he saw parallels with the oppression of the modern world. "As a modern person, I believe that today's problems are similar to history in finding your way in the face of oppressive and superior forces." “For me, there's something about the political situation in Hong Kong... the uncertainty about the future and the upcoming protests... there's something about it that resonates with me.
Chan questions tradition in his stories, but finds himself facing cultural imitation syndrome. "The main question is always about solving the issues of authenticity and ownership," he said. “I felt a little weird at first, or am I the right person to ask this? "
The visual metaphor works here too, answering Chan's question in its own way. “I see my work or research as something that comes from the diaspora; it's a childhood experience that is a third culture both at home and abroad,” he said. "I think because this metaphor of the bride hanging in the limnal void resonates, you're neither here nor there."
The Bride's Tragedy - Chan's version - a song series with stage design, choreography and animation will be released as a solo show and album. The first single "Seven Sisters" was released in August. The music video, based on a fairy tale about a group of sisters who rebel against an arranged marriage and are thrown into the sea, features Chan surrounded by women in red.
The wedding song, sung in English and Wit, has the same structure as the traditional song: preparing to wake up the sky, wearing new clothes, combing the hair of a woman with many children, eating special food. Each woman's songs are unique, but there are common themes and ideas that unite the laments—which Chan likens to improvisation. It reflects the musician's compositional technique and uses his classical training to push the limits and boundaries of sound. "If you know the basics of the rules, you can go crazy with them," he said. “The new songs I write are very inspired by traditional songs, there are certain melodic frameworks like motifs that come directly from traditional songs, and I have different strategies and techniques to put the music in a modern context.
Chan takes on the character of the bride, but there is a "meta element" where she reads like an observer of the world of crying, looking at the bride from a different angle. His mother, Chu Ping, also serves as Weitou's loudspeaker narrator, and another family member was the main inspiration for the article: Chan's aunt, the sister of his mother who died during the quarantine.
"This scene is about the sadness of losing her and seeing my mother lose...the songs help illuminate that sadness," Chan said. "When I wrote my first songs about grief, a lot of the songs really came from personal loss and grief that I had never experienced before."
Chan undermines the patrilineal nature of Witu culture by challenging the rituals and respect for women that came before. The project was also healing for his mother. "When I was growing up, my parents had a Chinese restaurant and they were working so much that we missed our childhood so much and for years my mother was very angry and I think she was angry that this was her life," he said.
“Now that I've been able to hire him as a collaborator and he's planning to be part of the touring party... he's very happy. He was very proud of his work because he won it all, and I was very proud because I think the stigma is gone. He was very proud that I was Weitu."
This article first appeared in Isigha qatar Saturday newspaper on October 21, 2023.
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