Chun Hua Catherine Dong’s Midnight Moment, Mulan. Photo by JF
Times Square Arts hosted a reception at Broadway Lounge at the Marriott Marquis last night with Chun Hua for a VIP cocktail hour and everyone headed to the plaza to see her Midnight Moment appear on 95+ surrounding billboards in Times Square from 11:57 pm to 12 am.
A video-based work created through virtual reality, Chun Hua Catherine Dong’s Mulan reimagines the legendary Chinese folk heroine of the same name to explore gender and the plasticity and plurality of the body. Inspired by ancient Chinese storytelling, performance traditions, and marine biology, Dong used 3D VR tools to create an imaginary aquatic fantasy world where Mulan disguises her identity and gender, in order to coexist and become one with the nudibranch — a colorful deep-sea organism with striking forms, unique defenses, and ambiguous gender identities. Ultimately Mulan becomes not only a hybrid being, but a part of the surrounding marine ecosystems. Donning the protagonist in a colorful Beijing Opera costume and staging her on the rainbow-hued nudibranch, Dong proposes the pluralities within this folk character, and challenges historically male-dominated theater traditions.
Chinese Theatre Works (CTW) was created in 2001 out of the merger of two non-profit institutions with long histories of bringing traditional and innovative, contemporary Chinese performing arts to local New York City, national and international audiences—The Gold Mountain Institute for Traditional Shadow Theater (GMI) and Chinese Theatre Workshop.
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