Dance in Her Land 她乡舞曲

Dance in Herland 她乡舞曲

18.5 × 25.7 cm
334 p
Chinese, English
Offset Printing, Exposed Binding, Dust Jacket
ISBN 979-8-9890170-3-4
Edition of 2000
First Published in 2025
Author: Luka Yuanyuan Yang
Editor-in-Chief: Kechun Qin
Project Manager: Michael Guo
Assistant Editor: Jierui Ou
Contributors: Selia Jinhua Tan, S.Louisa Wei, Xin Wang
Designer: Studio Pianpian He and Max Harvey
Distribution: Public Knowledge Book

About

Dance in Herland surveys artist Luka Yuanyuan Yang’s cinematic oeuvre, including her feature-length production Chinatown Cha-Cha and five short films centered on diasporic Chinese communities. The book picks up where the films end, serving as both a reflection and a complement, while also creating a new narrative. The book brings together hundreds of archival materials from photo albums, rare and invaluable oral histories, creative writings, and interviews with scholars. Over nearly a year of editing, we felt like revisiting 20th-century San Francisco and Cuba, tracing history through the neons of Chinatown and the echoes of Cantonese opera. For the dancers and performers documented in this book, their bodies act as living archives; their memories and unspoken emotions may be concealed in their steps, fingertips, and gazes.

Additionally, the design duo Studio Pianpian He and Max Harvey transformed the books into a vessel of collective memory through their design. They used papers in various colors to separate different oral history backgrounds. The designers delicately captured visual elements marked by the era from the archive, infusing the book with new charm grounded in the aesthetics of the last century.

About the Author

Luka Yuanyuan Yang (b. 1989, Beijing) is a visual artist and filmmaker working across documentary film, photography, installation, and performance. Through weaving documentary and archival materials, she explores themes of identity, migration, and memory, challenging conventional historical narratives and amplifying overlooked voices.

She has held solo exhibitions at institutions including Flowers Gallery, Hong Kong (2024); ARTiX3, Tokyo, Japan (2023); OCAT, Shanghai, China (2020); and AIKE, Shanghai, China (2019). Her work has been exhibited at major institutions including New Taipei City Art Museum, Taiwan; Centre for Heritage Arts & Textile, Hong Kong; Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China; Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China; Times Arts Center Berlin, Germany; Art in General, New York; Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo, Montevideo, Uruguay; Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing, China.

Her debut feature documentary “Chinatown Cha-Cha” was part of official selection at Pingyao International Film Festival, Hawaii International Film Festival, Cleveland International Film Festival, CAAMFest and many more. It had a nationwide theatrical release in China in 2024 (Douban Rating 8.4/10). Her short films have been featured in The New Yorker and screened at New Orleans Film Festival, Atlanta Film Festival, Camden International Film Festival and Asian American International Film Festival.

Yang is a recipient of the BAZAAR Art Awards – Cross Cultural Creator of the Year (2024), BVLGARI Avrora Award (2023), Art Power 100 (2019), and Rencontres d’Arles Author Book Award (2015). She has received grant from the Asian Cultural Council. Her works are in the collections of Power Station of Art, Kadist Art Foundation and FENIX Museum of Migration.