Book Talk | Dance in Herland with TE Editions

Join Pianpian He, Xin Wang, and Luka Yuanyuan Yang ask they discuss TE Editions' DANCE IN HERLAND.

ABOUT THE BOOK

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 CONTRIBUTORS

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.

Studio Pianpian He and Max Harvey sways between contemporary art and publicity, at this moment where the promotion and presentation of a work conflicts with its initial intentions, seemingly facing a dead end. SPPH&MH is against usual patterns of effective promotion and fast consumption, thus, aiming at making modest but long-lasting design works, even collectibles. Such can only be attained by working in close collaboration with artists. With an emphasis on production, our focus is on book design, exhibition design, website design and visual identities. By designing books we create spaces for narratives that can be carried around town

Xin Wang is a New York-based art historian and Curatorial Director at Pace Gallery. Currently finishing a PhD dissertation on Soviet Hauntology at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, she held curatorial and educational positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art, and received the Warhol Foundation’s Arts Writers Grant in 2021. Publications such as “Asian Futurism and the Non-Other” have been widely circulated, translated and taught in university curriculums.