History, Dance, and Sculpture Collide in "Translated Vase"
By Clare Austen-Smith
The Smart Museum’s 2020-21 artist in residence, Irene Hsiao, choreographed this spellbinding dance sequence inspired by Yeesookyung’s Translated Vase and the Smart Museum’s exhibition “Porcelain: Material and Storytelling,” curated by UChicago Professor Wu Hung.
“In a process that includes breakage, separation, and difference, we occasionally find grace—but, like Translated Vase, the breaks and cracks are not only visible but essential to the structure.”
Set to music by UChicago Music PhD student Baldwin Giang (2022 Gaudeamus Award nominee), the dancers engage with the artworks on display in the exhibition. Shown in the open and without protective glass, Translated Vase is sculptural and creature-like, as is the dance.
Translated Vase was created in response to Phil Chan’s Ballet des Porcelaines, a reworked presentation of a 1739 performance that exoticized and exploited East Asian cultures. In its reconfiguration by Chan and Meredith Martin, the performance flips the script by putting Asian protagonists front and center. Like Ballet des Porcelaines, Translated Vase also speaks directly to the East Asian experience with white colonialism—a history that includes exploitation, xenophobia, and displacement, as well as cultural exchange. The dance combines breaking with contact improvisation to embody the contradiction of who or what is “authentic, foreign, dominant, and creative.”
Hsiao writes, “In a process that includes breakage, separation, and difference, we occasionally find grace—but, like Translated Vase, the breaks and cracks are not only visible but essential to the structure.”
Learn more about the project here.
Sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago with support from a Title VI National Resource Center Grant from the US Department of Education.