Interview #184 — Rainbow Chan

by Angela Schilling

Rainbow Chan is fast heading towards being one of Australia’s leading young academics in contemporary music and works across music, media, sound, performance, and visual art. Having spent most of her life growing up and working in Sydney, she is increasingly looking to her homeland in Hong Kong to inform her practise and call a second home.

Rainbow spoke to Angela Schilling about tradition, decentering power, and the ongoing dialogue of consumption and desire.

This interview was first published as part of Liminal’s first print edition, in 2019.

Do you draw a line, theoretically or practically, between Rainbow Chan as pop musician and Rainbow Chan as visual and performative artist?

I think initially there was more of a separation, but my approach has become quite interdisciplinary, meaning I’m looking at the ways in which pop culture and the visual arts intersect. In this day and age, the line between low-brow and high-brow culture cannot be easily defined. Our world is so saturated with images, videos and shareable content that we seldom distinguish between “professional” and “amateur” anymore. Different types of media are interacting closely together in the form of synergy, usually with the aim to make us buy more stuff. I’m interested in how art, music, fashion create an ongoing dialogue around consumption and desire.

Art is not immune to commercialisation, just as pop music increasingly co-opts art and theoretical conversations into its production, into its themes, into its language. Meanwhile, you can do all of this while looking good in the latest designer outfit (just make sure you tag them on Instagram). That’s why I’m attracted to the intersections of pop music, visual arts, and design, rather than their differences, because it allows me to interrogate the hyper-connectedness of our “post-postmodern” reality.

Your visual art and performative practice both focus on ideological, historic, economic and familial relationships between China and Australia, or the Western, English-speaking world. You obviously have a personal interest in these ideas, but can you explain to those who may not know you as well why you think this work is important to make?

As I sort of alluded to earlier, our future is going to be increasingly flattened out as we move into our globalising age. While I’m personally invested in preserving my culture and mother tongue, I’m also interested in looking at the way that traditions are created and re-performed more broadly. That process is active, not passive. Even if you’re from the place where you are residing, like if you were born on the land that you’ve grown up on, I think it’s important to remember that traditions are social constructs. This is especially important to think about as non-Indigenous Australians living on stolen land, for whom the word “tradition” has a very loaded meaning. If you are not an original custodian of this land, whether past, present or emerging, then your “tradition” will be somehow implicated in Australia’s deeply traumatic colonial history. I’m still working out how I fit into this conversation as a first-generation migrant.

And so, my work tries to explore my own journey of migration from Hong Kong to Australia, critiquing the multifaceted beast to unpack, that is “authenticity.” I’m challenging the idea of “the origin” and showing that belonging is a really complex phenomenon, not a natural history. This has manifested in translation installation works that play with language apps and text, as well as imaginary advertising campaigns for counterfeited objects. I think making these kinds of works about hybridity can help to dismantle the idea of the original, and thus, authorship and ownership. I think that the playful manner of my works which borrow heavily from pop culture can often speak to other migrant families or individuals in an accessible manner, so they don’t feel so isolated. After all, the common perception of the visual arts is that of elitism. But when I see people from all walks of life being able to connect with my work, I feel a great sense of reward. They range from your young tote-bag carrying hipster to your fifth-generation Chinese-Australian grandmother. Hopefully, my practice is contributing to a wider conversation about diaspora and decolonisation.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m doing a billion things at the moment but in terms of music, I’m working towards my second album! I can reveal that these ten songs loosely explore how communication technologies and screen culture affect our notions of intimacy, memory and place. I’m also interested in the idea of accessibility. For instance, information being shared easily or images, messages and video being stored digitally. I’ve been contemplating how the uncanny and enduring nature of these modes of communication affect the way we connect with each other and with ourselves.

It’s also the first time I’ve felt comfortable enough with my place as an artist, and as an individual in the world, to include Chinese in my lyrics. I kept thinking about the way English has been used throughout non-Western pop music as a signifier of “cool.” Also, these moments often act as an introduction into the English language for non-English speakers. I was really attracted to the idea that my songs might also work a kind of soft power on the audience, introducing Cantonese slang into the lives of non-Chinese speakers. I don’t feel the urgent need to explain or translate those Chinese passages, and I don’t think they necessarily make me any ‘cooler’—I just like finally being able to reflect the bilingual workings of my brain. If you can understand what I’m saying, that’s great! If you can’t, that’s ok too because it hasn’t been made just for you. Even if it is just one or two lines of Chinese in my music, making the gesture feels like a decentring of power.

Do you think you feel differently about being an Asian-Australian artist as you release more music or do more visual art work?

I feel that being Asian-Australian or having that hyphenated identity, regardless of whether you are an artist or not, is an ongoing form of becoming, an ongoing process of negotiation. My work is so embedded in identity, I’ve forced myself to think about these issues very reflectively. But at the same time, the works I make end up having a feedback loop effect on way that I feel. It’s going back and forth. So yes—I feel differently about my hyphenated status with every new work I make. I gain more insight and more understanding as I research into it, and also produce works about it, and then how that is received by other people and in different spaces and in different contexts. Ultimately, my works help me build up my own unique understanding of what it means to be Australian-Asian. But as I travel more and begin to base myself across different countries, my experiences now tend to complicate those supposedly stable categories of ‘Asian’ and ‘Australian’. My sense of being feels a lot more flexible.

Do you think Australia is a good place to explore this flexibility? Sometimes, to me, Australia is very confusing—the media we see and hear and even the babbling left-wing conversations of race and inclusivity often washes over my ability to think clearly of my own identity. Would it be easier to understand your own heritage as ‘mixed’ (for want of a better word) if you were in Hong Kong, for instance? Does this place have an influence on the way you decipher these identities?

I think Australia is quite strange because of its relative isolation. For me, being so far away from home meant that I couldn’t access my native culture and geography for a long time. I think if I had stronger connections to Hong Kong when I was growing up, I might not be as interested in the construction of identity. Race is a thing taken for granted when you’re living and embodying experiences of the dominant culture within a nation.

What is your relationship to the Australian music landscape or industry like?

I try to not get bogged down by the logistics of fitting into the music landscape or clear genre definitions. I think for me it was a really important move to have many interests and activities outside of my pop music career. So for me they are teaching, swimming, reading and just hanging out with friends because I think it’s incredibly difficult to turn your music into the only thing that is going to feed you. If you see your relationship with the music industry as being a form of sustenance, I think you’re gonna burn out quite quickly. It’s very hard to achieve fame and fortune. There’s limited room to move within those spaces defined by traditional industry expectations. So that’s why I try to inhabit many different places at once. Some of the most satisfying spaces have a tangential relationship to the music industry and are not necessarily fully embedded within it. For instance, I really love mentoring emerging talents in electronic music production.

You have semi-relocated to Hong Kong during this latter half of 2018, can you tell me what prompted this move? What have you been looking at in your practise there?

Each time I return to Hong Kong, the country in which I was born, I develop a new feeling towards it. I hardly visited Hong Kong growing up so it remained a big part of my diasporic and nostalgic imagination. In the last few years, I’ve been able to navigate this complex place as an adult, which allowed me to renew my connections to its geography, culture and people. Earlier in 2018 I went back to do a string of performances across Hong Kong, Taiwan and China, with Liquid Architecture. During that time, I was really inspired by the young creative people and the various scenes that I witnessed there.

What I found fascinating was that global culture, consumerism and pop music infuses the fabric of all club culture. So while the music still seems foreign, because maybe it’s presented in a language that I can’t understand, there are still so many similarities and points of familiarity based on mass culture. It problematises the binary of “Western” and “Eastern”, you know, the fact that a lot of young people around the world wear Nikes and listen to Beyonce. As we’re all indulging in late capitalist hedonism, I wanted to look at intergenerational tensions in non-Western societies and other consequences of globalisation.

I saw the potential for my work to explore Hong Kong identity, a site of construction and deconstruction that changes as rapidly as the city’s skyline. I wanted to uncover local histories that are not your token images of the Victoria Harbour, junks and Bruce Lee. Instead, my recent travels have been focused on learning folksongs in the Hong Kong indigenous dialect spoken by my mother, Weitouhua. Through this process, I’ve learnt about the rich customs of village life before rapid urbanisation in the New Territories of Hong Kong.

Specifically, I’m looking at Weitou bridal lament cycles that young women sang before they were married off, as a form of feminist resistance. These songs were very sad, very long and very public. The performative aspect of them allowed her to safely express her grievances towards gender inequality. The bride-to-be would weep in a dramatic and poetic manner, protesting but ultimately accepting her fate. She would be a scrupulous daughter and leave behind her natal home in order to join the cold, alien and cruel family of the groom. I think I’m gonna look at creating a new project around this lesser known part of Hong Kong culture. Maybe in the form of a big musical! (Don’t get me wrong. I hate Musical Theatre... I just mean some sort of performative musical work.)

Do you think Rainbow Chan will always be a pop project, as opposed to the darker techno of Chunyin?

I am a sucker for pop music and it’s nice having a designated space to explore that unashamedly. I do, however, feel that over time, my perception of pop has morphed and moved in relation to everything else I’m doing as well. Who knows? I can imagine one day I’ll make a Rainbow Chan pop album that sounds like the music from 1920’s Shanghai jazz clubs with heaps of saxophones and Chinese spoken word if I got bored of electronic music. I think it will remain a pop project but it will undoubtedly take on different iterations.

Tell me about your favourite place and how it bleeds into your work. (If this happens at all for you - or maybe it’s not your favourite place, just a place that affects you).

I really love the feeling of stepping into Hong Kong airport or certain shopping centres and experiencing this weirdly distinct smell. It’s a clinical, clean smell, maybe more appropriately named a non-smell. I guess it is of the air conditioning? Whatever it is, I think this scent makes me really homesick because I immediately associate it with Hong Kong. The feeling of home somehow paradoxically exists in these liminal spaces for me. I like looking at liminality, which is the name of this zine, and very aptly named. Maybe that’s my favourite place.

Your 2017 release, Fabrica (on Healthy Tapes), was a solid fuck you to the male gaze and the way toxic masculinity affects a woman’s identity. Is it something you thought about as a whole project, or is it just the way it came out?

Fabrica came out of a real frustration with things that I was witnessing and experiencing as a woman in my mid 20s. Perhaps it was my Saturn returns? I just really needed to write these songs as a form of, I guess, self-care after the break down of different relationships. I was at a point in my adult life at which I couldn’t accept subpar standards around me, or other women, as the norm anymore. I needed to write these songs because I was mad and deeply hurt.

I knew for me the only way to really process those difficult realities was to give it a name, to give it a structure, to give it a vocabulary, for myself to actually see these systems that define power in our every day. These songs were examining gender roles and how they bleed into one’s self esteem and self-worth, and also one’s perceived value within institutions and within different social circles. At every single level of being and relating, these power plays exist. And I just really needed to write something about it for my own wellbeing.

Fabrica was an important project for me to turn my anger into something empowering. I felt like the richest person on earth when “Let Me” won Best Song of 2017 at FBi Radio’s SMAC Awards. It was really affirming to have others connect with your song and say, “Yes, you’ve come out on top as a resilient, bad bitch!”

Does Chunyin have an ideology like Rainbow Chan / Fabrica does, or (perhaps because of its lack of lyrics) is it simply a project to explore sounds and sonic ideas?

I think Chunyin is like this mysterious shadow that is extremely porous, so I think the ideology behind it is Chunyin’s fluidity. I avoid sung lyrics and having my face in this project because I think once I attach too much of my personal self to Chunyin, it doesn’t have the sort of flexibility anymore and people start to read into the project, depending on their prejudices and beliefs around my representation. So they might see: Chinese, female. Therefore, they think: X Y Z, Chunyin must mean this. But instead, Chunyin is, I guess, a project that allows people to immediately experience the music as abstracted sounds rather than being constantly reminded of its embodiment, i.e. me.

I’ve been thinking about your works within your art practice where you focus on ‘fake’ products and the corresponding consumer systems that these items have produced. To me this is so interesting, is this an ongoing idea for you? (I know you have so many ideas and focuses…) Will you revisit this? And can you give us a little background on your ideas or why it interested you in the first place?

The catalyst for this body of research was an artwork I created for a Christmas party at Firstdraft Gallery, curated by the amazing Justin Shoulder. I made an ad campaign using several images and anecdotes of counterfeit brands and knock-off goods from China. Growing up, wearing a counterfeited Mickey Mouse (actually, “Nickey Nouse”) t-shirt was pretty normal for me. I became interested in the problematic concepts of originality and authenticity -- problematic because capitalism makes us think they are natural and stable. However, the notions of originality, authorship, and ownership all lean towards a Western thinking style. We seem to believe that product value is fixed (of course, a Louis Vuitton bag costs this much! How else could it be?) but in fact, value is constantly being shaped by market forces, aided by the mass circulation of digital media.

Through these seemingly passive products and objects, I began to see the complexities of global economics and the power inequalities that drive consumer culture. The counterfeit then provided as really interesting site of dissent for me to investigate. Many of these knock-offs are humorous, reflexive and sometimes blatantly outrageous, but they are also symbols of resistance. Sometimes they are the results of mistranslation, or even better, they are the illegitimate hybrid mashups of designer brands, which scream postmodern charm. Chinese factories that manufacture the “real” items are trying to push back against multinationals by appropriating existing styles, forming alternate markets and making them more affordable for the masses. Without being over-simplistic or romantic, I do feel like there is a Robin Hood air about it. So, it’s not only the aesthetics but the socio-political significance of fake things that continue to be a provoking topic for me.

And, finally: what does being Asian-Australian mean to you?

Being Asian-Australian is an understanding that there is no centre and no periphery, only several crisscrossing flows.