Opening the Mouth | Chun Yin Rainbow Chan (陳雋然)

開口歌 Opening The Mouth Song, 2025, video loop, 2:39 mins

‘Opening the Mouth‘ reimagines the bridal laments of Hong Kong’s 圍頭/Weitou women, to whom Chan has deep ancestral ties. Chan translates these culturally endangered songs into contemporary forms that preserve their subversive feminist voices while reflecting on loss, resilience and solidarity. Symbolic imagery and ritual gestures recur as motifs, evoking resistance, grief, and love within women’s histories. Chan’s work engages deeply with language and memory, situating personal histories within broader sociopolitical contexts. She is particularly interested in the power of ritual, song and performance in postcolonial contexts – both as a means of reclaiming agency and a living archive.

ARTIST BIO

Chun Yin Rainbow Chan (陳雋然) is an interdisciplinary artist, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist based in Naarm/Melbourne and Gadigal/Sydney. Working fluidly across contemporary visual art and popular music, her practice examines themes of cultural representation, (mis)translation, matrilineal inheritance, feminist expression, and diasporic identity. Grounded in her ancestral ties to the Weitou people — Hong Kong’s first settlers — Chan’s work revitalises endangered women’s folk traditions, most notably bridal laments, reinterpreting them through immersive installations, silk painting, traditional weaving, sound, and performance, for contemporary audiences.

Chan holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from the University of Sydney and a Master of Fine Arts (Research) from the University of NSW. As a highly acclaimed visual artist and musician, she has exhibited and performed widely across Australia and internationally at art institutions and festivals, including the Sydney Opera House, Phoenix Central Park, Carriageworks, Melbourne Music Week, Iceland Airwaves, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Tai Kwun Contemporary, M+ in Hong Kong, SXSW, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Firstdraft, Art Gallery of NSW, Cement Fondu, Blindside, Queensland University Art Museum, Australian National University, and I-Project Space in Beijing.

Chan’s work has garnered significant recognition through major commissions and presentations. She is the inaugural artist behind ABC Bullion’s Arts Series Coin Program (2026). In 2024 she was commissioned by both the Yokohama Triennale (Japan) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia for Primavera: Young Australian Artists. Her installation “Fruit Song” is in the Art Gallery of New South Wales collection.

Her music is celebrated for its innovative fusion of experimental pop, electronic production, and traditional Cantonese influences, positioning her as one of Australia’s most distinctive voices in contemporary sound. Her releases Spacings (2016), Pillar (2019), and Stanley (2021), have earned critical praise from outlets such as The Guardian, Rolling Stone Australia, and ABC. Her documentary Songs from a Walled Village (ABC Radio National, 2021), was a finalist in the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union Prizes. Chan won “Artist of the Year” at the 2022 FBi Radio SMAC Awards and was named among the “40 Under 40: Most Influential Asian Australians” for her contributions to arts and culture.

Her one-woman performance The Bridal Lament—a reimagining of Weitou wedding rituals through song, movement, and animation—has been presented at Arts House, OzAsia, Liveworks, and Riverside Theatres as part of Sydney Festival. The work was co-commissioned by Performance Space as part of Liveworks Festival 2023 and OzAsia Festival 2023, with support from Carriageworks, the City of Melbourne through Arts House and Contemporary Asian Australian Performance.

Through her interdisciplinary practice, Chan continues to illuminate the voices of Weitou women, preserving and reinterpreting their stories while exploring broader questions of identity, language, and cultural inheritance

ABOUT SCREENWORKS: 

SCREENWORKS provides a dedicated screen space for video and moving-image work for Gasworks’ creative community. Each month a different work will be shown, celebrating the dynamism that screen-based media can offer. 

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