Planet Celadon: Our Receiver is Operating Trailer
In the video installation and performance Planet Celadon: Our Receiver Is Operating, artist Genevieve Quick imagines Asian American identity through a science fiction narrative that explores the challenges of communicating with a distant place and culture. Embracing her own hybridity and displacement, Quick imagines the Asian American experience as not just a global immigration phenomenon, but an interplanetary migration.
Quick has transformed a moon jar (an iconic vessel in Korean art) into a lunar body that revolves around her fictional Planet Celadon, which mimics the celadon glaze widespread throughout East Asia. As a crew of dancing vases come to life in a Busby Berkeley-esque scene, Quick activates the museum space and artifacts. A cosmic character dressed in a hybridized spacesuit/traditional Korean hanbok acts as an intermediary between Planet Celadon and Earth. Using a variety of texts, sounds, light and gestures — traditional Asian symbols, Morse code, light signals, aviation symbols and gestures, scuba hand signals and tap dance — Quick explores the ambiguity of sending out a beacon declaring "I am here" into the expansive universe that traverses time and space.
The Asian Art Museum, 2018
Installed as video installations:
FutureFeminist, Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA, 2020.
Migration Project, Goethe Institutes' Asia Centers, Asia Cultural Center, Gwangju, South Korea, 2019.
Beyond Boundaries, Korean Cultural Center, New York, New York, 2019.