Planet Celadon Performance Stills
In the video installation and dance 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
