RE:Cover Versions
Thursday, August 1, 2024 | 2:00 PM
4th floor rooms 4395 and 4210 | School for the Contemporary Arts
149 West Hastings Street (Please enter via Cordova Street plaza)
Please join us this Thursday at 2 PM for a presentation of video and live performance by SCA students in RE:Cover Versions.
RE:Cover Versions is a special class, taught by visiting artist Ming Wong and the SCA’s Kathy Slade, that focuses on reenactment as a mode to re-examine how art and forms of popular culture are intrinsically linked with wider historical and global events, using examples from the recent past, the 1980s for example, to reassess our contemporary context and create new meanings that resonate in the present.
This class is held in conjunction with Ming Wong’s research and commission with the Canadian Chinese Museum on the cultural phenomenon known as Cantopop, a genre that gained its popularity in the 1970s through to the 1990’s as a hybrid cultural product of Western pop music transposed to the Hong Kong entertainment industry, giving rise to pop songs sung in Cantonese that were cover versions of or inspired by Western pop hits.
Students in RE:Cover Versions engaged with their own family history alongside a series of texts, films, and songs in order to consider cultural and social histories, histories of migration and place, the role of language in performance, and ideas around reenactment, translation, citation, copies, repetition, remembrance, and pastiche.
Special thank you to Melissa Lee at the Canadian Chinese Museum, the School for the Contemporary Arts, and the SCA's Audain Visual Artist in Residency Program for making this class possible