Dance in Herland is a book release from Te Magazine that surveys the cinematic oeuvre of Beijing-based visual artist Luka Yuanyuan Yang, including her feature-length production Chinatown Cha-Cha and five short films centred on diasporic Chinese communities.
Yang mixes documentary materials and fictional narratives to explores themes around identity, trauma, memory, ethnicity, migration and mythology. Her visual storytelling aims to challenge more formal and ingrained interpretations of history and give voice to communities and individuals that have often been marginalised or misinterpreted.
About this beautiful volume the publishers say, 'The book picks up where the films end, serving as both a reflection and a complement, while also creating a new narrative. Over nearly a year of editing, we felt like revisiting 20th-century San Francisco and Cuba, tracing history through the neons of Chinatown and the echoes of Cantonese opera. For the dancers and performers documented in this book, their bodies act as living archives; their memories and unspoken emotions may be concealed in their steps, fingertips, and gazes.'