If The Sky Could Dream:
Dragonatomy

January 25th, 2025
Interactive Installation | Performance | Workshop

On January 25th, the Heritage Museum of Asian Art hosted the final installation of our resident artist, Irene Hsiao's 2024 series, If the Sky Could Dream: Dragonatomy, in collaboration with Paige Brown, Hunter Diamond, Menghua Guan, Penny Li, Amanda Maraist, Scott Rubin, Darling "Shear" Squire, and Peter Wong.

Attendees of all backgrounds were brought together to reflect upon the Year of the Dragon and to embrace the dragons among us. Through the workshop, everyone was invited to share their treasures, visions, wishes, and love through inscribing words of meaning onto banners that would be hung up among Irene Hsiao's installment. These ideas would manifest into representations of the dragon's anatomy-- the Pearl, the Claws, the Eyes, the Breath, and the Body. As everything finished up, the artists skillfully immersed viewers into multidisciplinary performances with episodes of storytelling, music, dance, and Taiichi throughout the halls and galleries of our museum.

Throughout the evening, guests experienced an engaging and contemplative performance that celebrated both ancient tradition and contemporary artistic expression. Hsiao's unique ability to blend artistic disciplines with visual arts and public spaces left attendees with a renewed appreciation for the deep history behind the dragon.

About the Artists

Irene Hsiao

Irene Hsiao is a dancer, writer, multidisciplinary artist, and 2024 artist in residence at the Heritage Museum of Asian Art. She creates performances in conversation with visual art in museums, galleries, and public spaces, a practice that includes site-specific interaction with visual artworks and experimental engagement with artists, institutions, and the public. She was the inaugural Artist in Residence at the Smart Museum of Art in 2020 and 2021, 2022-23 Fellow at High Concept Labs, first Artist in Residence at 21c Museum Hotel in 2022-2023, and a 2020 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist. Her performances have been presented at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, EXPO Chicago, Chicago Textile Week, Ragdale Foundation, Krannert Art Museum, Alma Art Gallery, Kavi Gupta Gallery, and more. She has received individual artist grants from Chicago DCASE, the Illinois Arts Council Agency, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Night Out in the Parks, and the Awesome Foundation.

Photo by Aroni Sheba Mokua

Paige Brown

Vocalist, pianist and composer Paige Brown believes in the use of voice as a channel, and the use of the instrument/body as a voice. Having inherited a version of the deep, resonant voice of her father and her late grandfather, she rejoices in the ability to play inside that resonance, bringing that sound to bear in songs that speak of joy, love, grief, and hope. She draws from a broad spectrum of influences that range from high school madrigal singers to college gospel choir, skipping from soul to funk to folk and weaving through sounds somewhere in between. Emerging from her compositional chrysalis, she is currently developing the inner mechanisms and connections to deepen and externalize her own artistic practice more fully, reacquainting herself with the simple, playful practices that attracted her to Music, her first love.

Photo by Ricardo E Adame

Hunter Diamond

Hunter Diamond is a creative woodwind and sound artist living and performing in Chicago. A mixture of conceptual, composed, and improvised performances keep him fully embedded in the Chicago creative arts community. In 2021 Hunter founded Curio Records which serves as the primary outlet for his recorded projects. Diamond's new double-album from his project Black Diamond (co-led since 2011 with saxophonist Artie Black) will be released by the Helsinki label We Jazz in July 2024. His next album will be the debut of Flesh of Fruit, a collaborative work with artist Allen Moore. Diamond performs with several groups of his own: Black Diamond (co-led with saxophonist Artie Black), the Hunter Diamond Quartet, Metal and Wood, Herbsaint (New Orleans traditional), and Strange Frontiers: sonifying the poetry of his father Eric Diamond. Diamond frequently contributes to collaborative work, often bringing a one-man-orchestral sound to projects with poet Marvin Tate, storyteller Sam Lewis, sound artist Allen Moore, movement artist Irene Hsiao, vocalist Ana Everling, singer/songwriter Hannah Frances, and the Wonder Wagon.

Photo by Ricardo E Adame

Menghua Guan

Menghua Guan, Master’s degree in music from Nanjing Normal University in China, founder of Menghua Guan Guzheng Studio, is a guzheng performer and tutor with more than 30 years of guzheng playing experience and more than 20 years of guzheng teaching experience. She has been invited to offer numerous lectures and performances in universities and libraries such as Roosevelt University, University of Wisconsin, Chicago Public Library etc. Menghua Guan was also invited to perform in Jay Pritzker Pavilion in the Millennium Park for Guzheng Concerto by the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic in 2018.

Penny Li

Penny Li is the development and program manager at the Heritage Museum of Asian Art. Having spent 90% of her days in China, Penny came to Chicago to pursue Arts Management at Columbia College Chicago. She is passionate about the transformative possibilities of art interpretation and engagement. Alongside her day job, she explores her creativity as a photographer and singer-songwriter. Penny is a lover of food, psychology, and theatre. Multilingual, she is fluent in Chinese, English, and Korean, with a conversational level of Japanese.

Photo by Ricardo E Adame

Amanda Maraist

Amanda Maraist is a movement deviser + improviser from the Texas gulf coast, and co-directs bim bom studios. She works collaboratively with movers, musicians and artists; most recently with Helen Lee, Freedom From and Freedom To, Khecari, Irene Hsiao, Ayako Kato / Art Union Humanscape and independently. Her movement work exists as both dance-making and physical space-making towards creating spaces of community abundance, with a do-it-together demeanor.

Photo by Ricardo E Adame

Scott Rubin

Scott Rubin is an interdisciplinary artist and improvising violist whose work interrogates relationships between sound and movement through analog and digital means. His recent projects have involved collaborations with musicians and dancers, often incorporating interactive acoustic/electronic improvisation, expanded performance practices, motion-sensors, and live video. In these projects, he engages themes of intimacy, control, and the sublime.

Photo by Ricardo E Adame

Darling "Shear" Squire

Darling “Shear” Squire is a Chicago native with Atlanta roots and trained in Ballet, Modern, Jazz and African. After high school, Darling began dancing professionally with Bubba Carr, Cher’s choreographer, Rhonda Henriksen, Twyla Tharp, Tracy Vogt, Hinton Battle, and Lauri Stallings. As a freelance dancer/ choreographer, Darling has worked with The Fly Honeys, Soho House Chicago, EXPO Chicago, Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre, MCA, Salonathon, Open TV and many others. Awards include: Impulstanz Between Gestures scholarship (Vienna, Austria), Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist, CDF 10X10 Choreographer, Links Hall CoMission Fellowship, 3Arts nominee (2019, 2022). Darling’s career has been one with a strong spiritual center and allowance of universal well-being.

Photo by Ricardo E Adame

Peter Wong

Peter Wong is a fifth-generation practitioner of Yang Style Taijiquan. He has been practicing Traditional Kungfu for over fifty years and has been an instructor of Tai Chi at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Peter Wong was a director of the 26th and 27th Board of Directors of the Chin Woo Athletic Association Hong Kong Limited. He is also the appointed Traditional Martial Arts Advisor and Sanshou散手 Advisor（2008-Now) of the Hong Kong, China Wushu Union.

Photo by Ricardo E Adame