Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

A studio course introducing topics in art-making practices as they relate to practical, conceptual, aesthetic and historical issues in contemporary art. May repeat for credit.

COURSE DETAILS:

Methods and Concepts: Re: Cover Versions, taught by the SCA’s Kathy Slade and guest artist Ming Wong, 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 to reassess our contemporary context and create new meanings that resonate in the present.

This class will be 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. Many figures from the Cantopop industry had strong links to Vancouver due to the history of migration between the two cities.

For this class students will work alongside Ming Wong and will participate in the research, development, and production of a series of Cantopop karaoke videos that will form the basis of a multimedia installation for an exhibition at the Canadian Chinese Museum in 2025.

Students will engage with 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.

Grading