Amy Chan (陳一云)
Light artist, theatre practitioner, artistic director of Drama COLLABoratory and pathologist. Interest in expanding the notion of light in postdramatic theatre through the exploration of musicality, performativity and theatricality of light in performance and installation, and the in-betweens of light-music, performance-installation and arts-medicine. Lightscape (light and space) is the co-performer, protagonist and antagonist in her works.
Her major works include the interdisciplinary museum theatre performance and installation project The Hong Kong Plague of 1894 (Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences and CACHe, 2014) , light installation Cabinet of Curiosities (2016) in group exhibition PseudoCollection - What Do Artists Collect (1a Space, 2016), site-specific light installation-performance Morbid Anatomy (Pathology Teaching Laboratory, 2016), and solo light installation Memento Mori: Sonata for Light (Lumenvisum, 2017). Her recent online lecture performance Remembrance of Amnesia (2020), reflecting on pandemic and memory in Hong Kong, was presented in My Documents | Share your screen! , the online performance series created and curated by renowned Argentinian theatre maker Lola Arias, and streamed on YouTube and the digital platforms of Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt am Main, Kampnagel Hamburg and Münchner Kammerspiele of Germany, and Kaserne Basel of Switzerland.
Amy crosses the borders between different communities, media and disciplines. She is the long-term artistic collaborator and tutor of St James Creation, the artist workshop and gallery under St James' Settlement with special attention to people of Trisomy 21 (Down Syndrome) and autism, for more than 10 years. She also collaborates with artists of different disciplines, with particular interest in light-music collaborations in projects such as World Premieres and Hong Kong Premieres of works by international and local composers including Alvin Lucier, John Luther Adams and Chan Sze-rok, as well as light-Cantonese opera collaboration in The Fable of the Ungrateful Wolf (PSi25, 2019).
As a lighting designer, director, performer and playwright working for various productions since 1991, she has designed lighting for over 80 theatre productions, art gallery and installations, including A Tree to be Found, the installation artwork in Para/Site in 2003, the award-winner of Hong Kong Arts Biennial 2003 and the collection of Hong Kong Museum of Art. Her original autobiographical theatre performance Two girls from Ngau Tau Kok (as co-creator, co-director, performer and lighting designer) has re-run in various venues for 5 times throughout 9 years. The play was adapted into a graphic novel of the same title and an English radio play broadcasted in the Worldplay series 2003 of BBC world channel. The original Chinese script and the translated English script were published respectively.
A Master of Fine Arts (with distinction) graduate of Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, major in lighting design with core research on light in postdramatic theatre, her artistic research has been presented in various international conferences such as The Congress of the Society for Theatre Studies of Germany and Performance Studies International annual conferences, and is published in peer-reviewed journal Critical Stages. She was an invited speaker of the Postdramatic Theatre Worldwide Symposium (2019) in Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Germany, discussing the resonance and perspectives of postdramatic theatre in Hong Kong and on her own light-theatre works 20 years after the first publication of internationally renowned theatre scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann's groundbreaking book.
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