She grew up in Australia listening to Teresa Teng, but singer Rainbow Chan is inspired by the fading dialect and culture of her mother’s home village in Hong Kong
- Rainbow Chan grew up in Australia listening to Teresa Teng and Faye Wong but is drawn to the culture and dialect songs of her mother’s Hong Kong village
- By learning to sing the songs and incorporating them in her music she is helping preserve them, and satisfying her own longing for a city she left as a child
Weitou is a Cantonese dialect still used by older generations in parts of Hong Kong – it is what was spoken before British colonisation, when the territory was a collection of farming and fishing communities.
For one Chinese-Australian musician and multidisciplinary artist, it is the main source of her inspiration as she uses her craft and creativity to keep the dialect and associated rural culture alive.
Rainbow Chan Chun-yin was born in Hong Kong before moving with her family to Australia at the age of six, and has not forgotten her roots. If anything, her upbringing seems to have made her appreciate them even more.
She recalls not having many friends who were people of colour, but her parents, who ran a suburban Chinese restaurant, made sure she remained connected to her origins while encouraging her pursuits in music and art.
The heritage of her mother’s side of the family – the Weitou speakers of Tong Tau Po Village in Yuen Long, in the northeast New Territories – is closest to her heart.
There’s this idea of belonging, of losing your home and going to a new place, that I think resonates with a lot of young people in Hong Kong
“Her ancestry can be traced back to one of the five clans that first settled in Hong Kong,” Chan says.
In some Han Chinese subcultures, a bridal lament cycle is a ritual that occurs before a wedding (often an arranged marriage), in which the bride sings and weeps in front of her family and friends to signify her profound sorrow at severing ties to her natal home.
Like many indigenous cultures around the world, the customs and traditions of New Territories villages, and the Weitou dialect, have been fading away for decades. The tradition of bridal laments, for instance, ended in the 1960s, and the only women who still embody that knowledge are in their eighties and nineties.
Chan wishes to reveal the relevance of this dying oral tradition to contemporary society. “There’s this idea of belonging, of losing your home and going to a new place, that I think resonates with a lot of young people in Hong Kong,” she says.
To Chan, music and art are her ways to navigate the challenges of life and highlight the beauty in everyday things.
[I’m] always looking at representation and identity and playing with the idea of authenticity
“Often my work is inspired by love, loss, longing and the fragmentation of memories,” she says. “I like to combine chopped-up field recordings with electronics and instruments such as saxophone, guitar and piano, and then layer my voice on top of these ideas multiple times.”
Through digital manipulation, warping and collage, Chan reimagines sounds to depict her homesickness for Hong Kong and her mother’s lineage.
As for her art, Chan says: “I’ve always had an interest in painting and drawing, so it made sense for me to express these Weitou lyrics in a way that extends beyond music, by translating these songs into paintings.”
Currently, she is learning traditional weaving for an installation that will also include snippets of conversations with her family.
As a woman of colour in Australia, she has long questioned the notion of representation, she says.
“Now, my work has become more focused on Weitou culture, but at the end of the day [I’m] always looking at representation and identity and playing with the idea of authenticity – I feel like authenticity doesn’t really exist. We’re always constantly recycling or reinventing ourselves or building an image.”
As part of Art Basel Hong Kong’s 2023 programme, Rainbow Chan will participate in “Mirror, Mirror: On the Transgressive Art of Cantopop and Performance”, a talk in which she will discuss her work with two other contemporary artists, Sin Wai Kin and Ming Wong, in the context of Cantopop as an evolving popular culture.
