If The Sky Could Dream
If the Sky Could Dream combines drawing, painting, dance, community art, found materials and found spaces to reveal and celebrate dragons among us—
February 9, 2024-February 8, 2025
Sky Woman
Storywork: Impression at Krannert Art Museum
and
Activation of Sky Dances Light at Kavi Gupta Gallery
Performances with the prints and sculptures of Marie Watt, September and October 2023
Turn of the Tide
What does it mean to be both inhabitant and destroyer of this place?
Collaboration with Jennifer Wen Ma, EXPO Chicago, April 10-16, 2023
Blue Alice
A character, a performance, an exhibition(ist)
Site-specific durational performance with sculptural costume
June 2021-
In Place
In Place occurs in multiple ways, places, and times and occurs with different collaborators in different moment, known and unknown, intentional and occasional and transient, working synchronously and asynchronously, just as we exist in time and space.
2021-2022
Yellow Alice
Yellow Alice plays on the collage, colors, forms, and Bauhaus influence in Claudia Wieser’s two-dimensional and sculptural works—and Wassily Kandinsky’s description of the yellow triangle: “energetic, luminous, psychotic.”
Premiered April 11, 2022
Translated Vase
Two performances inspired by Yeesookyung’s Translated Vase in Porcelain: Material and Storytelling at the Smart Museum of Art.
Premiered March 2, 2022.
Passage
Passage
Installation and Performance at High Concept Labs and Mana Contemporary Chicago
Performance with Kinetech Arts at ODC, San Francisco
October 23–24, 2021
Deep Far Home
Performance in/response to Deep Far Home, Chicago Textile Week, Epiphany Center for the Arts.
September 24, 2021
Vessel
A ship, a channel, a chamber, a chalice, a creature, a carafe, a woman, a cloud, a sound: Vessel.
April, September 2020
When we call the Earth…
Durational performance with Christine Tarkowski’s When we call the Earth by way of distinction a planet and the Moon a satellite, we should consider whether we do not, in a certain sense, mistake the matter. Perhaps- and not unlikely – the Moon is the planet and the Earth the satellite! Are we not a larger moon to the Moon, than she is to us?
June 14, 2021
Body Letters | Cartas Corporais
We didn’t speak the same language, so we exchanged body letters.
October 2020
Transformation
Three performances inspired by Yin Xiuzhen’s Transformation in The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China, Wrightwood 659 and Smart Museum of Art, 2020. Premiered October 20, 2020 on https://theallureofmatter.org/transformation/
Merely a Mistake: A Score for your Door
Community art project inspired by Liu Wei’s Merely a Mistake II, no. 7 in The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China at Wrightwood 659. Premiered September 7, 2020 at https://theallureofmatter.org/merely-a-mistake-a-score-for-your-door
The Allure of Matter
Ongoing series with The Allure of Matter exhibition, Smart Museum of Art and Wrightwood 659
2020–
Black Flame
Live, audience-participatory Zoom performance with a cappella singing and at-home art-making, inspired by Liu Jianhua’s Black Flame in The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China, Wrightwood 659. Premiered June 12, 2020 at the Smart Museum of Art.
Score for an Unfinished Dance
Score for evening-length audience participatory performance in The Allure of Matter exhibition at Wrightwood 659, scheduled for April 2020, cancelled due to COVID-19 pandemic on March 12, 2020.
Remembrance at Nuclear Energy
Annual ritual with Henry Moore’s Nuclear Energy
2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023
49 encounters with chiçiçiçichiciçi
Experiments, June 5-23, 2019 with Cevdet Erek’s chiçiçiçichiciçi at the Art Institute of Chicago
Untitled: After Tang Chang
Inspired by the exhibition, Tang Chang: The Painting That Is Painted With Poetry Is Profoundly Beautiful, premiered at the 2018 A-Squared Asian American Performing Arts Festival at Links Hall November 8 and … Continue reading
DIALOGO DIALOGO
October 6, 2018 Commissioned by the Smart Museum of Art for Dialogo: Virginio Ferrari and Chicago Premiere performance of Dialogo Dialogo, a new improvisatory dance installation choreographed by Irene Hsiao … Continue reading
Inside My Room Is Another Fish Bowl
Studies in Philippe Parreno’s My Room Is Another Fish Bowl (2016) at the Art Institute of Chicago, February 7-April 15, 2018. How wonderful to be a fish, always forgetting, always … Continue reading
The Radiant and the Dead
Created with Connor Plunkett and India Weston for the Smart Museum of Art’s Radioactive Party, 18 January 2018, with Emmanuel Pratt’s Radical (Re)Constructions. About pollen, smoke, repetition, impact, a house … Continue reading
Monster Studies
I study monsters. Ongoing studies inspired by Monster Roster: Existentialist Art in Postwar Chicago at the Smart Museum of Art.
Mad Rush
Mad Rush, film created with Le Wang, developed from a dance of the same title choreographed in January 2013. Below is a 90-second trailer. Mad Rush — Trailer from Mad … Continue reading
Letter from Taipei
Letter from Taipei is a picture book I made while teaching English at National Taipei University of Technology. It traces color and its absence and attempts to document the extraordinary … Continue reading
Jaerin Son’s Dogs or Cats; Augmented Body at Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theater, January 26-28, 2023
The dialogue that unfolds between Human and Bot is beautifully disorienting as it reveals the arbitrary nature of customs in a world still run by humans and the unconstrained possibility of imagined alternatives
Irene Hsiao 