Dance in Herland

Dance in Herland surveys artist Luka Yuanyuan Yang’s cinematic oeuvre, including her feature-length production Chinatown Cha-Cha and five short films centered on diasporic Chinese communities. The book picks up where the films end, serving as both a reflection and a complement, while also creating a new narrative. The book brings together hundreds of archival materials from photo albums, rare and invaluable oral histories, creative writings, and interviews with scholars. Over nearly a year of editing, we felt like revisiting 20th-century San Francisco and Cuba, tracing history through the neons of Chinatown and the echoes of Cantonese opera. For the dancers and performers documented in this book, their bodies act as living archives; their memories and unspoken emotions may be concealed in their steps, fingertips, and gazes.Additionally, the design duo Studio Pianpian He and Max Harvey transformed the books into a vessel of collective memory through their design. They used papers in various colors to separate different oral history backgrounds. The designers delicately captured visual elements marked by the era from the archive, infusing the book with new charm grounded in the aesthetics of the last century.