Three Times at Yamato Hotel
2019 - Photography (Photography)
89 x 128, 85 x 43 cm, 85 x 43 cm
Luka Yuanyuan Yang
Composed of three photographic panels, Three Times at Yamato Hotel by Luka Yuanyuan Yang is a part of the artist’s ongoing project Dalian Mirage , a seven act play in a theatre staged as the city of Dalian. This modern city was built by the Russian Empire in 1898 and occupied by Japan between 1905 and 1945. Based on historical investigations, Yang created ten characters, including a Dalian-born Japanese writer and a Dalian-born American immigrant. The characters from different time periods visit the city for one day, passing through the urban spaces: a harbour, staircase, square, hotel, street and theatre. Overlapping time and space, the montage depicts how the world, at each instant, is defined by fragments and moments from the past. These three photographs of the Yamato Hotel restaurant in Dalian, respectively shot in the 1930s, 1980s and the present, are interwoven in the central panel of the work. Built by the Russians, occupied by the Japanese, and returned to the Chinese after 1945, the Yamato Hotel is also famous for having hosted the last Emperor of China, Pu Yi, in 1931. The left and right panels feature the interior design and decorative paintings of the hotel at three different time periods: Japanese occupation, the early stage of economic reform, and the present. As such, the work reveals the long-term colonial history of Dalian that is rarely mentioned in textbooks about Chinese history. Highlighting the changes that the restaurant went through over the years, the work unfolds the complexities of identity—demonstrating how it is not fixed, but is instead a fluid, non-linear continuum.
Luka Yuanyuan Yang is a photographer, filmmaker and visual artist based in Beijing. Spanning film, photography, artist books and performance (they are often intertwined in her projects), her work addresses questions related to identity, trauma, memory, ethnicity, migration, and mythology. Mixing documentary materials and fictional narratives, her visual storytelling challenges the rigid and conventional interpretation of history and gives voice to communities and individuals that have often been forgotten, silenced, or misinterpreted.
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