Homeroom Presents:
Comfort Music +
a live music + performance series, every Thursday in April at Comfort Station.
$ suggested donation
Comfort Station
2579 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, IL
Thursday, April 6th
7pm doors, 7:30pm show
Mallory Qiu's Choo-Choo-Choo-Choo Station
Featuring Kyriakos Apostolidis, Gordon Fung, J Jiang, Che Pai, Mallory Yanhan Qiu, and Yezhou Zheng
Cho-Cho-Cho-Choo Station is a site-specific performance responding to the history of comfort station as the transition station between train and bus at the edge of the city of Chicago and now changed to the form of an art venue which naturally bears the culture and history throughout time.
This 90-minute piece takes the audience on a journey to different connections with ghosts in different times and spaces. J Jiang’s captivating reading text guides the audience through the experience. Mallory Yanhan Qiu, Che Pai, and Gordon Fung use movement, sound, live projection, and objects to immerse the audience in a world of imagination and wonder. The journey reaches its climax on the outdoor lawn, where Kyriakos Apostolidis and Yezhou Zheng create a mesmerizing visual experience through live video projection and physical movement.
Artist Bios
Mallory Yanhan Qiu
Mallory Yanhan Qiu(b. 2000, Chongqing, China) is a Chicago-based artist and curator who deeply passionate about live sound performance, sonic studies, body movement, poetry, and digital visuals. She draws inspiration from physical sensations and biological movements, aiming to flip the familiar and discover memory-laden places that coexist both near and far. Qiu holds a BFA in Sound and Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has performed at Compound Yellow, Epiphany Center for the Arts, Elastic Arts, Mana Contemporary, {} () {} ∆ ‡ | () {} Nonation Art Lab, Research House for Asian Art, SAIC, and Tritriangle.
WEBSITE: https://www.mallory-qiu.com
IG: @qiumallory
J Jiang
J Jiang (b. 2000, Shanghai, China) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago and Shanghai. She is pursuing BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Jiang uses art to live through boringness in a singular reality. She degrades objects to their literal contents by visible, invisible, and locations, then reassembles them to construct an alternative and possible reality which is legitimate in materiality but out of the shared experience. Imagining the uncontrollable subject, boringness is replaced by an awareness of the existential crisis and the agency to misbehave.
IG: @theashesofmymind
Che Pai
Che Pai (b. 1988; Taipei, Taiwan) is a multidisciplinary artist whose inspiration comes from studies in literature, slow cinema, and the physical theatre of Tai Chi. Through these practices, his awareness is fully opened; internal sensations of the body hence flow like water. The photographs, movements, and moving images serve as mediums through which the inner state resonates with happenstances.
Che holds an MA degree in Literature from National Taiwan University, and since then he embraces collaboration with artists. He had been working with award-winning director Hsin Yin Sung as a researcher, organizing shows for Ta-Chao Production as the leading performer, and programming educational events at the National Center of Photography and Images in Taiwan.
WEBSITE: https://paichejeff.wixsite.com/chepai/single-project
IG: @chechepai
Gordon Fung
Gordon Fung (b. 1988, San Francisco) is a transdisciplinary artist who primarily works with experimental film/video, noise music, multi-/new media performances, DIY electronics, digital art, programming, and installations. His works highlight unconventional executions like noises, lo-fi presentations, and glitches. Such aesthetics confronts the viewers’ understanding, perspective, and point of view through a more philosophical, if not esoteric, investigation.
To expand the possibilities of artistic idioms, he intertwines both analog and digital technologies—also to signify the co-existence of mundane and spiritual worlds. By overloading software and hardware, he collapses the two worlds to expand the audience’s perception of reality. As a break-maker, he employs circuit-bending to regain consumers’ sense of agency through artistic means. His involvement in media archeology strives to unearth unexplored potentials of obsolete equipment and to revive them to artistic life.
Informed by his multivalent aesthetics, he forms the collective //sense at SAIC to showcase time-based artists’ works through performances, workshops, and seminars. By curating experimental performances, he fosters a collaborative common ground for sound/video/performance/electronic artists to create gesamtkunstwerk through synergy.
As a runaway composer in contemporary music, his compositions have been performed in Canada, China, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, and the USA.
WEBSITE: https://gordondfung.wordpress.com/
IG: @gordon.d.fung
Yezhou Zheng
WEBSITE: https://vimeo.com/user84890550
IG: @zhengyezhou_
Kyriakos Apostolidis
Kyriakos Apostolidis (b.1991) is a performance artist from Greece. Exploring the term Morphoplastic, Apostolidis's art research deals with the concept of living sculpture in performance art. How the body is able to render symbolic forms of human existence through its movement plasticity, by activating the expressive potentials of the so-called “body intelligence”.
Apostolidis graduated from the School of Visual and Applied Arts at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki (2017), and also studied at the Facultad de Bellas Artes, Universidad de Granada (2014). Currently, he is pursuing his MFA in Performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with the support of Alexis Minotis's endowment scholarship "In Memory of Katina Paxinos", administered by the National Bank Cultural Foundation (MIET).
IG: @kyriakos_apostolidis