By Luka Yuanyuan Yang

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. Bringing together hundreds of archival materials from photo albums, rare and invaluable oral histories, creative writings, and interviews with scholars, Dance in Herland invites readers to revisit 20th-century San Francisco and Cuba, tracing history through the neon signs 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.

Designers Pianpian He and Max Harvey have transformed the book into a vessel of collective memory through their design, using papers in various colors to separate different oral history backgrounds. The design approach delicately captures visual elements marked by the era from the archive, infusing the book with new charm grounded in the aesthetics of the last century.

Designed by Studio Pianpian He and Max Harvey

Published by Te Editions, 2025
Bilingual, in Chinese and English

Softcover, 334 pages, full color offset printing, 7.25 × 10.2 inches

ISBN: 979-8-98-901703-4