Harmke Datema-Chang

My story in COVID times. Before COVID happened I had undergone some huge changes in my life. My mother didn’t grow up in a Chinese culture but in an orphanage she couldn’t pass the Chinese heritage to me and my Chinese grandfather was for me a legendary figure of my imagination. I only met him a few times in my life which were very precious moments. I tried in my life to merge in Dutch society but I found out after the Master of Arts in Amsterdam that the western bubble I was living in didn’t feel good.

I took the courageous step to brake with my old life by divorcing my husband and spent time in an Art residency in Leiden in the Netherlands. Here I start further questioning the lack of other non western cultures and knowledges in my life. The resident was lead by Santiago Pani grandson of the famous architect (Mario Pani). He had two artists friends called Pierre Fudaryli and Ricardo Santos and the meeting with them was magical in the way of creating together. They had started a community of artists in Mexico-City called NoEsUnaGaleria and I joined the community, which gave me a new boost in my career and more knowledge about myself, other people and the world.

After four long work periods in Mexico I started a small artist in residency in Utrecht as a dependance of NoEsUnaGaleria to work together with artists around the world. In that way I could create within an global community were I could feel at home meanwhile still taking care of my two children in the Netherlands.

I started to focus more on painting and made 40 paintings during the COVID lockdown.

When the first COVID lockdown was going on I lived and worked together with a Mexican artist called Mario Gildardo. It was meaningful and interesting to spend a time so long with someone from an complete different kind of world. We were creating a lot during this year and start building expos together and helping each other to survive. We made an solo and a collaboration expo in the Nijverheid, which is a cultural center and community of fifty other artists were my studio is placed. Here we connected to more different people from other cultures and they joined our global community.

During that period I started to create my own mixed cultural heritage. Because the imaginary world we create can be as strong as real culture. In my paintings I demolished my sense of the world and life into more complex shapes that makes intriguing puzzles to the audience. Everyone has their different view of what their seeing. And so is it with the mind and the world. Human or alien, different perspectives, background story’s and images. No image or story is the same.

Though I didn’t know if I could survive by only painting I create everyday against all other priorities in a form of resistance to create my own cultural heritage of paintings. Francis Ro made a interview about this and you can find the results on her Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/tv/CNLPu9ClkvZ/?igshid=1qhj7x9o4wkwk

Because in the Netherlands exhibitions were not possible from November til March, Mario Gildardo and I were flying to Mexico in January. The results of my new heritage paintings I took to NoEsUnaGaleria in Mexico-City to expose in a solo exposition called the Dutch Dragon in January 2021 Poligono.

I also starting to join the online auction of NoEsUnaGaleria were my painting get sold. In between all this I also worked on two large scaled sculptures which are going to be placed this summer in the Netherlands. One of them is A new History which involves the artwork of a cultural diverse school in the Netherlands. In the artwork the new cultural heritage of teenage children is placed. They did research about there own heritage and were stimulated to invent there own. This sculpture is in that way very relating to my own experience of the past years.

COVID time was for me and many artists not an easy time but the community of global artists show their great capacity and creativity in working together as artists friends to deal with this situation. I am proud of this community because we manage to sell our art in an selfmade online auction on instagram and we helped each other in exposing and dealing with selling art to buyers and collectors.

We are growing together and that is what made us even stronger during COVID times and I think this is something that the western art world have to learn more.