RAINBOW CHAN

In 2022, Chan was recognised in the ‘40 Under 40: Most Influential Asian Australians Award’ for her contribution to arts and culture. She won ‘Artist of the Year’ in the 2022 FBi SMAC Awards. In October 2023, Chan will premiere ‘The Bridal Lament’, a one-woman music and performance work that explores an obsolete wedding ritual of the Weitou people.

Chan’s highly anticipated EP Stanley was released on UK label, Eastern Margins (2021). Her sophomore record Pillar (Independent, 2019) was feature album on community radio stations nationwide and was nominated for the Australian Music Prize. Her debut record Spacings (Silo Arts & Records, 2016) was nominated for FBi SMAC Record of the Year and AIR Best Dance/Electronica Album, with its single Nest being FBi Radio’s most played song that year. Lifted from the EP Fabrica (Healthy Tapes, 2017), her single Let Me won the FBi SMAC Award for Best Song.

Chan has performed at renowned venues and festivals including Sydney Opera House, Vivid, MONA FOMA, Gallery of Modern Art, Melbourne Music Week, Iceland Airwaves, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, and Tai Kwun (Hong Kong). Her works have been exhibited with Firstdraft Gallery, Liquid Architecture, Artspace, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and I-Project Space, Beijing. In 2020, Chan was part of Artspace’s One Year Studio Program and was selected as the Performance Space x West Kowloon Exchange resident artist. “Songs from a Walled Village”, her documentary for ABC Radio National, was a finalist in the 2021 Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union Prizes. Chan was a finalist in the 2021/22 NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship (Artspace, Create NSW and NAS).

With a flair for nuanced songwriting, Chan is signed to Gaga Music Publishing and composes for film, television and theatre. Works include: ABC documentary, The Glass Bedroom (2017), a live score for AGNSW’s Starburst: Chinese Film Season (2018), theme song for 7am’s Everybody Knows podcast, an original soundtrack for short film Butter directed by Anita Lee (2022), and composition and sound design for Golden Blood written by Merlynn Tong and directed by Tessa Leong, Griffin Theatre (2022).

Chan is a passionate mentor and has worked with MusicNSW, I.C.E Parramatta, Hack Sounds and Bunga Barrabugu programs at Sydney Conservatorium where she teaches songwriting and production in Contemporary Music Practice. She is a board member of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.

Text courtesy the artist