OnApril 6, the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies debuted the final stage of their female dragon sculpture project at Hill Auditorium in collaboration with feminist artist Zhen Guo. Guo, alongside University of Michigan professors and students, built the dragon’s body, composed music for the performance and learned to dance the dragon. The dragon was built out of upcycled T-shirts and combines traditional Chinese crafting techniques with modern flair.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, LRCC Outreach Coordinator Carol Stepanchuk said planning started in 2024, the Year of the Dragon. She said the project was originally intended as a smaller collaboration with the Detroit Institute of Arts, but has since grown significantly.
“We were thinking about building the head and then the body,” Stepanchuk said. “But then once you build it, you want to dance it — and that requires music, and that requires getting faculty and students involved on that end and then performing it, to find dancers, to recruit dancers, to dance the dragon at various public art sites.”
Stepanchuk said Guo was chosen to lead the artistic vision for the dragon because of her unique background in traditional crafts — which she developed during the Cultural Revolution — and her willingness to experiment with those techniques.
“During the Cultural Revolution, she’s working in the countryside … where she learned embroidery and sewing, and a lot of the folk crafts and traditional crafts,” Stepanchuk said. “Zhen Guo just had such an interesting background, the right background to bring craft to this really important aspect to tradition, but also to reinvent this in a new and creative way.”
The LLRC invited Guo to fly from New York City to Ann Arbor for a short artist-in-residence stay, where she put the finishing touches on the dragon’s head. As a part of an LLRC collection of projects highlighting dragons, she also performed live calligraphy on Sept. 21, 2025 at University of Michigan Museum of Art’s “Dragons Everywhere All At Once” event, which won a city of Ann Arbor 2025 Golden Paintbrush Award.
In an interview with The Daily, Guo said she made the dragon female because, despite their historical significance, female dragons have mostly disappeared from popular culture.
“In the old traditional stories, they do have female dragons,” Guo said. “(Now) mostly in people’s mind, that’s a male image. … We could make something that nobody else seen before.”
Guo said the dragon is meant to be a powerful symbol of femininity. She made the dragon’s tongue stick out in reference to the Hindu goddess Kali, who Guo said is often criticized by people as “scary” despite possessing great power she uses to kill demons. Additionally, the final project was designed to be unmistakably female.
“Kali is a Hindu goddess, and she represents women’s power to me, because in the book, in the religion, it says she’s an ugly woman, but she has so much power,” Guo said. “I mean this dragon, very beautiful, has a feminine kind of smell, atmosphere, looks. You know when you see it; you can’t make a mistake thinking that this is a female, woman dragon.”
Music, Theatre, & Dance graduate student Mary Denney was tasked by performing arts professor Julie Zhu to create an electronic piece — which she titled “Sky Dragons” — to accompany the dancing dragon during performances.
In an interview with The Daily, Denney said she took inspiration from an abstract dragon pot in the UMMA collection, looping video game music and the ouroboros to incorporate cyclical elements into her piece. She said, while the piece does have an ending, it could loop forever.
“I wrote something that had two distinct halves, but could eventually loop back and forth,” Denny said. “One of the ways I approached structuring the piece was maybe giving the semblance of something that does have a definitive ending, but could potentially be eternal.”
Denney said she felt a connection that transcended time between herself and the original artists who inspired her while composing the piece.
“I almost feel like these centuries-long gaps between me and the original artists who created the work are kind of non-existent because both of these things are kind of existing in the present moment,” Denney said. “It’s almost like time traveling, a little bit. Of maybe finding a way to bring this artwork into the future while also still preserving the historic legacy of it.”
Daily Staff Reporter Rebecca Borlace can be reached at rborlace@umich.edu.
