Hair and Piano Wire: Echo Morgan and Du Chau at the Crow Museum of Asian Art, Dallas

Key facts

• Echo Morgan (Xie Rong) created a 30-foot-long painting using her hair as a brush during a six-day performance in April 2025 at the Crow Museum's UT Dallas campus in Richardson.
• The painting, 'You Don't Always See a Rainbow After Rain,' is titled after a 1990s Faye Wong ballad.
• Xie painted her face white daily, drew the Chinese character for the day's color, and brushed her hair in a ritual mirroring her mother's pre-wedding routine.
• The final day's color was purple, the color of scars, referencing her and her mother's birth scars and her father's squandering of family resources before dying alone at 59.
• The exhibition includes a telephone piece, 'Ring Ring from Rong Rong,' inviting viewers to leave messages for their mothers.
• Du Chau's 'Seeds of Memory' documents his great-grandmother's rice farming and his mother's barred chemistry studies due to gender.
• 'Last Rain IV' features over 1,400 hand-rolled porcelain coils forming willow branches, activated hourly by staff to create chimes.
• Chau grew up in postwar Vietnam, collecting rain in buckets, jars, and containers.
• Both exhibitions are at the Crow Museum of Asian Art in Downtown Dallas; 'The Rainbow My Mother Shows Me' runs through October 11, 2026, and 'Tracing the Threads of Memory' through March 14, 2027.