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Sobey

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The Image Centre

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ArtMuseum

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Steph Wong Ken is a writer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary) and her work has appeared in Catapult, LUMA Quarterly and other publications. [stephwongken.com](http://stephwongken.com)

Guest Editor

Joy Xiang is an editor, writer, and poet based in Toronto, where she is currently the Editor of _C Magazine_. 

Editor

Maandeeq Mohamed is a writer and researcher. Engaging Black Studies and related cultural production, her writing is featured in _Real Life_, _C Magazine_, and _Canadian Art_. 

Reviews Editor

Designer

Publisher

Chinatowns are complex sites that embody shared histories of survival spanning generations, amidst ongoing struggles with displacement and anti-Asian racism. Guest edited by Steph Wong Ken, this issue gathers artistic explorations of Chinatowns across Canada to reinterpret and reimagine their pasts, presents, and futures. From architectural shifts and hidden stories within their visual representation, to building community bonds through a garden, queer diasporic library, and pact against gentrification, Chinatown is revealed as a home for multitudes.


Chinatown

Review

Karina Roman Justo is an emerging writer, researcher, and educator whose practice focuses on decolonial theories. She is currently an MA Art History candidate at Concordia University.

 “Replicas and Reunions” transforms the entrance of the Gardiner Museum to reference the Historical and Artisanal Museum of La Pila, a rural coastal town in Ecuador where the selected figures were originally excavated from. The pink walls of the exhibition mimic the pink of the referent’s space, turning part of the Gardiner’s entrance hall into an extension of the museum in La Pila.  

 

Curated by Maya Wilson-Sanchez, “Replicas and Reunions” includes ceramics that travel between Ecuador and Canada, raising key questions about where artefacts contained within museum collections really belong. Inside a long horizontal vitrine, the ceramic figures from the Gardiner are paired with their replicas. These doubles were made by Andrés López, Genaro López, Daniel Mezones, Javier Rivera, and Guillermo Quijije, skilled ceramists from La Pila, who worked in consultation with artist Pamela Cevallos, founder of La Pila’s Historical and Artisanal Museum. Distinctive jewellery and dress are sculpted onto the paired earthenware figures. In _Standing Female Figure_ (400 BCE–500 CE), and its replica made by Andrés López (2022), garments pigmented with ochre and green catch the eye. Rooted in the Jama Coaque culture, the figurine wears a prominent nose ornament and a majestic headpiece with two long strips falling on both sides. In the vitrine, the figure’s face is turned away from the viewer, and instead faces its “original” partner, as if engaging in conversation. This interaction between the original and the replica dispels these very same categories, connecting them beyond aesthetics, all while evoking a family reunion across generations and centuries. The artistry of these contemporary makers employs techniques and resources from the ceramic traditions of La Pila, where the Gardiner’s collection items originally came from. Wilson-Sanchez’s research and curations asks of us: who is to define what makes an original?  

This critical revisitation of the Gardiner Museum’s permanent collection interrogates the origins of ceramic figures from the institution’s Ancient Americas collection. According to the Gardiner, this collection includes “at least 24 ceramic objects from Ecuador purchased from auction houses in New York City and from American art dealers.” _An Odyssey_ (2022) traces these histories with small-scale ceramic scenes by Cevallos and Quijije sequentially depicting how artefacts arrive at the Western museum. Scenes from an excavation site, a local restoration workshop, and a Sotheby’s auction, as well as a miniature of the Gardiner Museum take on a humorous and metanarrative tone, pointing to institutional collecting practices.  

 

Far from ending at the Gardiner’s entrance, this exhibition follows the visitor to the museum’s Ancient Americas section. In the empty spaces left by ceramics moved to the vitrines are playful notes informing visitors that “this object has been temporarily removed. It has been too much time since it heard the ocean.” Perhaps this is a proposal for these reunions to take place outside of museum walls, maybe someday back home in La Pila.  

Writer

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“Replicas and Reunions: Ancient and Contemporary Ceramics from Ecuador” includes work from Pamela Cevallos, Andrés López, Genaro López, Daniel Mezones, Javier Rivera, and Guillermo Quijije, and runs from 10 November 2022 to 12 March 2023 at  Gardiner Museum, Toronto.

“Replicas and Reunions: Ancient and Contemporary Ceramics from Ecuador”

“Replicas and Reunions: Ancient and Contemporary Ceramics from Ecuador” — Pamela Cevallos, Andrés López, Genaro López, Daniel Mezones, Javier Rivera, Guillermo Quijije 

**Shaneela Boodoo** (she/her) is a graduate of the University of Manitoba with a BFA (Honours) in Design and is also a recent graduate of the University of Winnipeg with an MA in Cultural Studies. She is a second-generation Indo-Caribbean immigrant, born and based in Winnipeg, MB. As an emerging artist, designer, and curator, Boodoo explores the entanglements of themes such as colonialism, dis placement, and womanhood. 


##### _C Magazine_ would like to congratulate Shaneela Boodoo on winning the 2022 C New Critics Award, and Stephanie Weber on being named the runner-up. Now in its 13th consecutive year, this program gives _C Magazine_ the opportunity to identify, support, and promote the work of promising new writers, who often become regular contributors. _C_ sincerely thanks all those who applied, as well as the jurors of this year’s award: Nataleah Hunter-Young, Maandeeq Mohamed, and Hagere Selam “shimby” Zegeye-Gebrehiwot. Measures were taken to ensure that the identity of entrants remained unknown to adjudicators. 


In a room bathed in light periwinkle, with candles flickering and gentle music tinkling, entering “begin to be; have become” at TakeHome BIPOC Arts felt like bending the heaviness of the present to something bright and gleaming. Formally established in early 2021, TakeHome BIPOC Arts House is the only artist-run centre dedicated solely to BIPOC artists in Winnipeg. Despite the minimal resources available to this young arts organization, the comprehensive exhibition encompassed photography, beading, and painting. Installations like Rae Swan’s _How Lucky To Be Made For This (2)_ (2021) and Lan “Florence” Yee’s _PROOF—Anti-Displacement Chinatown Garden_ (2020) floated in mid-air, oblivious to the confines of gravity. The recurrent use of suspension across “begin to be; have become” suggests a shared otherworldly ethos— one of amorphous beings not bound to Earth. Curated by Ren Lam, “begin to be; have become” is optimistic about the future by looking into the past, rejecting the overrepresentation of queer trauma by asking: _who have we always been? Who can we become outside of colonial violence?_
 
In Kole Peplinskie’s _Ancestor’s Embrace_ (2021), an installation featuring a flat A4-sized, two-sided piece of printed fabric is hung at eye level from a delicate chain attached to a maple branch with deer-hide loops. On one side, there is a photograph of a shirtless person, with tattoos and visible surgical scars on their chest. Sitting on a wooden chair surrounded by trees, the figure gazes into the camera as two beaded branches snake down and hold them close. One leaf stretches upward toward the person’s chest, as if to say: _I see you, and I am here_. The translucent fabric allows sunlight to pass through the work, as the person and the beaded branches shimmer, imbued with the brightness of the sun. On the opposite side of the fabric, the subject sits against the tree trunk. Pictured next to the subject’s face are two beaded profiles, one of which gazes at the subject with its hair flowing up and away. Peplinskie’s painstaking, laborious beading embeds these figures into the natural world, as if to say that by putting forth the effort to nurture the work of ancestral connection, forebearers will return the embrace, transforming you into beings that are as beautiful and shiny as they are. 

Photographs printed on fabric also hang mid-air in Lan “Florence” Yee’s _PROOF_ series. In _PROOF—Anti-Displacement Chinatown Garden_, a photograph captures two empty wooden chairs, sitting atop a platform, surrounded by flowers and other wild greenery. The word “PROOF” is repeatedly embroidered overtop. Embroidered onto the bottom left corner of the photo is a palette reflecting the range of colours in the image: black, green, sky blue, orange, and a creamy light yellow. Here, Yee’s embroidered details mimic the kind of features that would be present on a printer’s proof. According to the exhibition description, Yee grapples with the colonial power structures that inform state archives through the use of textiles “as an ode to self-defeat.” The ironic deployment of the proof format drives home the point that photos are “unable to capture all facets of lived experience.” Yee’s work asks many critical questions such as: _why is this practice of archiving touted as the best way to discover one’s history as a queer racialized person? What are the effects of this desire to document?_ Yee’s ultra-structured embroidery reminds us of the foundational limitations of sterile, institutionalized queer archives. Yee imparts that there must be room left for the messy, the illegible, and the imperfect, so that we may peer at the unseen. This obscuration lives between the cracks of a decaying structure, and if we look closely, we can catch a glimpse of something precious. 

I want to return to my opening questions: _who have we always been? Who can we become outside of colonial violence?_ The works in “begin to be; have become” feel unbound in their ponderings on gender and race, reflecting the labour of making a new home inside rich histories that seek to answer these questions. For Peplinskie, this labour is carried out by finding solace and showing love to oneself, the surrounding world, and the forebearers who shaped this same world. For Yee, they are determined to define their own fate through the painstaking labour of archival reconstruction that reminds us of the possibilities that open up when institutions fail. Ultimately, the aforementioned works are as fluid and boundless as time itself, traversing past, present, and future to finally become something that is unburdened and free.

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“begin to be; have become” included work by Kole Peplinskie, Rae Swan, Lan “Florence” Yee, and Helina Zegeye, and ran from 21 January to 25 February 2022 at TakeHome BIPOC Arts House, Winnipeg. Curated by Ren Lam. 


“begin to be; have become” — Kole Peplinskie, Rae Swan, Lan “Florence” Yee, Helina Zegeye

Olivia Kristoff is a writer and art historian based in Saskatoon, SK. She holds a BA in Art History from the University of Saskatchewan (2019) and is the curator at Wanuskewin Heritage Park. Olivia was raised in Treaty 6 territory, and is a member of Cowessess First Nation in Treaty 4. 

A retrospective covering her decades-long career, The Art of Faye HeavyShield, curated by Felicia Gay, highlights the immense impact the artist’s practice has had on the history of Indigenous art across the Prairie provinces, and so-called Canada at large. Since the beginning of her career, Faye HeavyShield’s work has incorporated aspects of her Kainai (Blood) heritage. Like her contemporaries Joi T. Arcand and Catherine Blackburn, HeavyShield emphasizes the importance of strengthening Indigenous cultures in a country that often continues to ignore the intergenerational trauma left from past and present colonial injustices.  

 

In _Wave_ (2018), a rope composed of printed digital photographs of prairie grass is arranged on the ground in the shape of a coil, much like a braid of sweetgrass. With each layer of the spiral bigger than the last, these “ripples” invoke the long-lasting influence of HeavyShield’s work on the Canadian cultural landscape. _Wave_ was created three years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission presented the executive summary of its findings and gave its recommendations in 2015. The concentric circles of roped–prairie grass photos visually articulate the echoing, ongoing colonial consequences that the settler state cannot be accountable to. This remains a standout piece in her body of work. 

Circular aesthetics are also prominent in _Sisters_ (1993)—an installation featuring six pairs of white shoes arranged in a circle. The pairs of shoes represent HeavyShield and her five sisters as a symbol of the strength of women. Like many Indigenous cultures in the Prairies, Blackfoot peoples are a matriarchal society, and women are integral to the success and strength of kin. As women are the core lifeblood of their society, HeavyShield pays homage to those in her family, with their relationality centred through each of the circle’s connecting points. With much of the artist’s inspiration coming from her life on the Blood Reserve and Blackfoot cultures, this approach to relationality, in terms of personal and communal experience continues to set her apart from other artists. 

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The Art of Faye HeavyShield  runs from 28 October 2022 to 19 February 2023 at the Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina.

The Art of Faye HeavyShield 

Artist Project

Simon Fuh is an artist and writer based in Toronto. His work spans a wide range of media, but coalesces around sound, installation, collaboration, and drawing. He tends to build relationships with friends and community through his work, often incorporating a performative or narrative element that influences the  trajectory of projects that explore themes of place, memory, and microhistory. 


**Sanaa Humayun** (she/her) is the child of Pakistani immigrants, currently residing in Mohkínstsis, on Treaty 7 land. She is an artist, writer, and curator exploring non-narrative storytelling, community, food, laughter, and an unapologetic love of gossip.


Simon Fuh is a Toronto-based artist, and working with him didn’t feel like work at all. I reached out to Simon because of the playfulness within his practice, often exploring temporary, site-specific installations and collaborations. This project takes an unconventional format, and planning together involved getting to know and understand each other. We talked often about the idea of relationship-building as art practice, and we tried to embody that through every level including our curatorial relationship, which didn’t follow a strict hierarchy or deadline.

I work in Calgary’s Chinatown and have for almost a year to the day from writing this. Calgary’s Chinatown spans just a few blocks, and as gentrification creeps in on either side, those borders continue to shrink. It’s so slow that you almost don’t notice. Restaurants, bars, coffee shops, spaces that have been here for years, sometimes decades, shut down quietly and without fanfare. The quiet exhaustion of unsustainability. My relationship to Chinatown is framed by the relationships I make with these spaces and the people who run them. It’s also marked by the gaps that are left when they leave. I had no preconceptions for this project other than wanting to create something that embodies the playful eccentricity of these spaces, compared to the stiff, cold, corporate façade of the rest of Calgary’s downtown.

Building a relationship over Zoom is strange and often stilted, and Simon and I spent a lot of time dreaming of what we wanted to create. Toronto and Calgary are vastly different cities, and as such their Chinatowns are different as well, considering sheer size alone. But common currents exist across both as landing places for immigrant communities, and we bonded over a mutual delight in our relationships to the small, locally owned spaces. Ones that exist earnestly and simply, where you can always find the owners, and build community through regular visits.

In Toronto, Apollo on Broadview Avenue is one such space. Located in east-end Chinatown, Apollo is a quiet, nondescript bar. The windows are covered with big metal barriers. The sign outside boasts its name in bright-yellow lettering, also featuring a cartoon monkey—a symbol for good fortune.

Walk into the Apollo and you’ll find grey walls, an internet jukebox, and a Molson Canadian flag. There’s a pool table and the bar sits toward the back. Francis, the owner, keeps the lights off over the pool table if no one is playing, so it’s often dark as you enter. But if you ask him to turn on the lights and get the jukebox going, the energy builds quickly. Most of the time, you’ll find a few regulars sitting at the bar chatting, or watching a game on the TVs. It’s clean behind the bar and a little haphazard—pitchers stacked on top of one another, along with a wok, old calendars, and miscellaneous papers. You can get one beer on tap; otherwise stick to bottles, or an obscure cooler. Francis is usually sitting there—he’s not shy, but maybe a little reserved. He’ll wait for you to start a conversation with him, but once you do he’s incredibly open.

Simon’s experience there is one that grows warmer with regularity. For him, Apollo is a place where anything can happen. There’s a sincerity to the bar— an honesty and a comfort in not trying to be anything other than what it is. It’s a space without frills, not catering to a specific clientele. To fit in there, you simply need to go. The space lets its patrons exist exactly as they are too.

As we discussed ideas, Simon revealed that he wanted to do something with this bar, his local Chinatown dive. We discussed giving a gift to Apollo, and to Francis. The question then became— what did Apollo need? Initially we decided on a bouquet of flowers. On a slow Monday night, Simon went over to the bar. When Simon recounted the evening to me, he set up the story slowly:

Simon orders a drink, sitting nervously, unsure of how to start a conversation. The TV plays quietly in the background and there are a couple of regulars at the bar. Francis recognizes Simon, but they’ve never really spoken, other than a bit of chit-chat here and there. Simon worries about explaining this project—if Francis will be interested, or confused. As he sits, he realizes that flowers don’t make sense for the space and that leaves him less sure-footed. Eventually he starts playing pool, and starts chatting and playing with some regulars around his age. Simon tells them what he wants to do. One of them knows Francis and has been coming to the bar since it opened, so he brings Simon up to introduce him. Simon tells Francis about the project and he’s not confused—he’s delighted. As the night unfolds, the energy grows and Simon learns more about Francis and the bar. Together, they decide that the gift will be a drawing of a monkey. Something that symbolizes good fortune, and an image Francis chose for the bar that is also representative of his daughter.

Two days later, Simon brought a framed drawing to the bar. _The Spirit of Apollo_ now hangs in the front, so everyone can see it when they walk in, at Francis’s insistence. This project lives outside of the magazine, in the relationships, gift-giving, and experience of building trust and community. Every part was rooted in the sweetness, intimacy, and care of these relations. Though giving Francis this gift was the centre of the work, it also means something far beyond it. The pictures Simon took are documentation—an archive and a record, a way of thinking about art practice that isn’t stiffened or institutionalized by white gallery walls. Simon’s work meets Apollo and Francis where they’re at and creates spaces for us to share in that reciprocity.

You can enjoy a cheap beer and impeccable energy at Apollo, 358 Broadview Avenue.

Curator

Artist

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Site-specific

Relational

Guest-curated by Sanaa Humayun, artist Simon Fuh’s _The Spirit of Apollo_ explores community relations in the form of Fuh’s local bar in Toronto’s east-end Chinatown. Fuh expresses his appreciation for the Apollo with a handmade gift that creates a space for reciprocity beyond the magazine’s pages.


The Spirit of Apollo by Simon Fuh: Text

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Last fall I attended Volume 5 MTL, the fifth iteration of Montreal’s art publishing festival. Composed of a series of virtual and in-person readings, panels, and launches culminating in a two-day book fair at the Société des arts technologiques, the festival loosely coalesced around the theme of recuperation. How can arts publishing recuperate lost histories, practices, figures, and ideas? It was a pertinent question to ask given the state of the book-fair circuit over the past few years, which has had to migrate online or else cease operations altogether. Upon entering the fair, I felt a palpable sense of urgency. Artists and publishers eagerly arranged and rearranged their displays, nervous for the long-awaited reunion with their audiences. Beyond the concerns of lost histories and practices, there was the lingering question of how to recoup lost costs.

Whatever your take on the subject, the recent worldwide reintroduction of large-scale art events has signalled a significant discursive shift in relation to the ongoing pandemic. Last summer, for instance, I jealously scrolled through a seemingly infinite carousel of pictures from the Venice Biennale, pictures that would’ve been considered gauche to post even just a year ago. Global art events have returned with frantic enthusiasm, and nowhere is that enthusiasm more unbridled than the art book fair. In the past few months alone, there have been art book fairs in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver, New York, Tokyo, Detroit, and Boston. The fair model, popularized in the early aughts by New York artist book publisher and purveyor Printed Matter, remains the dominant mode for the international dissemination of contemporary artist books. Artists, publishers, and galleries travel from all around the world to promote their wares at these events, which hover somewhere between exhibition, trade show, and conference. Attend enough of these events and you’ll start to see the same familiar faces at each one, a table set with books in front of them. 

For attendees, the whole experience feels a bit like speed dating. You wander from booth to booth, nod politely to each exhibitor, maybe make some stilted small talk while you absentmindedly flip through the pages of a  Risograph zine or a hardcover monograph worth triple the budget you’ve allocated for purchases. Maybe you buy a tote bag, or T-shirt, or some other piece of merchandise sold to offset printing expenses, but the real goal is to walk away from the fair with a book, maybe one you wouldn’t have otherwise encountered. The book I encountered at Volume 5 MTL took the form of an unassuming paperback featuring an illustration of a floppy-eared lapdog, peeking through the circular cutout of a shiny black cover. The sole purchase I made that weekend, the book fortuitously dovetailed with the fair’s interest in the uncovering and recuperation of lost histories.  

Written by artist Amy Ching-Yan Lam, _Looty Goes to Heaven_ tells the story of one of five Pekingese dogs taken by British soldiers during the 1860 looting of Beijing’s Summer Palace. Gifted to the Queen and renamed “Looty,” a cheeky but decidedly unironic tribute to imperial pillaging, the dog and soon its entire breed became symbols of British aristocracy. In Lam’s retelling, we start with Looty at the gates of heaven (or is it hell?). In order to pass through the gates and into the afterlife, Looty is instructed by a green-faced guardian to tell the true account of her life. What follows is the story of Looty’s forced migration and subsequent renaming, interspersed with the canine’s ambivalence toward the story she’s been made to tell. “And what if she left something or someone out of this true and final account?” writes Lam. “Would that something or someone be lost forever? Would the something or someone she left out be so lost that the effects would travel through time, to hurt or diminish what she could not remember in this moment?” 

Through Looty’s purgatorial contemplation, Lam explores the limits of historical reconstruction. What can the story of Looty tell us about the history of British imperialism, military conquest, international trade, looting, dog breeding, eugenics, opium, and tea? Here, the artist elides easy answers, but provides enough plot points for readers to build a narrative for themselves. Wedged between the English version of Looty’s story and the Traditional Chinese version is a timeline, presented in white text against a black background, that begins at the start of the first Opium War in 1839 and ends with a Pekingese winning the top prize at Crufts, the world’s largest dog show, in 2003. Some events that occurred in between: the British take control of the Chinese trade system and the island of Hong Kong (1842); the first Crufts dog show is held at the Royal Agricultural Hall (1891); Beijing and surrounding areas are looted by British soldiers (1900); the Pekingese becomes the most popular toy dog in Britain (1914). The timeline is printed in landscape rather than portrait, forcing readers to turn the book 90 degrees in order to read it. Lam offers these historical facts without commentary, allowing us to make our own connections and draw our own conclusions.

What Lam offers instead is speculation in the form of free indirect discourse from the perspective of a weary Pekingese. “What did it mean to be a dog?” writes Lam. “Did it mean being an object of pity? Did it mean being a sponge for excess feelings?” This is one way to see Looty, as a kind of colonial transitional object used to soothe the growing pains of an expanding empire. “Or, conversely,” writes Lam, “did it mean being a radiant source of feeling? Did it mean being a creature that produced unlimited love and empathy in others, that created the possibilities of commitment? A creature that generated true reciprocity, as in shared effects, shared consequences, shared significance?” By giving language and interiority to an overlooked figure like Looty, Lam transforms the cold, hard facts of the archive into an imaginative space capable of reaching beyond the perspective of those who may consider themselves to be history’s true victors and arbiters, a rhetorical sleight of hand that reveals how history happens to all of us, not to mention our pets. 

“What did it mean to be a dog?” writes Lam. “Did it mean being an object of pity? Did it mean being a sponge for excess feelings?”

The book ends with a selection of images, also presented in landscape: two engravings, from between 1783 and 1786, of the grounds of the elaborate Summer Palace from which Looty was stolen; a photograph of Looty from 1865, her head gloomily drooped into the cushion of an ornately carved chair; Princess Alexandra in the back of a carriage in 1910, her arms cradling a Pekingese; two portraits of champion dogs from 1899, photographed by noted eugenics advocate Francis Galton. A hidden colonial past leads to a fractured colonial present as readers make their way through these images and timelines, the clues of history scattered across each page. The story of Looty began before her birth and has continued years after her death. It’s a story without conclusion, a consequence wrought by history’s ever-unfolding shadow. Approaching this unfolding from several angles,  Lam presents a story that may not be final, but is nevertheless true. How can arts publishing recuperate lost histories, practices, figures, and ideas? _Looty Goes to Heaven_ provides but one example. 

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In the second entry of the May Contain Pictures column on artists' books, Cason Sharpe writes about the reappearance of art book fairs and Amy Ching-Yan Lam's _Looty Goes to Heaven_ (Eastside Projects, 2022). What can the speculative life and afterlife of a Pekingese dog tell us about histories of colonial trade? 

May Contain Pictures: _Looty Goes to Heaven_ by Amy Ching-Yan Lam

**Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong** is an artist and trained architect based out of New York City. Her creative practice lies at the intersection of art, architecture, and the public realm. Through site-specific architectural interventions, she creates experiences that activate forgotten or unused spaces, and that can spark people to encounter each other in unexpected ways.


 Linda Mae’s: An Architectural Past Life

**Tak Pham** is a curator and critic who graduated from OCAD University with an MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice. He has curated exhibitions for the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina (2019– present); Contemporary Calgary (2022); Varley Art Gallery, Markham (2020); Nuit Blanche Toronto (2017); Pari Nadimi Gallery, Toronto (2017); Xpace Cultural Centre, Toronto (2017); and Y+ contemporary, Scarborough (2016), among others. His writings and reviews have appeared in _Canadian Art, Espace art actuel, esse arts + opinions, Galleries West, Studio magazine, ArtAsiaPacific_, and _Hyperallergic_, and he currently works as Associate Curator at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, Canada. 


AKA and Jin Jin Cuisine

Charlene K. Lau is an art historian, critic and Curator of Public Art at Evergreen Brick Works.
She has held fellowships at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; Parsons School of Design,
The New School; and Performa Biennial. Her writing has been published in _Art in America_,
_Artforum_, _TheAtlantic.com_, _The Brooklyn Rail_, _frieze_, _Fashion Theory_, and _Journal of Curatorial Studies_, among others.

The Spatial Imaginaries of Karen Tam 譚嘉文

**Shellie Zhang** is a Toronto-based artist, arts administrator and occasional writer interested in examining the construction and dissemination of Canadian multiculturalism and diversity.

**Michelle Bui** is a Montreal based artist working in photography and sculpture. Her research lies in the use of material culture as a creative modality. Looking for points of combustion between objects, Bui elicits an array of physical feelings that conjure both pleasurable and confounding sensations, offering a space where sensory identity can unfold. 


Artificial Artifacts

Artificial Artifacts: Michelle Bui and Shellie Zhang in conversation 


Aamna Muzaffar collaborates on space, text, and moving image projects with artists and arts organizations as an independent creative director and technical supervisor. Based in Toronto, she is the Assistant Curator at Mercer Union, a centre for contemporary art.

Golden Jubilee: An interview with Suneil Sanzgiri

Tilling: Permanence for Black Diasporic Art in Canada 

Composition: Transplant Collaborations

Nadine Khalil is an independent arts writer, editor, researcher,  
and curator. After a decade-long stint in art publishing, she is currently advising art institutions such as the Ishara Art Foundation and Goethe-Institut on programming and editorial  
strategy. She is former editor of Dubai-based contemporary art magazine Canvas (2017–2020) and her writing can be found in art-agenda, Artforum, The Art Newspaper, ArtReview Asia, Artsy, Broadcast, The Brooklyn Rail, FT Arts, Ocula, and the Women’s Review of Books.

Ebb and Flow / Moving Through Mourning

You’re invited to submit a letter in response to C Magazine Issue 153 “Chinatown” by MARCH 1.

Selected letters will be published in C154 (Spring 2023).

The Letters column features a selection of 100-400 word letters to our editors, contributors and readers, and is printed at the front of every issue. A $100 honorarium is paid to each writer whose letter is selected for print. Published letters may be edited lightly for length and clarity.

Letters should engage the previous issue—its theme, articles, images—and related things beyond the magazine’s pages. They may be informal, informative, creative, inquisitive, speculative, critical, or any other number of things imaginable in the epistolary form. The column is intended to create space for dialogue on and around contemporary art and to continue conversations between issues, themes, and writers.

Read the [Call for Pitches](https://cmagazine.com/events/call-for-pitches-for-chinatown) for this issue.

**Send letters to [pitch@cmagazine.com](mailto:pitch@cmagazine.com) with LETTERS in the subject line.**

By now we understand extraction as the political-ontological basis for the circulation of resources under neoliberal capitalism—and that agents of such appropriation scarcely do enough to respect, heal, and replenish their sources. From sex work and old-growth forests to ghost towns and lost languages, this issue explores artistic and activist practices that interrogate an array of extractive efforts and attempt to demarcate non-extractive modalities. 

Extraction

Call for Letters: Chinatown

Call

The Letters column features a selection of 100-400 word letters to our editors, contributors and readers, and is printed at the front of every issue.

Now in its 14th year, the [C New Critics Award](https://cmagazine.com/programs/c-new-critics) is designed to help identify, develop, and promote the work of emerging art critics. Writers are invited to submit an 800-1,000 word review of an exhibition, performance, publication, or moving image work, by May 30, 2023. The winner will receive $750, editorial support to prepare their article for publication in the Winter issue of _C Magazine_, and a two-year subscription. All participants will receive a one-year subscription.

For the purposes of the award, an emerging writer is defined as anyone who has not published more than one piece of writing in a recognized print or online publication, exclusive of student-run journals and magazines. The competition is open to anyone residing in Canada, regardless of citizenship status, and to Canadians living abroad.

Exhibition and performance reviews must address work that occurred no earlier than January 1, 2023, whereas book and moving image work reviews must address work made in the past two years. See our [submissions](https://cmagazine.com/about/submissions) page for more information for writers. 

One submission per person. Upload your submission here at [award-submission.cmagazine.com](https://award-submission.cmagazine.com). Mail or fax submissions will not be accepted. Please let us know of any accommodation we may provide during the application process. Note that measures are taken to ensure that the identity of entrants remains unknown to adjudicators. If you have questions please direct them to [editorial@cmagazine.com](https://mailto:editorial@cmagazine.com)

The submissions will be assessed by Joy Xiang, Editor at _C Magazine_, and two external jurors.



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##### 

2022 C New Critics Award winner: **Shaneela Boodoo**

  
For her review of  "begin to be; have become" (2022), published in C153 “Chinatown” (Winter 2023). 


**Shaneela Boodoo** (she/her) is a graduate of the University of Manitoba with a BFA (Honours) in Design and is also a recent graduate of the University of Winnipeg with an MA in Cultural Studies. She is a second-generation Indo-Caribbean immigrant, born and based in Winnipeg, MB. As an emerging artist, designer, and curator, Boodoo explores the entanglements of themes such as colonialism, displacement, and womanhood.

  
_C Magazine_ would like to thank all those who submitted their writing to the competition, as well as the 2022 award jurors Maandeeq Mohamed, Hagere Selam “shimby” Zegeye-Gebrehiwot and Nataleah Hunter-Young.

[More information](https://newcritics.cmagazine.com)

Call for C New Critics Award 

Now in its 14th year, the C New Critics Award is designed to help develop and promote the work of emerging art critics. This program gives _C Magazine_ the opportunity to identify and support promising new writers, who often become regular contributors. Writers are invited to submit an 800-1,000 word review of an exhibition, performance, publication, or moving image work by the annual deadline. The winner receives a financial award, editorial support to prepare their article for publication in the forthcoming issue of _C Magazine_, and a two-year subscription. All participants receive a one-year subscription. 


For the purposes of the award, an emerging writer is defined as anyone who has not published more than one piece of art criticism in a recognized print or online publication, exclusive of student-run journals or magazines. The competition is open to anyone residing in Canada, regardless of citizenship status, and to Canadians living abroad.

Submissions are assessed by _C Magazine_ editors and external jurors, announced each year. Note that measures are taken to ensure that the identity of entrants remains unknown to adjudicators.

Submission deadlines vary from year to year. Exhibition and performance reviews are expected to address recent work. Timeframes are specified each year (2023 submissions will have to address work that occurred no earlier than January 1, 2023). Reviews of book and moving image work must address work made in the past two years.

Submissions are restricted to one per person. Upload your submission here at [award-submission.cmagazine.com](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfmdQtEJQBWkGhRk_0tfc7d--3DYdLYqMeiO6VN9WcrKpeEYA/viewform). Mail or fax submissions will not be accepted.

Please let us know of any accommodation we may provide during the application process. More information for writers is available on our [Write for Us page.](https://main.d2v45yttl0ocvf.amplifyapp.com/opportunities/write)



Submissions

C New Critics Award

Program

C New Critics Award 2023  
Winner will be published in issue 156

Program information

Shaneela Boodoo's review of "begin to be; have become" (2022) will be published in C153 “Chinatown” (Winter 2023).  
  
In her review of "begin to be; have become" (2022), a group exhibition at TakeHome BIPOC Arts House in Winnipeg, Shaneela Boodoo generously reflects on the exhibition's engagement with world-structuring categories like race, gender, memory, sexuality, and labour. Through evocative prose, readers access lush descriptions of the work from the unique vantage point of Boodoo's curious and attentive gaze: a flicker of a candle, the way sunlight is filtered through fibres of suspended textiles. Boodoo offers readers a kind of ekphrastic art writing concerned with form. Her interpretive moves are consciously, beautifully, descriptive, in order to broach the new practices of looking called for by the exhibition's exploration of "what we [can] become outside of colonial violence."

2022 C New Critics Award Winner

The **C New Critics Award** is designed to help develop and promote the work of emerging art critics. This program gives _C Magazine_ the opportunity to identify and support promising new writers, who often become regular contributors.

Now in its 14th year, the C New Critics Award is designed to help develop and promote the work of emerging art critics. 

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