As this issue’s guest editor, I found my self revisiting an almost uncanny time line of the origins of Chinatowns across Canada: the arrival of Chinese labourers to expand the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Chinese head tax, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the displacement and re-establishment of Chinatowns, as well as the ongoing struggle with gentrification and anti-Asian racism. The familiarity of these overlapping histories could feel desensitizing, yet while Chinatown communities faced shared obstacles in cities as far-flung as Saskatoon and Toronto, they still maintained a semblance of self. Artists working in relation to these spaces could be seen as an extension of this “self,” creating work that explores how a history of survival spanning several generations is being translated, reinterpreted, and reimagined.

Though I received many incredible pitches for this issue, I also came across what I would call “vacationing in Chinatown” stories, which gazed upon the space like a live-action theme park full of unique cultural foods, smells, and architecture. In some ways, these stories are not wrong in their tourist framing of Chinatowns. After all, as Linda Zhang and Peter Sealy’s piece “Resisting Either/ Or: Shanzhai Photogrammetry” points out, community leaders embraced much of Chinatown’s familiar Sino-style architecture to “create a space white people would also love,” a necessary act of survival. Chinatowns were designed to be multifunctional, presenting a different face depending on who’s looking. This built-in opacity feels like fertile ground for artistic exploration that recognizes the complexities inherent in these spaces.

Zhang and Sealy’s piece delves further into the chop suey architecture of Chinatowns. Though they acknowledge the inheritance of spaces made for the white gaze, they argue for a turn toward Eastern ways of thinking as a form of resistance using shanzhai, a term typically used to denote a copy or counterfeit. As part of her practice, Linda Zhang scans Toronto’s West Chinatown using 3-D photogrammetry and collages the images, which allows her to explore the speculative nature of an area under constant threat of displacement. Drawing on speculative fictions created by community writers, her work layers fantasy with renderings of reality to create new representations of the familiar.

Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong’s “Linda Mae’s: An Architectural Past Life” also probes beyond the surface of Chinatown architecture, documenting physical changes to Calgary’s Linda Mae building and the memories of residents who lived in the neighbourhood for decades. Weaving together personal recollection with architectural shifts, she creates a narrative not found in city planning documentation, including a handmade map of the building’s layout drawn by memory by former resident Carol Poon. Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong’s renderings of the Linda Mae, spanning over 50 years of the building’s life cycle, are paired with Poon’s recollections to reveal how the space’s architecture was shaped by building trends, financial needs, and the shifting desires of residents.

This issue’s Artist Project is a collaboration between curator Sanaa Humayun and artist Simon Fuh. 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, a “quiet, nondescript bar” run by a friendly owner, with a handmade gift that creates a space for reciprocity beyond the magazine’s pages. The Apollo is memorable for the cartoon monkey on its sign, representing good fortune, a marker similar to the red beacon sign of Linda Mae’s.

For the One Thing column, Annie Wong responds to the spatiality of Morris Lum’s Wong Kung Har Wun Sun Association, part of his ongoing photography project Tong Yan Gaai, which captures interior and exterior spaces in Chinatowns across Canada. Lum’s work turns empty spaces into sites worthy of docupmentation, as he leans on a network of community members to gain access to tongs, hidden alleyways, and restaurants, creating images that feel static and alive at the same time. Though these spaces are devoid of people, Annie Wong describes them as haunted by “past gestures” that “linger in the frame like ghosts caught in the lens flare.”

Elisa Yon’s piece for the Composition column is structured as a letter sent posthumously to Nellie Yip Quong, who lived and worked in Vancouver’s Chinatown in the mid-19th century. Inspired by Quong’s activism in the community, particularly her dedication to improving the lives of women, Yon shares a recent project where she created her own version of a Chinatown souvenir, in collaboration with Quong’s granddaughter. The project allowed Yon to honour Quong’s memory while also trying to answer questions like, “What role does Chinatown play for my generation?” and “What role, if any, do I have as a cultural worker in Chinatown?”

As spaces populated by several generations at once, and with multi-layered histories of migration, Chinatowns are trying to balance the desire for nostalgia and preservation with the current realities of these spaces. Godfre Leung’s “Vancouver Photohistory and the Politics of Disappearance” is a nuanced dismantling of what he calls “the fetishization of disappearance as the privileged criterion of cultural value.” He explores the curatorial prominence of ’90s Vancouver photohistory, which documented the continual loss of space in marginalized communities such as Vancouver Chinatown and explains how this prominence limits our access to other representations of these spaces. Ultimately, Leung finds more excitement in the work of artists from the Hong Kong diaspora, who pierce through a distant past performance of identity to resituate Chinatown within a current context.

If we were to create an artistic Chinatown canon (a possible supplement to the familiar historical timeline), Montreal based artist Karen Tam, whose career in curation, site-specific installation, and mixed-media work spans 20 years, would certainly feature prominently. But as Charlene K. Lau’s far-ranging profile on Tam demonstrates, her work often defies the static rules of historical time and space to create “spatial imaginaries” that are at once specific and immersive. Charlene K. Lau chronicles Tam’s influences, from her family’s restaurant in Montreal to her scholarly writing on shanzhai and examines how her work reconfigures the Chinese diasporic experience and disrupts the familiar. As Charlene K. Lau notes, Tam creates “environments that are entities unto themselves, old and new, present and future all at once.”

The fluidity of time and place is a key component of Queer Reads Library (QRL), a mobile collection of “cool queer stuff” curated by Kaitlin Chan, Beatrix Pang, and Rachel Lau. In their conversation with Rachel Lau, amanda wan uncovers how QRL started as a project between friends, before expanding across several countries to become a transnational collection with chapters in Hong Kong and Vancouver. Emerging out of the ongoing political events un folding in Hong Kong, including a ban on books about queerness, the library creates a mobile community space for a queer Asian diaspora. “Artists based in North America often have a desire for their work to be shared in Asia,” Rachel Lau tells wan, “They want to ask, ‘What does it mean for my work to be circulated in the place my ancestors are from?’” Though the members of QRL value the physical aesthetic of zines and ephemera, they also recognize the importance of creating connections for the artists they showcase, placing them in a shared dialogue that extends beyond borders or distance.

Ephemera and objects are an admitted obsession for artists Michelle Bui and Shellie Zhang. In “Artificial Artefacts,” they explore their shared interest in transforming ready-made objects into startling tableaux that play with texture, colour, and cultural signifiers. Bui describes her practice as a “bricolage” that charts the passage of time, a complement to Shellie Zhang’s engagement with objects as a personification of fantasy and desire, full of “comfort and complication.” Bui notes that “it’s clear the objects we choose to surround ourselves with function as a way of constructing and negotiating our social relations as well as our identities.” From delicate folds of tripe to shiny plastic laundry detergent bottles, Bui and Zhang discuss the role of accumulation and excess in their work, highlighting the power of objects to hold hidden and obvious histories.

For his piece on AKA and Jin Jin Cuisine, Tak Pham situates us within the history of Saskatoon’s Chinatown and explores how an artist-run centre and a Chinese restaurant became partners. Touching on the consequences of gentrification on small businesses in Chinatown and how artist-run centres contribute to these changes, the partnership between AKA and Jin Jin Cuisine presents a possible model for “long-lasting alliances” through collaboration and mutual aid. Formed out of Life of a Craphead’s project Until Either One Closes, the partnership has been extended in the most recent project at AKA, Dough Nation, which links community-based programming to issues in Chinatown such as food insecurity and community care. As Pham notes, though artist-run centres are still “catalysts for gentrification,” the AKA and Jin Jin Cuisine partnership represents a possible model for arts organizations to “cultivate and nurture mutual trust within the community” through thoughtful, responsive arts programming.

This issue’s Tilling column also focuses on how to create better responsive arts programming for a historically underserved group: the disabled community. Writer Eli Tareq El Bechelany Lynch explores how accessibility and disability justice, which often feel like afterthoughts in art spaces, became more of a focus during the pandemic. As organizations were forced to go virtual, they also adopted more accessible practices that benefited the disabled community. El Bechelany Lynch notes that “in a COVID-19 world, issues of access faced by the disabled community became issues for the larger global community and arts organizations found themselves facing a shared question: how do we as art makers, curators, and event organizers properly address accessibility needs?” They explore how Vancouver artist-run centre grunt gallery has emerged as an advocate for disability justice, sharing accessibility co-learning work shops with the broader arts community.

Shawn Tse similarly references access and community in “A Garden in Chinatown on Indigenous Land.” Tse connects with Indigenous artist Kiona Callihoo Ligtvoet to discuss what solidarity between Chinese and Indigenous communities in Edmonton’s Chinatown could look like, as well as the rewards and challenges of doing community-based work. Both Tse and Ligtvoet express frustration at how the area has become dehumanized by institutional oversight and the exclusion of Indigenous folks and people from different backgrounds, many of whom access the garden on a day-to day basis. Tse also muses on the role of artists in these spaces, while Ligtvoet advocates for a relational approach to community, and both artists envision better intercultural relations.

Taken as a whole, this issue reflects how Chinatown acts as a space for past remembrances, ongoing community building, and future-dreaming. There can never be only one timeline or singular vision of Chinatown; it will always be a home for multitudes.