Column

Elisa Yon is an architect by training, a socially engaged artist, public-art administrator, and second-generation Chinese immigrant living on the unceded and traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. 


December 6, 2022

Nellie Yip Quong                              
_Formerly of_ - 783 East Pender Street Vancouver, BC 

Dear Nellie, 

It has been over 73 years since your passing and I imagine you are enjoying a cup of oolong tea and a lively game of mah-jong in the afterlife with your pals from the Chinese Empire Ladies Reform Association (CELRA). Is it true you were a midwife for 500 Chinese women? I remember noticing you in a CELRA poster from 1904 and thinking how odd it was to see a white woman in a sea of Chinese ladies. Born in Saint John, NB, and raised Roman Catholic, you must have really been in love with Charles Yip Quong to marry him during a time when interracial marriages were not widely accepted by society. Given your family’s disapproval, I imagine you felt lonely and isolated when you moved to Vancouver with Charlie. Though I grew up in Toronto’s Chinatown, I struggle to retain my Cantonese mother tongue. How did you manage to learn five Chinese dialects as an outsider in the community? 

A few years ago, I had the privilege of meeting your granddaughter, Starlet. She generously took the time to visit me in my windowless basement studio at the Sun Wah Centre on Keefer Street. My studio mate, Jen, and I sat in our cramped quarters and listened to her stories about you, as told to her by her mom, Eleanor. I appreciated Starlet’s candour about you and your work. We wanted to put you on a pedestal, but she reminded us you had struggles and vices like everyone else. You liked to gamble and play mah-jong late into the evening in the Wing Sang family residence on Pender Street, built by your husband’s relative, Yip Sang. Sometimes you also played the role of a social worker and brokered adoptions under the table for parentless children. “Most of the time Granny Nellie just fell into these situations,” Starlet shared with us, “and did what needed to be done for the community.” 

At the time of Starlet’s visit, I was asking myself big questions: _What role does Chinatown play for my generation? What role, if any, do I have as a cultural worker in Chinatown? And how do I, a daughter of Chinese immigrants, born and raised in Toronto’s Chinatown, reconnect with this community?_ 

I started thinking about commemoration and the value of women’s labour as part of the history of Chinese settlement in Canada. I also wanted to reimagine the souvenir, not only as an object that holds sentimental value but also as a vehicle to highlight lesser-known histories, address issues affecting the community, and support local creative economies for cultural workers. 

In the many years since your death, Vancouver Chinatown has become a tourist destination. Gift shops now sell mugs, postcards, key chains, jewellery, and T-shirts with Chinese iconography that have little to do with our contemporary culture and heritage. Souvenirs have the potential to embed meaning, histories, stories, craft, and artistic expression into a physical item. If a souvenir can represent our community and our history, I think we should move beyond stereotypes. 

I decided to collaborate with Jen and Starlet on the _Pinafore Project_ (2019). We chose the pinafore as our souvenir, a traditional apron synonymous with women’s labour. Jen and I made 15 of them from a bright-orange canvas fabric, referencing the vinyl seat cushions, laminated walls, and neon sign of our beloved New Town Bakery on Pender Street. Starlet contributed an activist slogan, “Working Strong for Women’s Rights,” and we included a portrait of you on the front of each pinafore, wearing your signature fedora hat and a proud mischievous grin. On January 19, 2019, we took part in the annual Women’s March in Vancouver. As we walked the downtown streets past the Vancouver Law Courts, the pinafores we wore became more than souvenirs, they became symbols of resistance and change. They helped us share your story with a current generation of women and created an opportunity for us to continue your advocacy work for equal rights. 

Reflecting on the big questions I had when I started this work, I now feel part of a Chinese community who looks at Chinatown with a sense of nostalgia and as a place to reconnect to our heritage. For me, it’s not a place of refuge and survival like it was for my parents, who relied on Chinatown for everything from shopping for groceries to employment and obtaining a mortgage. Instead, it’s become a space to know and explore my own diasporic identity. I feel a sense of purpose—empowered by the knowledge of the hardships, accomplishments, and legacies of women like you who came before me.

There are times when I ask myself, “What would Nellie think about Chinatown today and its future?” Given the dedication you demonstrated for the welfare of children throughout your life, I think your answer would likely involve encouraging younger generations to find ways to bridge the past and the present, with the hope of sustaining a Chinatown that is not afraid to question its own identity and its future. 

Today, my orange pinafore hangs by the door ready to be worn in the garden, in the studio, or more recently, as an act of solidarity in support of abortion rights for women in the US. It is a souvenir that will continue to bring your legacy into my lived experience. 

With gratitude and respect, 

Elisa Yon

Writer

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

153Yon.pdf

Dialogue

Activism

In a posthumous letter to Nellie Yip Quong, who lived and worked in Vancouver’s Chinatown in the mid-19th century, Elisa Yon shares how she was inspired by Quong’s activism. Yon explores a recent project where she created her own version of a Chinatown souvenir, in collaboration with Quong’s granddaughter.

Composition: Dear Nellie

**Annie Wong** is an artist and a writer based in Toronto. www.anniewong.co

##### _I._
Morris Lum is a morning person. He prefers to shoot early in the day when Chinatown is momentarily abandoned. These deceptively deserted scenes are captured as part of his photography project _Tong Yan Gaai_ (2012–ongoing), which includes over 200 images of interior and exterior spaces found in 16 Chinatowns across North America. In Western media, these spaces are often the exoticized backgrounds for a Eurocentric narrative. But in Lum’s photography, they become the central subjects. The visual language of _Tong Yan Gaai_ is defined by an immaculate attention to detail in large-format. The protagonists of the photographs are the paraphernalia in a room, or the evidence of past gestures left on-site. Emphasized by the absence of people, Lum describes this aesthetic as the “residue of human activity.” [^1] Despite their conspicuous omission, the people who once occupied the space, including Lum himself, are inescapably entangled in the _mise en scène_ of _Tong Yan Gaai._ They linger in the frame like ghosts caught in the lens flare. 

##### _II._ 
Morris’s network of Chinatown kith and kin is wide. It includes elders like artist Paul Wong, the late poet and activist Jim Wong-Chu, and community education leader Valerie Ann Mah. Lum relies on this network to access the spaces he photographs. The slowness required to build these relationships is partially why Lum’s project has spanned more than a decade. The reward, however, is the rich oral histories of the first Chinatowns intimately recalled from memory. While the people with whom he connects are integral to his practice, _Tong Yan Gaai_ does not attempt to commemorate individuals. Rather, Lum stitches together their stories to create a visual memory network the viewer can saunter into, living vicariously through each image. 

_Silk Road_ (2014) reveals an empty courtyard between brick buildings in Victoria’s Chinatown. On a map, this area would be mistaken for a dead end in the labyrinth of hotels and boarding houses that once accommodated Chinatown’s bachelor societies.[^2] However, these clandestine spaces were vital to the social life of early Chinese settlers who existed in a de facto state of resistance. 

During the infamous “exclusionary period” of the early 1900s, the Chinese were subject to an enforced curfew. Empty neighbourhood enclosures and courtyards became furtive places where the community could gather to escape the surveillance of white colonial society. In these secret spaces, Lum notes, the community “[could] feel safe” and exercise a sense of autonomy. You can just imagine children playing, lovers meeting, and teens conspiring. The stories that invite speculation are the kind Lum relishes. The ghostly traces of trysts, conspiracies, and secrets settle upon each bricked surface, like dust glimpsed in a beam of sunlight. 

##### _III._ 
Morris’s mother is from Macau. His father is from Trinidad and Tobago. Growing up in Mississauga, like many children of the diaspora, he experienced his parents’ yearnings for past homelands, particularly the homesickness of his mother. When he began _Tong Yan Gaai_, which in his mother tongue, Cantonese, is the term for Chinatown, he hoped it would bring him closer to her. 

Chinatowns are by nature maternal spaces. In “The Trauma of Geographic Dislocation,” psychoanalyst Salman Akhtar reverses the concept of “mother as environment” to consider “the environment as mother.” He argues that our ego formation depends on the minutiae of our material environment, noting how the mundane miscellany “of identity like clothes, wallet, shoes, and eyeglasses connects us to reality and society in an unassuming but deep manner.”[^3] To the diaspora, the material culture of Chinatown is not just familiar, but familial.

In _Wong Kung Har Wun Sun Association_ (2016), the maternal sits quietly in the foreground. Lum’s photograph depicts a meeting hall as a cornucopia of traditional ornamentation and contemporary conveniences. Like other Chinatown tongs, the Wong Association operated as a community hub in response to racist policies excluding the Chinese from accessing social services. In addition to providing mutual aid, tongs helped abate homesickness by solidifying a sense of belonging and identity by upholding cultural traditions. The intimacy that emerged from such a practice of communal care lends itself to a culture of filial piety. These parental origins are suggested by the minutiae in the room captured in arresting focus. Photos of tong members line the wall like family portraits; the red banners embroidered in gold are statements of kinships; a key left in the cabinet’s lock is a sign of trust; and the small offering to the ancestral shrine is a reminder of roots. These objects evoke the presence of a caretaker. The image’s scale, intentionally immersive, encloses the viewer in a warm, almost motherly embrace. 

##### _IIII._ 
Morris sits anxiously at the table in Toronto’s City Hall. Across from him is a group of administrators from the city’s planning department, responding to the advocacy group Friends of Chinatown Toronto. The room is tense after an hour of confrontation, and out of desperation, dehydration, or both, Lum demands, “this has to stop.” 

By “this,” he is referring to the devastating pattern of disappearing Chinatowns across North America. While many of the images in his project can attest to signs of gentrification, _Lao Tsu Mural, Vancouver_ (2013) is a foreboding example. It features a mural of the famous Chinese philosopher, commissioned to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Vancouver’s Chinatown. The public artwork, intended to celebrate the neighbourhood’s longevity, is ironically accompanied by the adjacent building’s “sold” sign. Today, the mural is obscured by a six-storey apartment complex, built mere inches away from it. 

The outcry against the erasure of Chinatowns extinguishes the romanticized gaze that paints them as phantasmal miniatures from ancestral dreams. They operate as spaces for the Chinese community not only to share the means to survive in a white-supremacist society, but also to belong to one another. When an environment where a generation was raised begins to disappear, the psychological toll is akin to the loss of a mother. “Upon losing [this environment],” Akhtar notes, “we feel existentially naked and robbed of subjective continuity.”[^4]

The impacts of disappearing Chinatowns compel and haunt Lum’s work. “The circumference of the project,” Lum says, “has expanded with a greater sense of urgency to more cities.” This statement is made as if from a place of defence. Armed with a large-format camera, Lum documents past legacies and archives future losses. 

[^1]: Morris Lum, interview with author, Toronto, July 30, 2022. Quotes and paraphrasing of Lum throughout this piece are from this conversation. 
[^2]: The first Chinese community was primarily made up of single men who immigrated to Canada to work. Hence the term “bachelor society” is often used to describe this period in the history of Chinatowns. 
[^3]: Salman Akhtar, “The Trauma of Geographical Dislocation,” in _Immigration and Acculturation: Mourning, Adaptation, and the Next Generation_ (New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 2011), 15. 
[^4]: Ibid. 

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Photography

Cities

Annie Wong responds to Morris Lum’s _Wong Kung Har Wun Sun Association_, which captures interior and exterior spaces in Chinatowns across Canada. Though devoid of people, Annie Wong describes the spaces as haunted by “past gestures” that “linger in the frame like ghosts caught in the lens flare.”


One Thing: Morris Lum’s _Tong Yan Gaai_

**Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch** is a queer, mixed Arab (white/ Arab) disabled writer living in Tio’tia:ke. Their book _knot body_ (2020), published by Metatron Press, was shortlisted for the QWF Concordia First Book Award, and their second book, _The Good Arabs_ (2021), published by Metonymy Press, received the honorable mention for the Arab American Book Award for Poetry. With co-editor Samia Marshy, they are editing El Ghourabaa, an anthology of weird and experimental queer and trans writing by Arab and Arabophone writers.

It’s always been a struggle for members of the disabled community to find accessible art spaces. Despite an ongoing call for things to change, arts organizations are still behind on engaging in these conversations and doing the work of addressing accessibility needs. During the early months of COVID-19, the art world, and the world at large, began taking accessibility more seriously. Events went online, Zoom grew in popularity, and people started closed-captioning events. It became easier for different communities to participate in the arts, especially at a time when people needed to feel connected, and less alone.

Addressing all forms of oppression, including ableism, within arts spaces requires working against the established norm. Before the pandemic, much of this work was done by individuals willing to push back, or organizations focused specifically on accessibility needs as part of their mandate. But 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?

There are a few common barriers to making a space more accessible: a lack of care, a lack of understanding that inaccessibility negatively affects huge swaths of people, and a lack of funds. Lack of care often arises when an organization values money over people and will only implement accessibility improvements if it is legally obligated to do so. Similarly, such organizations might not see accessibility barriers as an issue that affects enough people and deem it not important to put resources into possible solutions. Lack of funds is often the result of under-funded and under-developed organizations who can’t pay staff to do accessibility audits or reach out to their communities to learn about their members’ needs. Given the ongoing struggle for arts funding in Canada, and the limited number of art spaces focused primarily on accessibility needs, it’s a challenge for arts organizations to move past these barriers to create more accessible spaces.

One organization with an ongoing commitment to accessibility and disability justice is grunt gallery, an artist-run centre founded in 1984 on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations (Vancouver, Canada). grunt’s mandate is “to create an environment that allows for accessible conversation.”[^1] Under the direction of program director Vanessa Kwan, the organization started prototyping a new series of online co-learning initiatives in Spring 2020 as part of a five-year process evaluating the accessibility of their systems and programming. They also created an accessibility committee, chaired by their exhibitions manager and accessibility consultant Kay Slater.

“This committee gathers to audit and review systems, procedures, and policies of grunt gallery,” the website describes, “to identify, think through, improve, and share the way [they] show up in [their] public programming, exhibitions, and for [their] community.”[^2] While their focus on accessibility is fairly new, grunt’s inter-community collaboration stretches back to their early days, when they reached out to other arts organizations “to realize projects otherwise beyond a single organization’s capacity.”[^3] 

grunt’s approach to programming works within the current system to try to make accessibility a priority for the broader arts community. In Spring 2021, they launched a series of community workshops for free, which included sessions on captioning, transcription, and non-auditory access[^4] that offered to teach others these skills and help them co-facilitate their own non-auditory access workshops. The workshops were run by Slater, who shared in an email interview[^5] what they knew about captions and transcripts as a member of the Deaf[^6]/DeafBlind/deaf/hard of hearing and disabled community. “I developed the skill over the past decade when captioning my own work—as a stubborn move to show people how silly it was to not caption work—and as a daily consumer, I had lots of opinions and anecdotes on using them,” they noted. The programming proved popular in the arts community, with over 200 people attending and more than 400 signed up for the run of the live workshop series specifically made for artist-run centres. The high turnout encouraged Slater to develop other workshops. “Over the past year, our creative technologist Sebnem Ozpeta and I have been researching ways to create simulcast (a simultaneous transmission of the same program on two or more channels) and asynchronous (streaming that is not necessarily live) hybrid solutions,” they shared. “While this series is in development, we’re practicing visual description and prioritizing alternative text descriptions in our exhibitions. Following a year of doing this work, we intend to share what we’ve learned.”

grunt’s accessibility co-learning series also creates non-proprietary knowledge, which is part of the framework of disability justice. In the age of late-stage capitalism and property ownership, the idea of just “giving your ideas away” might seem counter-intuitive. But mutual sharing is the basis on which the disability activist community functions in an attempt to move away from individualist capitalist thinking. Our world places so much importance on individual needs, but many disabled communities push back against this idea to show that interdependence is not a weakness or a flaw, but necessary for our survival. grunt, in line with this framework, always intended their accessibility initiatives to be available to their immediate circle, gallery visitors, and contributing artists, but also to contribute to a larger arts community effort.

Slater added, “This is not knowledge that benefits anyone if it is hoarded, and I would prefer bad captions to none at all.” They believe the knowledge gathered in grunt’s workshop series will only improve once it is critiqued, shared, and reworked. “Practicing accessibility, creative inclusion, and access is an investment,” they noted, “but the knowledge itself is inert if you don’t share it.”

In “You Are Not Entitled to Our Deaths: COVID, Abled Supremacy and Interdependence,” disability activist Mia Mingus explains, “Pitting the need for state and systemic change against individual and community change sets up a false binary. Both are necessary to get out of the pandemic mess we are in, just as both are necessary for any kind of liberation we are fighting for.”[^7] For Mingus, the solution can’t be simply about solving each barrier separately. Individuals must learn to care and there also must be government legislation in place to support disabled people and their access needs.

During our interview, Slater corroborated this idea, noting: “I understand why organizations who have been chugging along ‘successfully,’ without any critique on their programs from their existing audiences, may not want to promise something and then be shamed for their efforts. Someone at the top might recognize accessibility as important, but if they are only looking at audience in terms of number of tickets sold, people through the door, or positive comments received, they may see change only as a risk.”

Prioritizing the status quo doesn’t account for access needs, and it can be easy to fall into a model of quantity over quality, especially if this will ensure organizations stay afloat. But this brings up the question of what art spaces are really for, beyond the numbers or reviews. If the intention is to build community around creativity, passion, and artistic expression, how can we move beyond the status quo and focus on supporting the needs of disabled folks? “Sadly, it requires people in power to slow down and be inconvenienced as they learn and shift their priorities,” Slater said. “It can’t be about the number of bodies through the door—it has to be about moments in community.”

Though the pandemic forced community members to have conversations about accessibility needs, some for the first time, many disability activists feel accessibility best practices are being left behind as spaces shift back to “normal.” Following the lifting of government restrictions, arts spaces have reverted to in-person events, axing most of their online or hybrid programming. They’ve dropped mask mandates in their spaces, forcing people to make hard decisions daily about their health and safety if they want to participate in public life. It’s becoming rarer to see organizations acknowledge the pandemic is still ongoing, particularly for disabled and immunocompromised folks. At the same time, it has also become even more obvious how integral art, literature, and community are to our happiness as human beings.

Mingus and other disability activists have criticized the “return to normal” as a return to a lack of care for disabled and at-risk communities. Now that arts organizations no longer have to operate solely online, the progress made on normalizing accessibility best practices during the pandemic, when it seemed like people were invested in safety and access to resources, could also disappear. In a plea to non-disabled people, Mingus decries, “You are not entitled to our fear and terror at the worsening conditions and chaos of this pandemic, wondering if we will ever be able to safely leave our homes again. You enjoy connection at the expense of our isolation. Your wants are always more important than our needs.”[^8]

When we think about basic human needs, we tend to list food, clean water, safe housing, and bodily autonomy as priorities. But what about access to the arts and to experiences that bring us joy and happiness? Why should these basic human needs not apply to disabled folks, who are often the most marginalized? “A cornerstone of being disabled in an ableist world,” Mingus notes, “is isolation. This is part of the trauma of ableism. Disabled people are marked over and over by isolation through material, social and cultural inaccessibility, stigma, fear, violence, and shame.” For Mingus and other disability activists, there needs to be a reframing of the pandemic toward interdependence, which “acknowledges that our survival is bound up together, that we are interconnected and what you do impacts others.”[^9]

grunt acknowledges the shifting landscape of the pandemic for disabled folks and has opted for a hybrid approach to their programming. Slater noted that “a return to normal for some does not represent a return to normal for all and ‘normal’ excluded many people in the first place. […] We won’t necessarily get it right every time and we might not have the capacity to do it quickly for everything, but we can commit to recording and archiving everything for the sake of inclusion and time-shifted participation. We’re trying to model the change we want while staying flexible, transparent, and open to feedback.”[^10]

This hybrid approach has proven to be one of the best solutions as the pandemic continues. Other solutions they suggest include prioritizing mutual aid, “fighting the scarcity mindset that to be more accessible is to take away from something else,” and disrupting the need to be bigger and better than others. The grunt staff are not positioning themselves as experts on these topics but rather as part of the larger conversation. Their openness to change and to being held accountable reflects the ethos of disability justice.

Though grunt gallery and other organizations, like Tangled Art + Disability,[^11] are doing important work, the challenge of addressing accessibility needs can’t be solved by only a few organizations. Increased attention and care for accessibility needs across the board means no single organization will feel they need to create original solutions for large, seemingly overwhelming problems. The more accessibility initiatives are started and shared by different organizations, the easier this work will be. Of course, additional funding for accessibility initiatives in the arts would also help make spaces more truly accessible. But grunt gallery’s approach demonstrates how arts organizations can help each other now by finding creative ways to share knowledge and resources to further disability justice in the arts.

[^1]: grunt comms, “grunt gallery Accessibility Committee,” _grunt_, December 6, 2021, https://grunt.ca/grunt-gallery-accessibility-committee
[^2]: Ibid.
[^3]: “History,” _grunt_, accessed October 4, 2022, https://grunt. ca/history
[^4]: grunt comms, “Community Workshops: Captioning, Tran- scription, and Non-Auditory Access,” grunt, February 23, 2021, https://grunt.ca/community-workshop-captioning-transcription-and-non-auditory-access
[^5]: All Slater quotes not otherwise attributed are from this 2022 email interview with the author.
[^6]: Deaf with a capital “D” connotes someone who is culturally deaf while lower-case deaf refers to the physical condition of having hearing loss.
[^7]: Mia Mingus,  “You Are Not Entitled to Our Deaths: COVID, Abled Supremacy and Interdependence.” _Leaving Evidence_ (blog), January 16, 2022, https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2022/01/16/ you-are-not-entitled-to-our-deaths-covid-abled-supremacy-interdependence
[^8]: Ibid.
[^9]: Ibid.
[^10]: Kay Slater and grunt gallery, “Non-Auditory Access: Subtitles & Transcripts,” from a recording of a past workshop grunt has put online for free, September 3, 2021, https://vimeo.com/597531894
[^11]: https://tangledarts.org

153ElBechalany-lynch.pdf

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. They explore how Vancouver artist-run centre grunt gallery has emerged as an advocate for disability justice.

Tilling: How grunt gallery Advocates for Disability Justice in the Arts

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Editorial

Steph Wong Ken is a writer currently based in Tkaronto, near a forest of black oak. [stephwongken.com](http://stephwongken.com)

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. 

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Migration

Guest Editor Steph Wong Ken reflects on the issue’s theme: _Chinatown_

Editorial: Chinatown

It is with great esteem that I take this opportunity to address _C Magazine_’s readership through its pages, to share some of my departing thoughts on what it means to maintain a meaningful project like _C_ over time. 

Publishing a small, not-for-profit, art and art criticism magazine is not a financially lucrative business. However, it’s been irrefutably valuable work for myself and for all of us who have contributed so that _C_ can continue to serve and reflect the contemporary visual arts community in Canada. The magazine is the creation of a large and beautiful array of fellow contributors who make it worthwhile to do this work in the first place—artists, writers, editors, designers, board and advisory members, interns, funders, donors, sponsors—and every one of them, and you, are our readers. Of utmost importance to me is the understanding that this publication is a collective effort.

Directing _C_ for the past 14 years has been both a privilege and a challenge. At its heart this work is administrative— it’s not glamorous on a day-to-day basis, but it’s necessary work that supports a shared purpose. At times overlooked, I think strong administration is essential to developing an ethical work environment and relevant content, and of course to ensuring that the creative work can continue. For some time, this work has involved recognizing and actively address ing the historical shortcomings of a publication founded in the colonial and racist ideologies and structures of the 20th-century art world. _C_ began as a project initiated by artists and curators with the purpose of serving creative workers and thinkers in their community. That initial purpose continues to be the basis for reparations, with the imperative forward movement of radical inclusion.

Much has been said about the state of art criticism—a debate that has sought to articulate the loss of principled critique in the face of capitalist interests. Why does the quality of art criticism matter? Art publishing might seek only to describe and analyze works of art, in order to provide the basic service to artists of attracting attention and communicating to those interested in looking at or buying art. This limited scope related to promotion and exposure might be what some desire, yet for many of us readers—including professionals in the field—there is much more that can be considered and expressed. That is really why a publication like _C_ exists. No matter the experiences that artists and writers choose to engage with, I think our role at _C_ is to take them seriously, and to provide a forum to show how they touch on our needs, wants, environments, and politics.

_C_ serves artists by extending the dis course of contemporary art. It’s important that publications like _C_ focus on interpretting and evaluating art and the ideas surrounding it at a level that challenges the status quo, and creates new thinking about the most profound issues affecting humanity through the lens of contemporary art. I’ve found the most consequential type of art and cultural criticism to be one that interprets the ideas and experiences most pressing, and difficult, for us to process as individuals. This is the realm in which I think the greatest need exists for art criticism. If our circulation is an indicator, unfortunately, it may be where the least public interest lies. In no way does this disparity make our work, or art criticism, unimportant—rather, I believe that we should publish the best and the least heard voices among us in the service of the collective good.

As publisher, I’ve taken the view that we need to stay closer to the side of ideas than the side of simple promotion and profit, if only because I recognize how rare it is to be able to do so. We are supported in this project by a sophisticated and relatively generous system of public funding, and in my mind it would do a disservice to the public if we did any less than work in solidarity with artists and writers, to use our means to extend their practices and record the ways in which they engage with and challenge society. I’m not particularly interested in putting individual artists on pedestals, or raising one above the other—the point of publishing _C_ is to maintain an environment that values artists as changemakers and important voices, not simply as entertainers. It’s hard work being an artist, and _C_’s role is to strive just as hard to understand that work.

I’ve published 53 issues of _C Magazine_, working with and supporting somewhere in the realm of 1,000 writers and many more artists, and I can’t think of any thing more rewarding than knowing this work exists and that the magazine might continue for as long again. When it comes right down to it, the very purpose of _C_ is to invite engagement with con temporary art, and the very best way to support _C_ and the artists it covers is to read its pages. 

l’ll take this opportunity to ask you one last time to subscribe, advertise, and donate regularly, so that all those involved can be paid fairly and the project can continue on the best footing possible. Ensuring the quality and viability of this organization has been my goal throughout, and I very much look for ward to seeing what my colleagues who come after will produce. Long live _C_!

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A parting note from Publisher Kate Monro after 14 years at _C_.


Pressing Forward

Feature

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.

In the summer of 2021, at the corner of René-Lévesque and Saint-Laurent boulevards in Montreal’s China town, an empty lot lit up every night. A large tree stood in the centre, Karen Tam’s _Arbre à souhaits_ (Wishing tree) (2021), festooned with twinkling lights, orange plastic spheres, red ribbons, and 1,300 placards covered in handwritten Chinese characters representing seven wishes: longevity, health, fortune, prosperity, happiness, strength, and resilience. A stage encircled the tree, ringed with picnic tables and a series of kiosks. Entitled _Place des souhaits_ (Wishing square) (2021), Tam’s collaborative project with designer Jean de Lessard transformed the 35,000-square-foot (over 3,000-square-metre) lot into an intergenerational community space for performances, workshops, or simply a place to rest one’s weary bones and eat some dumplings. Some nights, the stage played host to Chinese opera, decorated with a colourful forest of 1,000 flags, and on others, it became a night market or a casual meeting place.

A makeshift park at the border of Chinatown and the surrounding neighbourhoods felt particularly dreamy amid the disturbing rise of anti-Asian violence, and the anticipation of a season of revelry and bacchanal following a long, difficult year. In 2002, SARS emptied out Chinatowns, and the COVID-19 pandemic also led to less people frequenting these neighbourhoods on a larger scale. The opening of Tam’s installation at the start of the summer created a safe public space in Montreal’s Chinatown to be seen, surrounded by community members, staking ground. With _Place des souhaits_, Tam and her collaborator de Lessard created a space for hosting artistic openness and intergenerational relationships, reinforcing the value of physical, public space as essential to cultural and social infrastructure. On a less formal level, the space felt like a soothing balm, lighting up an area that prides itself on resiliency and strength. The site-specific work synthesized much of what Tam’s oeuvre has explored over the past two decades, connecting the spatial imaginaries of Chinatowns in Canada to the ongoing formation of Chinese diasporic identity.

The daughter of parents of the Cantonese diaspora, Tam spent many hours in her family’s Chinese restaurant, Aux Sept Bonheurs (Seventh Heaven), in Montreal’s east end. In family photographs, she is pint sized, wearing a pink shirt, Mary-Janes, and barrettes in her hair, sitting in the side doorway to Aux Septs Bonheurs. In another, Tam as a toddler stands on the restaurant kitchen’s cooktop gripping two wok handles with a big grin on her face, while her father, the chef, holds her in his arms. Tam still has the same warm and open smile, and upon meeting her for the first time on a video call, I’m immediately disarmed and feeling major sister vibes. She tells me that she grew up with a network of friends, family, and other restauranteurs who would help one another out; even after retiring and selling his business in 2004, Tam’s father trained successive Chinese restauranteurs who took over Aux Septs Bonheurs.

I asked Tam if she worked in the family restaurant after school and on weekends, the fate of many immigrant kids. She only lasted one summer, before returning to her true callings: music and art. At one point, music almost superseded her artistic ambitions; a trained classical pianist, Tam decided a graduate degree in music would be her back-up plan if she wasn’t accepted into the MFA in sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. But her career has always been a balance of priorities and happenstance; after completing her MFA, Tam took a research trip to the United Kingdom and happened to meet a professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, who persuaded her to pursue a PhD in cultural studies—something she had only considered for the golden years of her life.

This flow between disciplines and practices acts as a type of architecture for the way Tam approaches her artistic practice. While completing her PhD, she wrote essays and articles on _shanzhai_ culture—a Chinese term to denote fake, counterfeit, or parody consumer products. Her dissertation examined the corporeal experience of space, referencing the development of the North American Chinese restaurant from the 19th century until the present, a project that challenged her to think culturally about her own artistic practice and, more broadly, how she employs historical context in her large-scale installations. In some ways, a micro-sized form of Chinatown can be found in the diasporic Chinese family restaurant. Spatially, the Chinese restaurant envelops an imaginary of multiple diasporic Chinas, asking: who are these spaces for, and how are they reflected onto us?

Tam leans on her family’s history in the restaurant industry to create site-specific work like _Place des souhaits_, referencing the cultural and social functions of these spaces. As much community centres as they are businesses, the two functions cannot be easily divorced from one another. Rarely are exchanges that occur in small, independently-owned businesses purely transactional; rather, they are cultural and social interactions, the connective tissue of everyday life. Sharing a meal with others might be one of the most sustaining and generative acts of care, taking the time with loved ones to nourish the mind and heart. All these types of essential, community-based activities are given the space to unfold in Tam’s approach to public installation, transposing the interior socio-cultural dynamics of a family restaurant to an outdoor space and expanding opportunities for these kinships to flourish. By combining various elements of Chinese diasporic culture into one—shopkeeping, gatherings in public space, performance—Place des souhaits remakes the artwork as community space for a wider au dience, including those who may not ever pass through the doors of a gallery or museum.



All-encompassing and meticulously researched, Tam’s exhibitions are curatorial ventures that seem to negate institutional curation, blurring the lines between art production and the recitation of cultural history. Her work rarely focuses on her as a solo artist in the spot light. Rather, she centres artists from the margins of Canadian art history, as in _With wings like clouds hung from the sky_ 大鵬就振翼 (2017–2022)—where Tam created an imagined artist studio for LEE Chao Nam 李 趙南, a Chinese Canadian painter who lived in Victoria in the 1930s and was a contemporary and friend to Emily Carr. The work was sited at multiple institutions; conceived at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria presented an expanded iteration of the exhibition before it toured to the Richmond Art Gallery and made its final stop at the Varley Art Gallery in Markham. Taking its English and Chinese titles from a poem carved onto the walls of San Francisco’s Angel Island detention/immigration centre, the exhibition looks at the life and art of Lee, whom Tam discovered while reading Carr’s journals.[^1] In each iteration, Tam shifted the exhibition according to its community context in each city, inviting local Chinese brush painters to show their works alongside those of Lee, Carr, QI Baishi, LUI Luk Chun 呂陸川, and other artists from the Chinese diaspora.

Acting as a cultural historian, Tam converses with these late artists to create new spaces untethered by the weight of our contemporary moment, linear history, and geographical borders. Through various strands of connection—artistic, community, geographic, and cultural—Tam assembles a lineage of ancestral art knowledges and inheritance, including her mother TAM YUEN Yin Law 譚阮嫣娜, a traditional Chinese painter in her own right, and a student of Lui, as well as the younger Tam herself. By placing her mother’s painting of goldfish next to her mother’s favourite painter Qi, and positioning a Carr in proximity, or mixing up the display of “local” artists with more “known” names, Tam questions what makes someone a so-called professional artist, itself a particularly contentious term in the contemporary professionalization of the arts, and another artist an amateur. Who gets to be shown, and who receives recognition? In each reinstallation of the exhibition, the works and spaces inhale and exhale new air, new contexts. The installation also breaks up the linear continuum of art history, creating discursive, visual space for the gaps in the history of art in Canada, and the art of the Chinese diaspora.



Tam’s interest in showcasing the work of her forebearers and her peers has also shaped her curatorial practice. In 2021, she curated “Whose Chinatown?” for Griffin Projects in North Vancouver, which takes a more traditional route in its museological display, exploring the psychogeographic space of Chinatown. Incorporating the works of multiple artists, as well as living and past collectives—including art, zines, family heirlooms, imagery from personal and public archives, and family collections—the exhibition asks, “Who were the early Chinese-Canadian artists?” and explores Chinatown as a spatial imaginary. Rather than focus on marginalization as a productive end, Tam’s exhibition is a haven for diasporic history and cultural production, contra to pop culture’s image of Chinatown as a seedy site for gang violence, turf wars, and illegal gambling dens. The exhibition reflects Tam’s interest in creating scholarly, visual histories that don’t feel fussy or overly pedagogical. As both an artist and a curator, she exerts a quiet confidence over her subject matter, offering a speculative view on how the worlds of Chinese art and art of the Chinese diaspora in Canada might have interacted had they existed at the same time and place, allowing planes of history to collide in a space where kinship, shared vocation, and culture find home.



Tam’s exploration of the concept of remaking and its meaning in her curatorial and artistic work can be linked back to the Chinese practice of _shanzhai_. In her essay “Dolce & Banana: A Shanzhai Creator’s Manual” published in the anthology _The Changing Landscape of China’s Consumerism_ (2014), she notes that “Shanzhai can be used as an appropriative practice in contemporary art, and as a method of resistance, subversion, and critique.”[^2] The term _shanzhai_ can be broadly defined as copying, counterfeiting, and appropriation, but Tam taps into the creativity and innovation embedded in this practice, a counter to what a Western worldview might consider unethical or trademark infringement. In 2012, Tam began making papier-mâché interpretations of Chinese porcelain ware in her sculptural series _The Porcelain Collection_ (2012–present), building up layers of strips of Chinese newspaper, the construction visible just under a painted surface. From the classic blue and white dragon motifs of _The Sporting Life (Golf)_ and _The Sporting Life (Football)_ (both 2015), to the multi colour _Dream of Flying Machines_ (2015), a close inspection reveals their depictions may not be classic from a historical point of view but, rather, depict classical Chinese art as it could be interpreted today: a dragon next to a football or a golf club, rocket and satellites in the latter. By taking from one medium (porcelain) and using another (newspaper) with contemporary imagery, Tam narrows a cultural gap. She notes of this series, “I would probably never be able to acquire the originals, I can in my own way come closer to them through their likeness.”[^3] The works are exercises in a knowing through making, playing on the practice of _shanzhai_ to create new objects that reference historical representations but are wholly authentic unto themselves.

These vessels can be viewed as a metaphor for the many identities that proliferate within the Chinese diaspora, each not quite like the other, an amalgam of “Chineseness” as a cultural imaginary and its specific context in diasporic form. The paper-mâché porcelain ware appear to approximate chinoiserie designs, though like their so-called originals, these too are one of-a-kind and just as true as their forebears, touched and shaped by an artist’s hand, not mere replications made in another medium. Viewed as reproductions or replications, the papier-mâché vases ultimately fail as utilitarian objects; after all, they cannot hold flowers or water. Rather, Tam’s reinscription of certain Chinese motifs like mountains, meanders, or lotus blossoms carries on a lineage of visual culture beyond its roots, broadening their application via a simple, approachable method that can easily be replicated with an everyday material like paper.

The vessels are part of an ongoing series and still circulate in exhibitions today, much like the porcelain objects that inform them. They also move in and out of Tam’s large-scale installations—appearing in her recreations of a curio shop, a storefront window, and a photography studio. 

Many of Tam’s works, in fact, evolve as part of a series, with no definitive enddate, referencing perhaps how cultural production has never been pure, but moves through the world constantly hyphenating, multiplying, and resituating itself in new contexts.


Tam’s _shanzhai_ methods also appear in _With wings like clouds hung from the sky_ 大鵬就振翼. Collaborating with her mother and Lui, Tam painted 300 drawings of birds based on a Carr sketch, a call back to the erasure of Chinese diasporic artists like Lee. While learning through copying has a privileged place in Western art history—painters training in Europe were brought to galleries and salons to sketch the “masters”—the practice has acquired a negative connotation, synonymous with pirated, counterfeit goods, specifically those made in China. The adage that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery might apply here, but Tam’s intention is more about parallels and retracing history rather than straightforward reenactment. Similarly, Tam’s paintings of 12 men named Lee Nam attempt to locate a visage for Nam among the archives of Canada; her depictions speculate that one of these portraits is the Lee in question, and that in depicting him, he is truly seen and known. The knowing, it turns out, does emerge through successive iterations. After the third exhibition at the Richmond Art Gallery, a collector approached Tam with a paint ing of Lee’s dated September 1933 (currently it is awaiting authentication), which will be reproduced in a forthcoming publication by the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and Richmond Art Gallery. As fluid as the identities, lives, and brushstrokes that the exhibition records, _With wings like clouds hung from the sky_ 大鵬就振翼 moves within its own sense of time, mixing the past with the present and future, creating new possibilities for overlap and connection.



Careful in her approach, Tam is not concerned with preserving history. Instead, she recognizes a connection to the past must be informed by engaging with lo cal communities in a continual process of regeneration. From an artist’s studio to domestic interiors, Chinese restaurants, karaoke lounges, and opium dens, Tam’s serial works continually evolve with each iteration, shifting to accommodate their sites and never present ing a singular narrative. She invites artists historical and contemporary to join her in this remaking; each space is rooted in collaboration, connecting her with her ancestral past while propelling her work into the speculative future. 
It’s uncool to use the term “immersive” now— many times it’s a stretch when used in the contemporary art lexicon—but it perfectly encapsulates Tam’s highly detailed (and deeply _shanzhai_) installations. Visually, she transports the viewer into a time and space that existed long ago, will exist in the future, or never existed in the ways in which she envisions it, creating environments that are entities unto themselves, old and new, present and future all at once. While art historians might write histories from marginalization into the main narrative, Tam does this in the visual form of an exhibition display, creating an artist’s exhibition within an exhibition, a never-ending salon. Her installations could be framed as _shanzhai_ villages in their (re)creations of everyday life, no less sites of invention and reinvention than history itself with its revisions and evolving augmentations. In their doubling and imagining, Tam’s works become new agents of history, authentic and original in their replication. As Tam notes, “If art is a product, then it will be shanzhai-ed.”[^4]

[^1]: Of Lee, Carr wrote: “A young Chinese came to my door carrying a roll of painting. He had heard about the exhibition, had come to show his work to me—beautiful watercolours done in Oriental style. He was very anxious to carry his work further… I invited him to show in place of the flower painter and he hung a beautiful exhibition.” 
[^2]: Karen Tam, “Dolce & Banana: A Shanzhai Creator’s Manual,” in _The Changing Landscape of China’s Consumerism_, ed. Alison Hulme (New York: Chandos Publishing, 2014), 84. 
[^3]: “Sculpture,” Karen Tam, accessed October 16, 2022, https://karentam.ca/sculpture.html 
[^4]: Tam, “Dolce & Banana,” 85.

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Charlene K. Lau’s far-ranging profile of artist Karen Tam chronicles Tam’s influences, from her family’s restaurant in Montreal to her scholarly writing on _shanzhai_. Lau examines how Tam’s work reconfigures the Chinese diasporic experience and disrupts the familiar.


The Spatial Imaginaries of Karen Tam 譚嘉文

**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. 


**Shellie Zhang** is a multidisciplinary artist. She creates images, objects, and projects in a wide range of media to explore how integration, diversity, and assimilation are implemented and negotiated, and how manifestations of these ideas relate to lived experiences.


##### Working in photography, sculpture, and installation, artists Michelle Bui’s and Shellie Zhang’s individual practices share an obsession with gathering items and reconfiguring them in a studio setting. Their impulse to collect organic material as well as plastic and found objects explores the role of consumption, accumulation, identity, and the body in a world dominated by a culture of material excess. As contemporary artists creating work in community, Bui and Zhang discuss their overlapping artistic practices and examine the sources of their shared language. 

>**Shellie Zhang:** I feel like I’m talking to a fellow hobbyist collector, what I imagine someone who collects postage stamps feels when they find someone who shares their specific and mutual obsession. I’ve always described my photos of objects and assemblages as portraits of characters invented by me, created by chance, or built from a common source. It’s a constant back-and forth of how much we are defined by objects and how they define us, or in Sara Ahmed’s words, “what orients us toward or away from things and how they become sticky with mean ing.”[^1]  Would you describe your images as portraits? Do you identify as a photographer, or feel more like you use image making as a means for constructing and capturing? 

**Michelle Bui:** I’m excited to connect with you, it feels like talking to someone who already knows me in some sense. While the definition of a photographer is quite vast and multifaceted, I’ve always struggled with being identified as one. Perhaps I could best define my practice as a bricolage, or a precarious sculpture that becomes stabilized through photography. My work often depicts a moment of balance, represent ing the transient nature of things and materials. There’s a fragility that appears in the passage of time that I hope translates into my images, too. 

I admire how your work approaches the history of immigration, such as your piece _Believe It Or Not_ (2020–2021). There’s a project I’ve been wanting to pursue—photographing the ceramic plates, a gold-link bracelet, and family photo albums that my uncle brought over when he immigrated from Vietnam in the ’80s. He brought what was the most essential and precious, knowing he wouldn’t be able to go back. I’ve never spoken to him about it for many reasons—shyness and language being obstructions to any conversation, but also because we have never addressed that specific moment in my family, what it was like to move away from your home and experiencing trauma and displacement.

In that sense, the objects my uncle carried with him do speak to his identity and are a part of his history. While they don’t hold the specificity of words them selves, 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. In a broader sense, I wonder who we are in this era of the disposable where waste takes up more and more space. How do we define the idea of overripe or decay during this era of excess? Recently, photography has made the most sense as a medium for me to capture the concreteness of things, their surfaces, but also how they can operate as forms of detachment and reverie. Surface can be misleading and there is an openness to that idea of the envelope (the skin of the image) that relates to portraiture, too. 

>**SZ:** _Believe It Or Not_ was one of my more research-driven projects. As I slowly learned more about the history of the Chinese community in Saskatoon, and how their Chinatown was demolished, I started to think about what evidence of these stories could look like. What resulted was a mirroring of the court and legal documents I scoured through, and I imagined the objects in the works I produced as evidence of these histories, perhaps to interject life into some of the stories that are dying or buried. I also included some subtle allusions to the board game “Clue” to personify the objects. As the artist, I felt like I was playing the role of a detective, trying to piece this history together. 

>You hit on something else that’s resonating with me, how the existence and journey of an object tells so much in itself. I’m also hesitant to ask family about certain histories attached to items, though I know there’s a story there. Why is an object here and how did it get here? What does it mean for it to be here? An object’s existence alone is so intriguing. I wonder what it’s seen, heard, smelled, and touched. 

**MB:** In recent projects, I’ve been working exclusively with brand-new things or fresh produce like fruits, flowers, and offal that I find in shops in Montreal to access the “newness” of store-bought objects. They’re often packaged in a way that makes it easy for us to buy them, and they feel less charged because they’re presented to us as new and available in infinite quantities. But I think the desire to camouflage the efforts of production is what makes them interesting. What are we trying to hide exactly? 

>**SZ:** Something you do so well in your work is the use of raw materials such as muscle and flesh. It ani mates the tension, moisture, and rot in your subjects, until they almost appear to be breathing, such as in your piece _Twisted Musk _(2019). I’ve never seen such patience applied to tripe and seeing it so delicately laid on black leather with flowers moved me. It was like the material was getting the praise it deserved. 

**MB:** I remember fighting a lot with the piece of tripe and wanting to control the folds and curls. In the end, letting the offal take its own shape made it less about imitation and decor and more about unveiling something fragile that is usually kept inside the body.I wanted to circle back to the subject of places like the Dollar Store—I think we both tap into these spaces in our practices, but we differentiate in terms of the objects we select in drugstores, hardware stores, conveniences stores, and grocery stores. The smell of all these places is the ever-present scent of plastic, a particular perfume that screams “new!” and casts such an exuberant sense of optimism; all it can do is collapse.

I love your piece _Ode to Spring_ (2022) because it reminds me of those weirdly upbeat TV ads from the ’90s. The Sunny Delight one in particular comes to mind. I remember that if only we could drink enough of that juice, we’d become happy and bouncy like the kids in that ad. There was a possibility to fit in if you bought, and consumed, the “right things.” 

>**SZ:** I remember when I moved to the US as a child, these images were a promise of fitting in, and a way to learn about a new culture through the language of consumption. There’s an acute awareness that buying things won’t bring to fruition the realities they sell us; we’ll never be those Sunny Delight kids. But I like the feeling of desire they convey, and I wanted to simply stay in that moment. It’s a bit like a crush—a fantasy that’s more potent than the real thing itself. The abundance of plastic in the spaces we frequent feels like a fitting material to elude the malleability and potential of what we saw in those images. 

**MB:** _Ode to Spring_ also really captures that sense of cringe that fuels both our practices. The confounding sensations of familiarity, the optimism and excess, the desire to blend in—all those ideas and feeling are entangled and revealed within that single piece. I like how your image invites the viewer with bright colours and familiar textures, but also somehow feels like a façade. The image is so perfect you wonder if it’s real. It contains an overflow heightened by the knowledge of an inevitable drought. 

>**SZ:** I’m so glad that you mentioned cringe! There’s something about the uncomfortable that’s so alluring and hard to look away from. I think some of the items I pick toe the line between the still-life tradition, musicological displays, and visual merchandising. Sometimes I have to give myself restrictions to narrow down the things in an image. I’ll limit myself to locations, a certain aesthetic, or some other more personal narrative-driven criteria. 

>Often, I feel affinities with objects that are imported because they share a similar journey of coming here as I did. Anne Anlin Cheng discusses how the racialized history of the yellow woman has created a human ontology indebted to commodity, artifice, and “objectness.”[^2] Maybe this is why I look to objects for both comfort and complication. 

**MB:** Long before we started this conversation, I’d been thinking about how our works overlap, especially in our tabletop compositions. I also bought similar fruits and textiles as the ones you use—a royal-blue and lavender silk from the “oriental” section of the fabric store—though I’ve never used them for any photo set-ups. Apples, pears, grapes, oranges could appear in my work, but the pitayas, lychees, bitter melons, and other fruits and vegetables you’ve photo graphed in your series _Offerings to Both Past and Future_ (2018–2019), while very seductive and à propos, can’t. I think using “Asian” or “exotic” fruits would veer too closely to my Vietnamese identity, which I embrace at times but also feels foreign to me. It’s a complicated relationship and vastly multilayered. I’m certainly skirting around this question of identity within my practice as a second generation immigrant. Perhaps the objects I long for, accumulate, or hold on to can speak about that better than my own words. 

 >**SZ:** It’s interesting to hear your experience with objects that are seen as exotic. I was asked once why I include these self-exotifying things in my work. I found the question to be telling of what the person asking considered exotic. Since I work with things in my home, in my friends’ and family’s homes, or found or purchased from places I’m comfortable in, these objects have always been the opposite of exotic to me. There is also a visual history we have inherited, and I find it much more exciting to develop autonomy in defining and shaping the future of that object and visual language. I love to work with dead stock, things that aren’t expected to sell anymore. Instead of making existing objects into new forms and structures, I like to work with things that are freshly out of style, kitsch, or loud (yet overlooked) to maybe give a critical lens to shifting desires and trends. I’d love to hear how you pick your materials too. So many of your images emphasize a vacuum-sealed glossiness or high shine. Textures feel so import ant in your work. 

**MB:** Lately, my images have become more liquid and mutable, as if there is a desire to crush the objects I’ve accumulated to see if that veneer of glittery optimism is still present. A lot of my process is like cooking—layering objects and textures using gelatin, boiled water, egg whites, sugar, and plastic film either to slow down or accelerate the process of transformation.

It feels cliché to say, but it does bring me back to those memories in the kitchen with my mom, where we communicated through gestures. I remember gently peeling the imperial-roll pastry sheets for chả giò (Vietnamese fried spring rolls). It had to be a precise gesture, going too fast or at the wrong angle would tear the sheet. Putting down the filling, wet and cold, with speckles of bright orange carrots, translucent vermicelli, wood ear mushrooms, and pink meat to which we added raw eggs to make the texture even more goopy. The sound it made when you separated the mixture is how you knew if you’d succeeded. The right ratio makes the perfect tear sound.

We’d also sometimes prepare stuffed pig stomach, rubbing the surface with salt under running water and filling the stomach with ear cartilage for extra gnaw. Then we’d sew the stomach like a balloon to hold everything in, a black stitch tracing a line on that elegant, curved shape, and adding a bow before plopping it in the oven. In all honesty, the result was never that great in terms of look and taste. The meat would always leak through holes we didn’t properly stitch and the whole thing was an unappetizing beige blob. But the messy process, the smell, the textures, the colours, all of that clearly stayed with me.

>**SZ:** Not cliché at all. There’s a real skill to bundling all those delicious components and juices together. It makes me think about the delicate balance of push-and-pull in some of your works. There’s a clear allusion to the body as well. 

**MB:** The series at Esker, _Naked Excess_ (2022), was produced while I was pregnant, with a good chunk of it completed after giving birth to my son, Milan. I sometimes joke that the series are simply pictures of my placenta, which perhaps is not too far from reality. The images were made during a period where I was extremely self-aware of what I was ingesting, and inspecting everything that I was eating, but you can only control so much. The work at the studio also evolved in the same way, a mix of organic and plastics all melded in together. Some objects ended up in the image after careful deliberations while others are fortuitous accidents.

>**SZ:** The placenta is a magical container. In ancient China, there were ways of burying the placenta in auspicious directions that would impact the child and mother.[^3] It seems like such a beautiful tradition, paying respect to something that protected us so tenderly. I’m reminded of artist Winnie Truong’s recent project “Herbaria” (2022) [^4]where there are so many organic figures that allude to the post-pregnancy body, or on the synthetic end, Ani Liu’s works [^5] with long plastic tubes of a milk-like substance. Maybe these practices and artefacts are a way of visually manifesting a labour that is often made invisible. 

**MB:** In your _Aesthetic of Surfaces_ (2017) and _Cornucopias_ (2019–2020) series, you use photographs and sculpture in the same installation. There’s also the presence of an altar—did you have one in your house growing up? 

>**SZ:** We didn’t have an altar at home, though sometimes, we’d pay respect to the dead at the homes of extended family or in public. With _Offerings to Both Past and Future_ and _Cornucopias_, I was inspired by the act of leaving fruit on graves and altars at home, at businesses, or in restaurants. I felt that for this body of work, I had to include plastic fruits and bring a sculptural configuration into the images. While it’s terrible that plastic is forever, sometimes it’s a useful surrogate for the real, unavailable thing or to help sustain a gesture.

>These objects are so packed with hope, promise, and wishes that the act of acquiring them and then leaving them for another is a transference of these sentiments. When we were still in a vaccine shortage during the pandemic, a small demand for joss[^ 6] vaccines emerged. Families would buy paper/cardboard vaccines to burn and send to their loved ones, a way to give them something they weren’t able to get while they were living and perhaps as a form of closure. I cried for a week whenever I thought of this. 

**MB:** The pragmatism of plastic is hard to beat. I appreciate seeing offerings that feel so removed from the ancestral gesture, like a bowl of popcorn next to fresh fruit. It adds a layer of humour that appears in our work, too. The flashy and junky aspect of some of the objects and materials we choose often creates a sensation of friction that skirts very closely toward bad taste. I think we both play with the notion of absurdity within our practice to reflect excesses in the material world.

I had an altar at home that my par ents prayed to for specific celebrations, but the one that struck my senses was created by my uncle, the family’s eldest son, for Đám Giỗ (a Vietnamese death anniversary) and Tết (Lunar New Year Festival), offering the most ripe, perfect fruits and flowers and reserving the best bites from the dishes the family had prepared. It was a space of solemnity but also of fear as a child. It felt as if those objects and portraits could really carry my thoughts to the elders and vice versa.

Do you ever get tired of accumulating objects as part of your practice? Sometimes I wish I could be a painter and paint my own objects instead of buying them, or that I could mix the right colour on my own instead of searching existing objects for the perfect hue.

>**SZ:** There does seem to be some parallels with painting—finding the perfect light to make the material shine a certain way, attempting to capture the likeness of the ephemeral in an image. The compulsion to collect feels hereditary. I don’t know if it will ever stop. Making work is maybe a coping mechanism for making sense of my hoarding. I’m still trying to find the balance between being intentional and intuitional. 

[^1]: Sara Ahmed, _The Cultural Politics of Emotion_ (New York: Routledge, 2004), 11. 
[^2]: Anne Anlin Cheng, _Ornamentalism_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 
[^3]: Sarah Hollister, “Placenta Burial Rituals,” https://placen tarisks.org/wp-content/ uploads/2018/09/Placenta burial-rituals-from-around the-world-handout.pdf 
[^4]: “Herbaria,” Patel Brown, July 30 to August 27, 2022, https://patelbrown.com/ winnie-truong-herbaria 
[^5]: “Untitled, Feeding Through Time and Space,” Ani Liu, accessed October 14, 2022, https://ani-liu.com/ feeding-through-space-time 
[^6]: Types of paper offerings made to be burned as offerings to the dead. 


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Sculpture

Artists Michelle Bui and Shellie Zhang discuss the role of accumulation and excess in their work, highlighting the power of objects to hold hidden and obvious histories.


Artificial Artifacts

Artificial Artifacts: Michelle Bui and Shellie Zhang in conversation 


**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. 


On 20th Street West in Saskatoon, there’s a neighbourhood called Riversdale, a few blocks with Asian businesses tucked among artisanal coffee shops, lifestyle boutiques, and trendy restaurants. Unlike bigger Canadian cities, Saskatoon’s unofficial “Chinatown” isn’t demarcated by grand architecture or a welcome gate; rather, it’s identified by unremarkable exteriors with simple signs bearing short descriptions and Chinese characters. This lacklustre presence is, in fact, a historical consequence of racist policies carried out against Chinese immigrants and their descendants in Saskatchewan since the 19th century. The legacy of this history continues today, as waves of gentrification steadily overtake the neighbourhood.

Recognizing the rapid disappearance of the Chinese community in Riversdale,[^1] AKA artist-run centre collaborated with art duo Life of a Craphead in 2019 to create a long-term working relationship with their next-door neighbour, Jin Jin Cuisine, a restaurant run by a Chinese couple specializing in Northern Chinese dishes. The partnership explored how an art organization and a small business could work together to address community issues like food security and gentrification. For AKA, the partnership with Jin Jin Cuisine also expands on their commitment to support residents through community-based art practices and food sharing. With two successful collaborative projects completed, the working relationship between AKA and Jin Jin Cuisine is an example of how art organizations operating in gentrification-prone areas can be more responsive to community needs.

Despite the absence of official “Chinatown” recognition, Riversdale still shares a similar history to other Chinatowns in Canada, as well as a heightened risk of gentrification. The origins of Saskatchewan’s Chinatowns stretch back to the late-18th century, when the Government of Canada brought over 17,000 men from China to work on the western section of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Despite racist policies like the 1885 head tax and the Chinese Exclusion Act, Chinese immigrants in Saskatchewan grew from 41 people in 1901 to 957 by 1911, with communities in Regina, Swift Current, Battleford, and Moose Jaw. In the early 20th century, Chinese workers were brought to Saskatoon’s River Landing district on 19th Street East by the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, where they settled, opened businesses, and founded the city’s first Chinatown. But they were displaced when the city expropriated the area in 1930 to build the Saskatoon Technical Collegiate Institute and the Royal Canadian Legion Hall,[^2] moving Saskatoon’s Chinese community to Riversdale. The number of new businesses operated by Chinese immigrants recovered slowly until the mid- ’60s when growth tapered out, and by 1986, there were only 20 Chinese businesses in Riversdale; Saskatoon’s Chinatown has never fully recovered.[^3]

In a 2016 news article, journalist Charles Hamilton described the opening of “coffee shops, upscale bars and boutique shops” and condo development, as signs of the city’s growth, whereas local Indigenous activist Erica Lee saw them as gentrification in Riversdale. The quick rise in the neighbourhood’s property values negatively affects residents who are typically marginalized and poorer than folks in the city on average.[^4] Lee’s insights share similarities with how gentrification has affected New York City’s Chinatown, especially with the presence of art spaces in the neighbourhood. As trendy cafes, bars, and galleries took over former Chinese-run businesses, the city’s Chinese population was forced to relocate to neighbouring boroughs.[^5] The growing neighbourhood tensions were further exacerbated by a 2017 exhibition at James Cohan Gallery in Chinatown by Berlin-based Israeli artist Omer Fast. Fast transformed the gallery’s typical white cube into “a funky Chinatown shop or bus-company waiting room with metal chairs, broken A.T.M.s and a shabby façade.”[^6] Artists and residents of Chinatown protested Fast’s show for its harmful perpetuation of “poverty porn,” one of many justifications for gentrification in the neighbourhood.

Referencing displacement in NYC Chinatown, writer Audrea Lim acknowledges the limitations of community-organized protests to challenge agents of gentrification like banks, developers, real-estate management companies, government officials, and lobbyists. The protests “are ill-suited for building the long-lasting alliances across race and class—between Chinese and Latinx immigrants, or between different groups of Asians and Asian Americans—that are the work of organizing and forging independent political institutions.”[^7] In Saskatoon, the partnership between AKA and Jin Jin Cuisine presents a possible model for “long-lasting alliances,” highlighting the need for meaningful collaborations between small local businesses and art organizations to effectively resist gentrification.

As one of Canada’s oldest artist-run centres, AKA became more aware of their role in the community when the gallery moved into the former location of a Chinese restaurant, Toons Kitchen, in 2007. For the gallery’s first project in their new home, AKA commissioned Montreal-based artist Karen Tam to create an iteration of her installation series _Gold Mountain Restaurant_ (2002–2017), transforming the gallery into a Chinese restaurant dining room—a tribute to the building’s former life in an exhibition titled “On Rock Garden” (2008). AKA’s partnership with Jin Jin Cuisine was initiated by Life of a Craphead, the collaborative practice of Amy Lam and Jon McCurley, and their exhibition “Entertaining Every Second” (January 17–February 16, 2019), which featured works criticizing representations of Western imperialism in Asia, including a “bamboo ceiling” structure with three clowns on top, and a text piece entitled _The Qui et American But Only The Parts Where the White Man Main Character Tells the Asian Woman To Do Stuff for Him_ (2019). Life of a Craphead also organized a multi year site-specific project as part of the exhibition, _Until Either One Closes_ (2019–ongoing). Reflecting Lam and McCurley’s interest in community-based engagement, according to the project description on the AKA website, it is an agreement between AKA and Jin Jin Cuisine where the restaurant caters all AKA’s exhibition openings and events “for the rest of time, until either one of the businesses closes (or moves).”

Opened in 2009, Jin Jin Cuisine Dumpling House is a family restaurant run by Mr. Yushan Yao and Mrs. Weifang Yang. The name “Jin Jin” is a joint word for China’s capital—Beijing—and Tianjin—the neighbouring city Mr. Yao and Mrs. Yang are both from. The two cities represent the authentic Northern Chinese cuisine Jin Jin serves to Riversdale patrons, like fried scallion pancakes and Tianjin-style dumplings and buns. Speaking almost no English, the restauranteurs communicate with their non-Chinese clients through pictures on the menu and alternative communicative cues.

Unlike the performativity criticized by Chinatown activist groups in Fast’s project, _Until Either One Closes_ is a mutually agreed-upon partnership, where AKA holds itself accountable for the gentrifying effects it contributes to the neighbourhood by actively supporting Jin Jin’s business as well as recognizing the restaurant on AKA’s list of funders and supporters. Given the physical proximity between the restaurant and the artist-run centre, the project also creates an opportunity for AKA and Jin Jin Cuisine to be each other’s witnesses, working together to try to address a shared problem. 

Inspired by _Until Either One Closes_, AKA and Saskatoon based artist Xiao Han collaborated with the Riversdale Community Fridge project and Jin Jin Cuisine to organize _Dough Nation_ (2022). Covering the entire width of the AKA building, Han created a large billboard featuring the Jin Jin couple sitting in their restaurant. The project also included a series of food-sharing days in May and June 2022. Every Thursday to Saturday at 3pm, Mrs. Yang dropped off fried rice and pancakes at the community fridge located be tween Jin Jin and AKA. The title _Dough Nation_ plays on the idea of “donation” and the value of “dough”— an essential ingredient found in many cultural dishes, reflecting the crossover between the restaurant world and the art world encouraged by the project. 

Han has an existing relationship with Mr. Yao and Mrs. Yang, having previously worked as a Mandarin translator on Life of a Craphead’s project. The two are also the subject of her photography work _The Jin Jin Couple_ (2021), depicting the couple standing in the alley behind their restaurant, the red building framing them within an intimate and comfortable shade. The vulnerability Han captures demonstrates the trust the couple has cultivated with the artist, enabling a thoughtful project like _Dough Nation_ to happen. Han notes, “To exhibit public artwork based on a Chinese immigrant family’s business and their relationship to the location raises several questions: what does Chinatown mean? How does stereotype affect Canadian history? What are artists’ and curators’ roles in cultivating relationships with the history of Chinatown?”[^8]

The participatory nature of _Dough Nation_ created generative conversations on issues facing many neighbourhoods experiencing gentrification, such as community care and food insecurity. It also called back to AKA’s previous project Locals Only (2017–2019), a series of community gatherings coordinated in partnership with CHEP Good Food Inc.—a not-for-profit that provides healthy food options to Saskatoon’s core neighbourhoods—to explore local food, changing neighbourhoods, and creative forms of hospitability.[^9]

After over 13 years in business, the Jin Jin couple is looking to retire and close their restaurant doors, which means Life of a Craphead’s multi-year work _Until Either One Closes_ will also come to an end. While the project has not successfully prevented the loss of a significant community establishment, it served as a model for arts programming that reimagines the relationship between the community and the gallery space. In the process, the project also highlighted the influence of artist-run centres in shaping the culture and the affordability of a neighbourhood through their programming. While it is unclear if the agreement will be reprised with another business in the neighbourhood, AKA’s co-staff Tarin Dehod and Derek Sandbeck plan to continue making AKA a true community space that serves Riversdale locals and gives back to residents. “Galleries often begin the gentrification cycle; we benefit from it and are complicit in it,” Dehod explains. She goes on: “Years ago, a colleague encouraged me to make a choice for AKA: continue steering it in the direction of a white cube space or try to serve our immediate and local communities. We chose the latter, and since then, we’ve been working to understand and enact co-authorship with communities.”[^10]

Despite the valuable work AKA has done to try to address community needs, art organizations and artist-run centres are still catalysts for gentrification in marginalized neighbourhoods like Chinatown. AKA’s relationship with Jin Jin Cuisine serves as an example of how to cultivate and nurture mutual trust within the community, creating a model that supports neighbourhoods through arts programming. By protecting the livelihood of existing residents, art organizations and artist-run centres are also acknowledging their complicated role in these spaces. 

[^1]: “About,” AKA, https://akaartistrun.com/about 
[^2]: Jeff O’Brien, Ruth Miller, and William Delainey, _Saskatoon: A History in Photographs_ (Regina: Coteau Books, 2006), 46–47.
[^3]: Yixi Lu and Li Zong, “The Development of the Chinese Community in Saskatoon,” _Canadian Ethnic Studies_ 49, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 76–79. 
[^4]: Charles Hamilton, “‘This Is Ground Zero for Gentrification’: Artist Wants to Keep the Gentrification Conversation Happening In Riversdale,” _Saskatoon StarPhoenix_, September 8, 2016, https://thestarphoenix.com/news/local-news/this-is-groundzero-for-gentrification-artistwants-to-keep-the-gentrification-conversation-happening-in-riversdale
[^5]: Audrea Lim, “Beyond Canal Street: Gentrification in Chinatown,” _FRIEZE_, July 19, 2021. https://www.frieze.com/article/beyondcanal-street-gentrification-chinatown 
[^6]: Holland Cotter, “Omer Fast’s Chinatown Instal lation Is a Misfire,” The New York Times, October 20, 2017, https://nytimes.com/2017/10/20/arts/design/omer-fast-chinatown-artshow-james-cohan.html 
[^7]: Lim. 
[^8]: Xiao Han, email message to author, September 19, 2022. 
[^9]: “Gratitude and Legacies: Concluding Locals Only 2017–19,” Locals Only, May 28, 2019, https://localsonly.akaartistrun.com/gratitude-and-legacies-concluding-locals-only-2017-19 
[^10]: Tarin Dehod, email message to author, October 3, 2022.

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Artist-run centres

Touching on the consequences of gentrification on small businesses in Saskatoon’s Chinatown and how artist-run centres contribute to these changes, Tak Pham explores how the partnership between AKA Artist Run Centre and Jin Jin Cuisine presents a possible model for “long-lasting alliances” through collaboration and mutual aid.

AKA and Jin Jin Cuisine

**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.


In the ’50s and ’60s, Chinatowns became illuminated by a sea of neon lights, reflecting the trend of more colourful signage and unabashed self-advertisement, a nod to growing nightlife. In the mid-’60s, the Poons installed the tall, three-faced pagoda-shaped sign on the top of the building.
 
>_“I remember going into Linda Mae’s cafe to make root beer floats. I remember Po Po sitting in her office. In the lounge, all of us grandkids had a non-alcoholic drink named after us—mine was called Carol’s Cooler, a lime-flavoured drink! There was an ice-cream machine and booths with jukeboxes, where ’50s and ’60s music played. We served egg foo young, wonton soup, chicken noodle soup, beef noodle soup… egg rolls… and deep fried shrimp in rings like a donut. There were sweet and sour ribs, dried ribs and chicken wings, chicken with mushroom, beef and broccoli, chop suey and chow mein… My dad made lots of pies, like banana and coconut cream pie, cherry pie, apple pie…”_                                             


 
                                     
As children, Carol and her sister Jasmin spent weekends and afternoons after school at the family businesses. To them, Linda Mae’s Gift Shop was a place of wonder. 

>_“We would stand or sit on the steps outside the store and peer inside the big glass windows. The gift shop was full of stuff, lots of knick knacks. It was Toy Land with all sorts of neat things. They sold fireworks, jewellery, and Chinese clothing… vases, pottery, slippers… and incense. It was packed and the back [of the shop] was Po Po’s office, which led to the restaurant kitchen.”_ 

They helped the staff prepare food in the rear kitchen for the coffee shop and restaurant, which served Chinese and Western dishes. Linda Mae’s was their anchor to home in Chinatown.
 
>_“There was a dumb-waiter… that we all rode in! Downstairs, there was a big walk-in fridge, a huge prep kitchen and a big noodle machine. There was a cooking area to make egg roll and wonton wrappers, where the potatoes were peeled, the shrimp were peeled, where the French fries were made… On the main floor was the kitchen. Women worked in the front of house and the waiters were mostly men. People smoked indoors.”_ 

Linda Mae’s was more than just a service establishment, or Carol’s childhood stomping grounds. It was also a community hub; the Poons helped locals translate documents, facilitate immigration paperwork, and interface with doctors. Carol considers them instrumental to the life, and resilience, of Chinatown. 

>_“Regardless of if they were new immigrants or Canadian born, many people had their first jobs there. The Linda Mae’s Lotus Gardens Restaurant and the gift shop were the places many non-Chinese people had their first experience with Chinese food and culture. Most of Chinatown and the greater Calgary community knew Chong Him and Arline Poon because of the Linda Mae’s, New China, and Imperial Palace restaurants, and strong community involvement.”_ 

In the early and mid-’70s, the Poons passed away. The iconic Linda Mae’s, as Calgarians knew it, closed in 1976. After 25 years, the restaurant finally changed hands. The new owner reappropriated the same building structure but changed the restaurant name to Mandarin Village.
 
>_“In the ’50s and ’60s, there was still a lot of discrimination and racism was quite rampant. Non-Chinese would come down to Chinatown and pick fights at the end of the night… [but] Linda Mae’s brought an elevated level to Chinatown... People knew of The Linda Mae’s and the Poons played a big part in preserving Chinatown. What did this mean for me? It meant that we were a part of all of this. This was home.”_

In the early ’80s, Mandarin Village shuttered, and the building remained vacant until the late ’80s, when it was renovated by Calgary Chinatown architect Clem Lau. Linda Mae’s was given a minimalist makeover, stripping away the slatted crown on the façade and restoring the windows on the second floor. The iconic rooftop signage structure still stands, reminding us of the ’60s heyday when Centre Street was a frenzy of glowing signs, though the red lettering has been replaced multiple times with the logo of new tenants who occupy the building.

Today, the building houses an optometry office, clad with masonry and tan-painted stucco. A branded teal awning extends along the perimeter of the building, a faint reminder of the iconic slatted crown that used to envelop the second storey of Linda Mae’s façade. An eye-care centre’s name and logo now wrap across the three-sided rooftop signage structure in English and Chinese, the paint on the decorative pagoda chipped and fading. While the building has changed over time, the legacy of Linda Mae’s lives on; it was once the epicentre of Chinatown, inviting those inside and outside the community to come in.

>_“I have deep memories of my family’s history with the building. The structure represented Chinatown and I know it made an impact even now, you still hear people mentioning Linda Mae’s, this many years after it not being in existence.”_ 

##### A building’s facade is how a structure faces the city, how it represents itself to the world. It also holds a series of architectural past lives, narrating changes in social and political eras, ownership, and technology through construction details. While fire insurance maps and archival documents give a glimpse of a building’s recorded history and physical presence, they leave out the voices of residents, building stewards, and owners. Calgary Chinatown, like many North American Chinatowns, is an ethnic enclave born out of a history of anti-Asian racism and exclusion. Founded on generations of community resilience, the façades of the buildings are markers of the past lives of those who helped to shape the area and sustain it over time. 

One of the most iconic buildings in Calgary Chinatown is the Linda Mae Block, a two-storey concrete structure with a rounded corner and a three-sided pagoda rooftop sign. Today, the building could easily go unnoticed, overshadowed by neighbouring residential towers. In old photographs from the ’50s and ’60s, it’s surrounded by low-rise buildings on the main strip, a precursor to the housing boom of the late ’70s. Carol Poon remembers: 

>_“Walking home from school, I could always see the bright red sign that said, ‘LINDA MAE’S.’ It was almost like a beacon; the other buildings weren’t as big or bright. You could see it from blocks away.”_ 

Previously an old boarding house, the residential property was purchased by Arline and Chong Him Poon, community leaders in Chinatown, who redeveloped it into a commercial block in 1950. They named the structure Linda Mae’s after one of their beloved daughters, and it housed a coffee shop, a gift shop, and offices. The Poons continued to transform the building, reflecting their savvy approach to changing trends and their growing economic mobility. To expand their business, they converted the offices into Linda Mae’s Lotus Gardens Restaurant, and in the late ’50s, they added the building’s iconic red slatted crown to the upper level of the façade.

In the ’60s, the City announced construction plans for the Downtown East-West Penetrator—a freeway through Calgary’s downtown—which would have demolished the bulk of Chinatown. Community organizers, including the Poons, mobilized to successfully block the expropriation for the proposed freeway.

>_“Chinatown was a close-knit residential community. Families and friends all knew one another and kept a watch out for each other.”_ 

A native Calgarian, Carol Poon grew up with the family at the Linda Mae’s building and lived with Chong Him and Arline in their fourplex next door. As their great-niece, she considered them Po Po and Ye Ye, her grandmother and grandfather. The household was multigenerational, with extended family stretched without boundary across the adjacent buildings.
 
>_“It was never dull or boring. We used to slide down the banister of the stairs. Some evenings, Po Po would play hymns on the piano, and we would sing and dance. Po Po had a flower garden in front of the house. In the summer, we would sit outside on the patio or the steps and watch people and cars go by. When we were really little, we rode our tricycles up and down Centre Street in front of the house and Linda Mae’s.”_                                                                                                           
                 

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Architecture

Memory

Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong documents physical changes to Calgary’s Linda Mae building. Weaving together personal recollection with architectural shifts, Wong includes her own renderings of the Linda Mae, spanning over 50 years of the building’s life cycle.


 Linda Mae’s: An Architectural Past Life

amanda wan (they/them) is a queer han chinese settler based on the unceded, occupied territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and sʔəl̀ilwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Wau tuth) First Nations. Their MA thesis project asks how the “Asian” body is produced through erotic mediations, and suggests that staying with the erotic ambivalence around what is aestheticized as in/organic, im/material, or self/ other can enable reciprocity to become a form of queerly reproductive labour. amanda also creates poetry and artwork in the form of zines, illustrations, and published writing in _Room Magazine, Augur Magazine, LooseLeaf Magazine_, and elsewhere.

##### Queer Reads Library (QRL) is a project as multiple as it is mobile. A collection of zines and independent publications that moves with its organizers, QRL is home to works by artists who identify as part of the queer Asian diaspora around the world. Created in 2018 by Hong Kong-based artist-curator Kaitlin Chan and artist-publisher Beatrix Pang, QRL was in part a response to the Hong Kong government’s shelving of 10 children’s books featuring themes of queerness, the result of lobbying by anti-gay rights groups.[1] When artist-writer Rachel Lau joined the project, they launched a North American chapter in Vancouver. 

Since its inception, QRL’s programming has consistently prioritized collaboration with fellow artists and cultural workers. As part of Queer Zine Friends Worldwide, QRL connected with J Wu of Mixed Rice Zines to talk about bringing the collection to Hong Kong, Taipei, Vancouver, and San Francisco. QRL also participated in the opening exhibition of SPRINT21 Independent Publishers and Artists’ Book Salon in Milan, Italy, speaking on the theme “HARD COPY SOFT TOUCH: Experiences on Queer and Transfeminist Archive.” And more recently, a QRL Reading Corner at Para Site, an independent art centre based in Hong Kong, focused on the collection’s late-’90s to 2000s Hong Kong theatre ephemera and queer publications on cinematic culture, curating a conversation on “publishing one’s own zeitgeist.”[^2]

I spoke to QRL member Rachel Lau about the transnational mobilities that make the collection possible, Chinatown, “cool queer stuff” as forms of cultural capital, and contributing to the vibrancy of the queer Asian diasporic community. 

>**amanda wan (aw):** I’m curious to hear how QRL imagines its relationship with the artists that contribute to its collection. Kaitlin has been quoted as saying—I love this phrase—“cool queer stuff”[^3] in response to questions about the kind of work that QRL houses. How do you, as curators, hold conversations about what kinds of work you want to include, and which zines you select for the collection? 

**Rachel Lau (RL):** With QRL’s curation and collection, there’s a kind of unspoken sensibility around queerness and Asianness that people don’t always think about. “Cool queer stuff” involves what artists in the collection have adopted based on the people they spend time with, the spaces they frequent, the media they consume, and their upbringing. All that “stuff” becomes a sensibility that operates on a subconscious level. Not to say we don’t put thought into our curation, but what’s queer to us as QRL is something that isn’t always conscious. 

We often talk about how QRL is not really about the material books themselves. It’s about the relationships we build with other queer Asian artists. The artists are everything. If their work didn’t exist or they hadn’t put their stories out in the world, we wouldn’t have a library. We see the artists who are involved with us like collaborators, but ultimately, I see us as a community of voices coming together. There’s a stewardship aspect to it. Beatrix, Kaitlin, and I all have zines in the library as well, because we also want to be part of the conversation we’re curating, carrying, and fostering. Each work is saying something different about queerness and queer experiences. In this way the library also speaks as a whole, with its own dialogue, through the interactions of the zines in the collection. 

Kaitlin, Beatrix, and I all have slightly different approaches to how we relate to the Asian diaspora, or “Chinese” culture in general. My parents immigrated from Hong Kong and China to Vancouver and met here. I grew up here with cultural exports, and a sort of time capsule of Chinese culture that my parents brought with them from the late ’80s. Coupled with North American queer history, such as the Stonewall riots, LGBTQ2IA+ and queer rights movements, the AIDS crisis… all that history informs the way that I imagine queerness.

Kaitlin’s dad is from Hong Kong and her mom grew up in Australia. Kaitlin has an Australian passport, but went to an international school in Hong Kong and college in the US. She experienced being an immigrant in the US later in life. Beatrix was born and raised in Hong Kong when it was still a British colony. They grew up going to a local school, went to college there, and their family’s there. So, we all have tangential connections to what a queer Asian diaspora is, and how we experience it. This informs our sensibilities, and what we think is “cool queer stuff.” 

>**aw:** I love how you frame QRL in relation to a queer Asian diasporic sensibility. In the case of QRL’s organizers, this seems to emerge in flows of relationality through different Chinese diasporas. This sensibility, as you call it, seems very attentive to the people and materials around you all, in a relational way. 

>It also seems conscious of accelerating flows of capital. Capital in the sense of speculative finance, surveillance technologies, and colonial education—but also cultural capital, where “coolness” becomes significant to producing QRL as a mobile library that is compelling enough to be circulated throughout the queer Asian diaspora, and more broadly.

>Cultural capital is present in a lot of Asian diasporic artist communities. Take the visuality of certain fruits like durian, bitter melon, or mango, for example, which are then taken to represent and mediate specific parts of a very broad Asian diasporic sensibility and can be used in the direction of “identity,” but hardly ends there. This is not to say aesthetics is frivolous, that frivolity isn’t political, or that nuance is lost in the circulation of cultural capital. Meaning is actually enriched when we ask about the conditions of the queer Asian diaspora in terms of its materiality around desire and perceived value. We can then attend to the potency of identity or art movements as aesthetic tropes that compose a queer Asian diasporic sensibility.                                     

**RL:** It was significant that Kaitlin, Beatrix, and I were all in Hong Kong during a pivotal time for political activism in the city, including anti-Extradition Bill protests that began in 2019.[^4] Movement in terms of capital, activism, and community organizing informs the artists that we connect with, which will inevitably affect the collection’s contents and how we steward them. 

>**aw:** QRL Vancouver began when you returned to the city. How does the movement of each organizer affect where QRL chapters are located? 

**RL:** Realistically, what having “chapters” means depends on how much capacity we each have for QRL, which fluctuates. The more pertinent question is: how can the library have a life beyond the three of us? I would hate for the library to no longer exist because, for whatever reason, the three of us are not doing it anymore. People move on from projects and decide to go in different directions or practices. It’s not necessarily inevitable, but it can happen with collectives. Then the question becomes: how can we sustain the collection of voices that is QRL? 

>**aw:** Even though QRL began as and continues to be a mobile library, it sounds like you’re trying not to emphasize the movement of the organizers as the key to the project. But given the scope of QRL’s collection and reach, is transnationalism something that QRL focuses on? Or is it just one element of the bigger picture?

**RL:** The transnational connections that make up QRL are reflected in our collection, which includes works from people who are based in Asia, those in diaspora, and people who are kind of in a hybrid zone. In that way, QRL will always be transnational because it includes work from queer Asian people all over the world. Centring these voices in the collection is one of the library’s central tenets.

Having Hong Kong and Vancouver as QRL chapter locations also checks out because they’re cities people generally move through. Thinking about flows of capital and empire across the Pacific, QRL’s particular form of transnationality makes sense. We didn’t choose Hong Kong and Vancouver as strategic places for QRL chapters, but the way that each of us has arrived in our personal histories of migration translates into how we connected to one another, and where QRL now has its roots.

>**aw:** This conversation came out of a prompt to consider Chinatown in relation to QRL as a space within the queer Asian diaspora. To some extent this connection is clear, given the specific histories of Chinese migration. But we can’t say that everyone involved in QRL has a connection to Chinatown or identifies with the same histories, because that’s just not true, especially framed within the concept of queer Asian diasporic sensibility.

>That said, you also work in Chinatown as program manager for the Yarrow Intergenerational Society for Justice.[^5] How have you and QRL approached your relationship to Chinatown, given the messiness of artist communities shaping interrelated histories of mobility and settler colonialism?

**RL:** I think about how the young Chinese people working at Yarrow, who care about Chinatown as a community, who care about the elders, and are trying to maintain that culture, are often queer and trans. I don’t think that’s an accident. There is something to be said about the ways queer and trans Asian people exist and what we value, and what kind of care we want to bring to our communities. One of QRL’s most recent group exhibitions was in San Francisco’s Chinatown at the Chinese Culture Center, which focused on artistic works related to the non-binary and diasporic Asian communities.[^6] These types of group exhibitions reflect our desire to bring queerness to the forefront of Chinatown spaces, to highlight the queer Asianness that already exists in multiple ways.

Sometimes I see that desire channelled into efforts that I don’t necessarily agree with. I wonder how they affect the flow and exacerbation of gentrification. I don’t know if the connection between QRL and Chinatown is so simple and sexy. I don’t think it works that way. 

>**aw:** There is cultural capital that operates within Chinatown, like you’ve mentioned. In this way Chinatown can sometimes feel, in your language, like a “sexy” space. People are drawn to Chinatown and its histories as a visual, aural aesthetic, and as a site of social critique.

**RL:** The point of tension is when other queer Asian people are drawn to Chinatown because it’s “sexy.” When wealthy white people are gentrifying Chinatown, that dynamic seems obvious, so there’s less tension there. Not in the sense that gentrification doesn’t suck, but it’s more like, “We’ve seen that before.” There’s language for it: “That’s just colonizer shit!”

It’s more complicated when queer Asian people engage in that process. As an arts and culture worker, and a community worker in Chinatown who’s queer and Chinese, I feel like I exist at the intersection of these tensions. I’m constantly asking how I navigate that space. So far, my answer is to bring the seniors I work with at Yarrow into art spaces. And to give people money! But I don’t think that’s a long-term solution. 

>**aw:** I think it’s valuable to question the desire to connect with ourselves and others through the idea of Chinatown as queer and Asian—particularly Chinese—people. In some cases, desire isn’t always transformative. 

**RL:** I see where that desire comes from. Sometimes there’s a desire from queer Chinese artists to reconnect culturally because they have become estranged from their biological family, so they’re looking for another space to exist. Obviously, that doesn’t change the fact that their work materially affects the well-being and lives of residents in Chinatown.

I think the desire for queerness to exist in a cultural space isn’t inherently “wrong.” But how do we go about creating these spaces? That’s very important to me: thinking through how we’re affecting other people. I love the mobility of the QRL collection because it gives us a chance to think about how each space interacts with our values. 

>**aw:** Distributed across your room, Kaitlin’s, Beatrix’s, and elsewhere, the physical space of QRL is both material and not material. This feels different from how Chinatown has been made available to people, in part because it’s a space that doesn’t move, per se; it’s a place people go to and leave or stay, with different paths and capacities. 

**RL:** So much of what people love about Chinatown and its aesthetics is also a consequence of similar material realities around mobility, such as red-lining or discrimination via policy. People love the colours, signs, smells, and the fact that the neighbourhood is a one-stop shop. But all those things, which people want desperately to copy or embody, are a result of what residents needed to do to survive. 

In Hong Kong, there are older public-housing buildings coloured pink and green. Apparently, there was a point in time when these paint colours were cheaper. So, the contractors of those buildings just went with it. We then have this aesthetic that arises from material conditions of the finance capital of Hong Kong, not unlike the emergence of aesthetics in Chinatowns across North America. 

>**aw:** Right, now we have a visual language for this mediation of capital, materialized in the form of pink and green paint on buildings in a housing project. These questions about aesthetics and mobility in relation to capital make me think about how intimacy, in the form of physical proximity, can be used as a shorthand for relationality. Some developers claim they have a relationship to Chinatown just because they’re present in it. Yet these relationships can also be detrimental, creating displacement and gentrification. I’m curious about how this complexity translates to the work of QRL, a project that is predicated on the dispersal of spaces, with the collection and its artists always in multiple locations at once.

>You’ve talked about the process of curation as one of stewardship. How do you see yourself as a curator or cultural producer, as someone who’s able to shape a narrative? And how does this role work, given your dependence on artists to provide the material with which you shape that narrative? 

**RL:** To be honest, I don’t actively call myself a curator when I’m organizing with QRL. Most of the time, I focus on being a queer Asian artist who connects with other queer Asian artists. I think this stripped-down approach to the work by-passes the formalities of an institutional relationship between “curator” and “artist.” In the absence of these formalities, a space for new connections emerges. Artists are often very generous and excited about being part of our library. There are some artists who have offered their works to us for free. And of course, we try to buy artwork directly from artists too. 

Artists based in North America often have a desire for their work to be shared in Asia. They want to ask, “What does it mean for my work to be circulated in the place my ancestors are from?” At the end of the day, reciprocity and generosity between us and the artists makes the whole thing go around. 

>**aw:** As QRL continues to evolve, how are you approaching your role in building a queer Asian diaspora community in the context of current social and political events? 

**RL:** The changing political situation in Hong Kong, especially with the enforcement of the Hong Kong national security law,[^7] is something we think about as an explicitly queer project with roots in Hong Kong. I wonder what the political situation will mean for the future of the library and for queer people. But there are queer people, movements, and projects in spaces where queerness is “illegal.” Queer people will always build community with one another. We have to; we always will.

[^1]: Karen Zhang, “_And Tango Makes Three_ Among 10 Children’s Books With LGBT Themes Taken Off the Shelves in Public Libraries by Hong Kong Government,” _South China Morning Post_, June 20, 2018, https://scmp.com/news/hong-kong/community/article/2151705/and-tangomakes-three-among-10-childrens-books-same-sex 
[^2]: “QRL Reading Corner at PS Shop: Queer Visual Culture of Hong Kong in the 1990s and 2000s,” _Para Site_, December 3, 2021 to February 20, 2022, https://para-site.art/programme/qrl-readingcorner-at-ps-shop-queervisual-culture-of-hong-kongin-the-90s-and-2000s 
[^3]: Shea Fitzpatrick, “The Queer Zine Library in Hong Kong That’s Finding a Global Community,” _AIGA Eye on Design_, June 6, 2019, https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/the-queer-zine-library-inhong-kong-thats-finding-aglobal-community 
[^4]: Since scrapped following major protests from people in Hong Kong, the Extradition Bill was proposed by Carrie Lam (chief executive of Hong Kong) and would have enabled the Hong Kong government to detain wanted people in relation to certain criminalized activities, even in territories where Hong Kong has no formal extradition agreements. People detained would have been transferred to Beijing and become subject to its legal system. Protestors critiqued the potential loss of governmental sovereignty from Hong Kong to Chinese authoritarianism, the brutal response of both governments to protestors, and how the bill would effectively legalize abduction by the Hong Kong or Beijing governments under the guise of “national security.” 
[^5]: https://yarrowsociety.ca 
[^6]: “WOMEN我們: From Her to Here,” Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, February 19 to December 18, 2021, https://cccsf.us/post/women%E6%88%91%E5%80%91-from-her-to-here
[^7]: Put into effect in 2020, the Law of the People’s Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region gives jurisdiction over nation-state security operations to the centralized Chinese government in Beijing. Under this legislation, the Chinese government can convict and prosecute permanent residents and non-residents alike on charges like “terror ism,” “sedition,” or “collusion with foreign forces” in Hong Kong. What activities fall under these broad categories seem to be defined at the discretion of the national security agency set up by the Chinese government personnel in Hong Kong. While government officials in Beijing and Hong Kong have claimed that the legislation will not affect rights or freedoms around assembly and demonstration, speech, publication, or press, critics have pointed out that such broad terms ex tend the ability of the Chinese and Hong Kong governments to criminalize any activities they deem threatening to their authority, under the guise of security and protection. Such critiques also highlight ongoing tensions around Chinese authoritarianism and the after maths of British colonialism in Hong Kong.

**Rachel Lau** (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and community worker based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and sʔəl̀ilwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations, colonially known as Vancouver. Inspired by the tenderness and strength of queer and racialized communities, they create work that embraces feeling and communality. With friends, they organize Queer Reads Library, a mobile library of queer books and zines based in Hong Kong and Vancouver.

Participant

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Collective

Libraries

In their conversation with artist-writer Rachel Lau, amanda wan uncovers how the Queer Reads Library started as a project between friends, before expanding across several countries to become a transnational collection with chapters in Hong Kong and Vancouver.


Queer Asian Diaspora as Sensibility

Queer Asian Diaspora as Sensibility: A Conversation With Rachel Lau of Queer Reads Library

Godfre Leung is a critic and curator.

His writing has recently appeared in _ArtAsiaPacific_ and _ReIssue_, and his recent exhibitions include “Offsite: Christopher K. Ho” (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2022) and “TJ Shin: The Vegetarian” (The Bows, 2022). He is the Curator at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəyə̓ m, Sḵwxw̱ ú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations.

##### Four years ago, when I was working at an arts organization in Vancouver’s Chinatown, I attended several community meetings about the neighbourhood’s cultural preservation and revitalization. The discussions centred around articulating Chinatown’s “intangible cultural heritage” in preparation for an application to UNESCO to designate the neighbourhood a World Heritage Site. On numerous occasions during these meetings, I heard presenters say, “A mall in Richmond is not culture.” 

##### Most likely, the speakers at these meetings had in mind Aberdeen Centre, the first of a cluster of shopping malls in Richmond that served predominantly Chinese diaspora communities. Its opening in 1989 coincided with a massive wave of migration from Hong Kong to Greater Vancouver between 1989 and 1997, a period bookended by the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the “Handover” of Hong Kong’s governance from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China.[1] As the largest concentration of these immigrants settled in Richmond, a former suburb of Vancouver that ascended to city status in 1990, the invocation of the mall in those Chinatown meetings was also likely a shorthand for that immigration, and the dramatic urban and social changes to the city that accompanied it.

What does it mean to say that a mall in Richmond is not culture? That there is priceless cultural heritage in Vancouver’s Chinatown, both tangible and intangible, is beyond question. But what the case for Chinatown excludes—or disavows—reveals much about the cultural politics that surround these kinds of community heritage projects. Institutions, whether municipal, provincial, or national, or international ones such as UNESCO, legislate an economy of recognition that requires communities to represent themselves in ways that the institution can understand. This often takes the form of self-justifying proposals that presume a scarcity of resources: beyond monetary capacity, what applicants often assume in these scenarios is the scarcity of an institution’s attention, or the limitations of its capacity to be informed about the communities seeking support. These presumed scarcities place communities in competition for institutions’ resources.

Imagine the following cascade of arguments: _our culture counts as intangible cultural heritage. Our gathering spaces and what happens in them count as culture. They are more than a century old. They are disappearing. They were here first. These Chinese people are worthy of (your) attention._ This isn’t to suggest any animus between the organizers of Vancouver Chinatown’s cultural preservation and the shoppers at Aberdeen Centre—in fact, many are probably the same people. Instead, the slippage between the right kind of gathering space, the right kind of culture, and the right kind of Chinese people illustrates something deeply embedded in a specific cultural politics that pervades the custodianship of history in Vancouver: the fetishization of disappearance as the privileged criterion of cultural value. 

This politics of disappearance is most clearly visible in a related curatorial phenomenon that has no formal name, but which might best be called Vancouver photohistory. Much of the city’s art history is built around the international success of the so-called Vancouver photoconceptualists—Stan Douglas, Rodney Graham, Ken Lum, Jeff Wall, and Ian Wallace—and many of their iconic photographs of the ’80s and ’90s happened to depict versions of the city that it came to very quickly no longer look like. These two factors led to a widespread curatorial practice scaffolded on the canonization of the photoconceptualists, in which photographs by these artists and many others are endlessly presented in survey exhibitions as melancholy artefacts of a lost city.[^2]

The Vancouver photohistory narrative is built around a sense of irretrievable loss, communicating through the memorialization of what has disappeared, what is disappearing, and what is at risk of soon disappearing. A curatorial practice, not a photographic aesthetic, it nimbly absorbs into its existential orbit works such as Stan Douglas’s _Circa 1948_ (2014), originally an immersive video installation and now an iPhone app that recreates Hogan’s Alley, Vancouver’s historic Black neighbourhood, demolished in 1970 for a freeway project that was later aborted; and Rebecca Belmore’s _Vigil_ (2002), a performance work commemorating the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people (MMIWGTS+) in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a common site of abduction.[^3] Chinatown also has its place in these exhibitions, memorialized in photographs of the neighbourhood by Greg Girard, Jim Wong-Chu, and countless others. But at its heart, the backward-looking approach of Vancouver photohistory speaks to a different kind of disappearance.

Almost uniformly unstated in Vancouver photohistory exhibitions is how the city was “lost.” The wave of Hong Kong-to-Vancouver immigration, 1989–1997, is their hidden term. In 1984, the United Kingdom and People’s Republic of China signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration, in which Hong Kong was to be ceded to China in 1997. In 1986, Vancouver declared itself to the world with Expo 86 and, two years later, the Expo lands were sold, amid much controversy, to Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing—simultaneously signalling to Hong Kong the desirability of Vancouver real estate and initiating a 35-years-and-counting panic about “foreign buyers.” Along with the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, these events set into motion the unprecedented mass migration from Hong Kong that coincided with a total upheaval of Vancouver’s urban fabric.

In her 1991 essay “Construction of the Imaginary Indian,” over three decades later still the finest ever piece of writing about art in BC, Marcia Crosby describes the colonial unconscious of the West Coast tradition—which Jeff Wall has famously positioned himself and his photoconceptualist peers as a countertradition to, but Vancouver photohistory has nonetheless conscripted them as its culmination.[^4] Characterizing the originary work of Emily Carr, Crosby writes: “[Carr] locates her work within the salvage paradigm. She describes the [totem] poles [she paints] as belonging to a geographical space, a landscape devoid of its original owners. [...] The issue here is that the induction of First Nations peoples’ history and heritage into institutions as a lost Canadian heritage should be considered within the context of the colonization of aboriginal land.”[^5] In the place of the displaced residents of Hogan’s Alley, the disappeared MMIWGTS+, and land-dispossessed Indigenous people more broadly, Vancouver photohistory implies the presumed subjects of Wall and company’s photographs to be _unsettled_ by immigrants—first from Hong Kong, then successively from Taiwan and Mainland China—who in this narrative destroyed the housing market and initiated a still-ongoing wave of involuntary white flight. This narrative is a further displacement of Vancouver’s Indigenous inhabitants, here from the contemporary cultural landscape, rendered, as Crosby might argue, first distantly historical, then ultimately imaginary. It is also a particularly perverse mutation of what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang call “settler moves to innocence.”[^6]

For a corrective to Vancouver photohistory’s account of the ’90s, we might turn to the work of Hong Kong diaspora artists. In 2019, I co-curated an exhibition at Centre A in Vancouver by Hong Kong–based artist Samson Young, who was raised and educated predominantly in Australia and the United States before resettling in Hong Kong as an adult. “It’s a heaven over there” (2019) emerged from Young’s archival research on BC native Won Alexander Cumyow, purportedly the first Chinese person born in Canada. Young built his work from the poetics of diaspora in Won Cumyow’s story: though he had never been to China, Won Cumyow was an active member of the Chinese Empire Reform Association at the turn of the 20th century and a follower of the exiled Chinese reformist and utopian philosopher Kang Youwei.[^7]. The resulting work, _Da Da Company_ (2018–2019), was an animated video installation depicting Won Cumyow envisioning Kang’s unrealized, utopian, modernized China, which morphs mid-daydream into an ’80s shopping mall. Its name was borrowed from 大大公司, a legendary Hong Kong department store from the ’80s that later spectacularly fell into ruin. 

The exhibition’s site-specificity was crucial: “It’s a heaven over there” was the reopening exhibition of Centre A in its new location in the then-newly revitalized Sun Wah Centre in Vancouver’s Chinatown. Built in 1987 as a shopping mall to primarily serve Chinese people, Sun Wah was underused for the entirety of its existence before 2018, when its primary tenant became the arts non-profit BC Artscape, which converted much of the mall into artist studios and several galleries. Young’s video rhymed the dislocation of Won Cumyow’s utopian vision in the diaspora, and the literal exile of Kang from China, with the original, unrealized ambitions of its site, the Sun Wah Centre. In 1989, not long after Sun Wah opened, the aforementioned Aberdeen Centre opened in Richmond. And with the wave of immigration from Hong Kong also moved the centre of Chinese shopping in Greater Vancouver from China town to Richmond, leaving Sun Wah to become the kind of retail apocalypse ghost town you see videos of on the Internet—“mall ruin porn,” as Young described it to me.

Thinking back to Crosby’s critique of Emily Carr and everything after—to tweak Crosby’s coinage, West Coast nature as _de-voided_ landscape—Young’s exhibition might help us refrain from envisioning Vancouver as a hollowed-out void or unliveable money pit, as those who have left it often feel. If what was to be mourned in the failure of Sun Wah wasn’t lost money and unrealized retail but a community gathering place that never was, that gathering place did in fact exist; it just turned out to be in Richmond. None of this begins to address the complexity of Asian mobilities and settlerhood—and the cooperation and complicity of immigrants within a settler-colonial state—but it does start to decentre the subject presumed by our politics of disappearance.[^8]

Young’s exhibition is paralleled by two recent works by Vancouver artists with Hong Kong ties born in the ’90s, a generation removed from the cultural politics of Hong Kong immigration that was the subtext of Vancouver photohistory. At the 2021 Hotam Press Gallery exhibition “Light Hours: Eleven Artists Looking at Hong Kong,” Joni Cheung presented _A Sunday Afternoon_ (2018), a video work documenting a conversation between the artist and her mother, accompanied by framed copies of the two’s student IDs a generation apart. Buried beneath the clacking of mah-jong tiles, Cheung’s off-screen mother recounts, entirely in Cantonese, her experience as a recent immigrant from Hong Kong to Vancouver in the early ’90s. Her narrative discusses the early years of Aberdeen Centre at length, including its long-since-replaced bowling alley, framing the proverbial “mall in Richmond” as an emotional anchor point for community under the condition of displacement. 

Chad Wong’s photographic series _Empty Spaces that Fill My Heart_ (2021) is more direct. In its guise as a public-art installation at the Aberdeen SkyTrain Station, presented by the Richmond Art Gallery, Wong places an oblique-angle photograph of a Traditional Chinese Medicine shop in Vancouver’s Chinatown in implied contrast to a close-up shot of a carpet at President Plaza, a mixed-use building neighbouring Aberdeen Centre that houses commercial retail, restaurants, and a Radisson Hotel. To those who frequented these spaces, the now-underused President Plaza’s carpet is immediately recognizable as an artefact of transplanted ’90s Hong Kong decor. The juxtaposition between the two sites places stress on the recent interest in Chinese diaspora art to almost exclusively forsake the recent past for the distant past emblematized by Chinatown. Who, this work seems to ask, are we performing our identities for? What narratives do these performances serve? And, considering that the vast majority of Chinese people in the Lower Mainland have no lived or familial ties to Chinatown, nor to the railroad, the head tax, the Anti-Asian Riots of 1907, or the other moments of subjection that Chinatown-themed art often invokes or stands for, whom do our performances exclude— including ourselves? 

There’s a word art historians like to use to refer derisively to each other’s bad comparisons. When two artworks from entirely distinct contexts are placed side by side in a slide lecture based on their visual similarity—a case of mistaken identity—this is called a pseudomorphism. In a way, Wong’s photographs restage this art-historical scene, which plays out a cultural politics in this country in which one levelling, overarching master term is allotted to each ethnic community, totally disregarding the nuances of migration histories: for Japanese Canadians, internment; for South Asian Canadians, the Komagata Maru; and for Chinese Canadians, it is Chinatown.[^9] _A Sunday Afternoon and Empty Spaces that Fill My Heart_ have their own politics of disappearance, but these two works invert the usual narrative: the absence they mark is precisely that which Vancouver photohistory—and institutionalized Vancouver history in general—disavows. 

[^1]: One could just as easily argue that this periodization should begin in 1984, 1986, or 1988, as discussed later in this article, and that its conclusion might just as appropriately be signposted by the Asian Financial Crisis, also in 1997. 
[^2]: For some groundwork on Vancouver photohistory, see Godfre Leung, “Photos Worth a Thousand Houses,” in _Maisonneuve_ 68 (Summer 2018): 58–61. 
[^3]: While Belmore’s performance work is about as far from the aesthetics of photo conceptualism as one can imagine, it was included in the 2017 Vancouver Art Gallery photohistory survey exhibition “Pictures From Here” via its documentation by video artist Paul Wong, appearing as _Vigil 5.4_ (2010), a video work credited to Wong. 
[^4]: See Wall’s essay “Traditions and Counter-Traditions in Vancouver Art: A Deeper Back ground for Ken Lum’s Work,” in _Camères indiscretes: Rodney Graham, Ken Lum, Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace_, ed. José Lebrero Stats (Barcelona: Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, 1992), 102–111. 
[^5]: Marcia Crosby, “Construction of the Imaginary Indian,” in _Vancouver Anthology_, 2nd ed., ed. Stan Douglas (Vancouver: Talonbooks and Or Gallery, 2011), 286–7. 
[^6]: Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” in _Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society_1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40. 
[^7]: See Godfre Leung, “Places That Are Not a Place: Sam son Young in Conversation,” in _It’s a Heaven Over There_, ed. Godfre Leung (Vancouver: Centre A, 2019), 8. 
[^8]: The best account on immigration and settler colonialism that I know of is Iyko Day’s _Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism_, which reads East Asian migration relation ally rather than as a siloed area study, and articulates a structural matrix in which the settler-colonialist state “[mixes] alien labour with Indigenous land to expand white property” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 31. 
[^9]: There is, of course, an other pseudomorphism here: the condition of individual East Asian people in North America to be mistaken for one another. 

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Godfre Leung discusses the curatorial prominence of ’90s Vancouver photohistory, which documented the continual loss of space in marginalized communities such as Vancouver Chinatown, and explores how this prominence limits our access to other representations of these spaces.


Vancouver Photohistory and the Politics of Disappearance

**Shawn Tse** 謝兆龍 (he/him) is a father, artist, filmmaker, and community organizer. He is a member of aiya哎呀, a collective creating spaces to remember the emotional and geographic loss of ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ | amisk wacîwâskahikan | Edmonton’s Chinatown; co-organizer of Chinatown Greetings, an arts-based fundraising plat form exploring ways to build healthy relationships between the artist and Chinatown community; a consultant for the CanAsian Arts Network, a national digital platform sup porting Asian Canadian artists; and an actor and coordinator for Third Space Playback The are, committed to creating spaces of dialogue to promote community change and social justice. 

##### Since 2009, Chinatown South has been in the process of being absorbed into Edmonton’s downtown zoning area and rebranded as The Quarters. “Nestled next to North America’s largest stretch of urban parkland,” reads the project plan, “The Quarters Downtown is positioned to become a vibrant, flourishing community.”[1] Realizing the Chinatown I knew and loved was at risk of being displaced, my partner and I decided to put our savings into buying a vacant lot right on the Armature/96 Street. It felt like a subversive win against encroaching development and helped further our dream to build a Chinatown community space. 

##### Ociciwan Contemporary Art Centre, one of the few art spaces in Canada dedicated to Indigenous art, became our neighbour two lots over. This proximity led me to reflect more deeply on the erasure of Indigenous lands as well as my own discomfort around land ownership. It also helped me recognize our shared struggle to keep our cultures alive. Once the land sale was official, I reached out to Ociciwan members to offer the vacant spot for their outdoor programming. Serendipitously, Ociciwan was looking for a space to host the Finding Flowers Project led by Anishinaabe artist Lisa Meyers and inspired by late Mi’kmaw artist Mike MacDonald’s Butterfly and Medicine Gardens (1995–2003). In 2021, _kamâmak nihtâwikihcikan_ ᑲᒫᒪᐠ ᓂᐦᑖᐃᐧᑭᐦᒋᑲᐣ launched, “an invitation to co-exist, centring reflection, interaction, and care with medicine plants.”[2]

##### In racialized advocacy spaces, there is an ongoing risk of lateral violence, where one racialized group experiences violence from another racialized group. In the context of land ownership, lateral violence against Indigenous folks can often go ignored or unacknowledged, and it felt important to connect with the Indigenous community situated near the Chinatown lot to talk about it more fully. I reached out to artist Kiona Callihoo Ligtvoet, who worked at Ociciwan last year to help build _kamâmak nihtâwikihcikan_ ᑲᒫᒪᐠ ᓂᐦᑖᐃᐧᑭᐦᒋᑲᐣ and has experience working in Chinatown, to talk more about these connections. We met at the garden, a south-facing lot next to the Chinese United Church. On one wall of the church is a mural by Evan Matchett-Wong, _Drum Circle_, of a hand drum and Indigenous and Chinese plants. As Kiona and I settled into the space we noticed a rabbit resting under the shade of a flower bed. 

>**Shawn Tse:** When you were building the garden, did anything come to mind in terms of Chinatown connections?
 

**Kiona Ligtvoet:** The garden was extended as an invite to community in Chinatown, to unhoused folks, Indigenous folks, and those who are living rough. I don’t think there’s always the consideration that the people who are living here, visiting here, and spending time here all have lives, experiences, and histories. I’ve heard people, especially through institutions, talk about this area [in ways that are] very dehumanizing. Folks who are around the garden all the time have built their routines and have their own relationships to community in this neighbourhood. They were generous in their histories, including artists, farmers, and many people who taught us how to save the plants when they were drying up, and who helped us sustain _kamâmak nihtâwik ihcikan_. Folks told us what their interests were, and what they would like to do [in the garden], what they would like to be offered by the space. I think it just goes back to visiting and getting to know people and getting to know community so that any potential harm is reduced. 

>**ST:** Hearing what you’re talking about makes me think of those difficult cultural tensions between the Chinatown and Indigenous communities. How do we get over that? There are so many more similarities than differences; we need more understanding of our shared historical oppressions. There isn’t the alliance that I think there should be, and we’ve hit rock bottom in Chinatown and as a city.[^3]

>In the last year, I’ve been struggling with my position in the community. Sometimes I doubt whether it’s somewhere I feel safe and want to continue putting my efforts into, because I see so many differing ideas of what this community space can be. I think the big light for me is being able to sit down with you today and be like, wait, no, I can create futures in this community space with whoever is interested in having me.

**KL:** The work can feel individualistic because sometimes it is individualistic. But you’re never existing alone. I think it's valuable to look at your relationships with neighbours and our relationship here talking to one another. Relationship-building has to be flexible without being extractive, and without replicating harmful power dynamics or carceral systems. 

>**ST:** I constantly struggle with the name “Chinatown” and how I relate to it. But I’m curious: as an Indigenous person who has spent time and worked here, what kind of feelings bubble up for you?


**KL:** I feel like it’s so complicated. I refer to this neighbourhood as Chinatown. This neighbourhood has many names, like The Quarters, and I’ve heard people recently call it “the new arts district.” I feel like the city is always trying to rebrand it, like it’ll make things different if it’s called something different. But it’s just disposing the histories between Chinese and Indigenous communities and broader BIPOC communities who still live here. Acknowledging our shared history and building solidarity is so important, which is why I liked the land-defence patch event that aiya哎 呀 collaborated on with Ociciwan and Prairie Sage Protectors.[^4]

It is an important part of place-keeping not to further erase, dispose of, and disregard Indigenous folks or the Chinatown community. It’s complicated, especially when you’re looking at it as ownership not just of land or neighbourhood, but of the histories, relationships, and lived realities in this space. 

>**ST:** Maybe I’m just thinking about it too much, but it’s so suggestive of ownership. Chinatown—Chinese people’s area... 


**KL:** You’re right; it can feel exclusive. Ownership often presents barriers to stewardship. Many Indigenous folks are present within this neighbourhood and on this land. The name also has a rich history that overlaps between Indigenous and Chinese communities. 

>**ST:** And pre-contact too, the name erases that. There’s an oppressive past where Chinatown was an “un-wanted” area, and now it’s the place we enjoy bubble tea and dim sum. The tension Chinatown faces is keeping businesses afloat while coexisting with a large population of houseless folks. This dichotomous way of looking at it is very problematic. The houseless community should be part of making decisions about the future of Chinatown be cause they are community members too. So that’s where I think that “ownership” question comes in play. Who gets to choose the future of Chinatown?


**KL:** You see Indigenous folks who are living rough, unhoused, or otherwise getting turned away at local businesses within Chinatown, as well as funding for harm-reduction resources being cut and police presence being high. It festers into further displacement and erasure that is still active and a huge principle in city planning, any kind of planning. 

>**ST:** It’s sad to me that there isn’t more solidarity between the Chinese and Indigenous communities. I have a friend who connects positive memories of the Chinese restaurant in his small town with time spent with his Indigenous community. I know that you grew up in a small town too, was that the case for you?



**KL:** Every Christmas, my moshom would take us to Bing’s [Family Restaurant] and we would sit there for hours. When relatives would visit, we would take them there and get a big table and sit there for so long, eating and drinking tea and coffee. When I moved to Edmonton, I spent a lot of my time in this area and it was my favourite because I got to have interactions with many elderly Indigenous people, and Chinese elders as well from the Chinatown Care Centre. Thinking about Bing’s brings me back to a nice little memory space, the comforts that I had when I first moved here from a rural town at 17, and what made me feel at home. 

>**ST:** I think that at the core, the intention of Chinatown leadership is asking, how do we preserve the belonging of this space? The Chinatown community is trying to fight, resist, and figure out ways to keep Chinese heritage alive and prevent these fleeting, nostalgic memories from disappearing, physically and emotionally. As a by-product, there are certain things that people excuse themselves for and, unfortunately, I don’t think that’s good enough. I struggle with the fact that if the community is about care, we can’t pat ourselves on the back simply by saying we’ve done good enough for the Chinese community. That’s not good enough in 2022. 


**KL:** I want that too. I think it’s reassuring to remind ourselves that there’s power outside of leadership too. It’s just a different kind of power and it’s not always recognized as widely, but it’s there. 

>**ST:** Do artists have a certain type of power? I loved our land-patch event, and it makes me think of the power of artists. But I also recognize that it spoke to a very specific group of people. 


**KL:** The event was beautiful and fun and had all the best intentions, but the critiques of it are valid, which is that it still presented some barriers to entry for folks in the neighbourhood. The space was filled with an arts community, largely from outside of Chinatown. The event didn’t extend itself to our neighbours the way we had intended; it wasn’t as accessible as it could have been. 

>**ST:** This article is a prompt to explore my uncertainty, discomfort, and determination to move forward with community work in Chinatown. Do those kinds of things come up for you working in community? 


**KL:** I feel like I struggle with those feelings a lot. Who is community? Who am I caring for? Who’s caring for me? How does what I’m doing support folks, but also what happens if it’s not? Support, engagement, nurturance looks different to everybody. I think it’s a big practice of asking and not knowing. I don’t feel I’ll fully know ever. I think in my personal art practice, it’s easier because I make work for my family and relatives. I’m in so much conversation with them that I feel grounded in that practice.

When it comes to art and community, I think I’m asking myself whether I’m falling into the co-opting of “community” by institutional spaces that are often the ones giving me money or time or space to work on things. A lot of it is me wanting to trust the people I work alongside. Trusting what they say when I do something wrong, and asking, who am I accountable to? It’s so extractive feel like I have a clear sense of self sometimes. And that’s why I like working on community projects outside of institutions, because I feel like when I’m at home, on the farm, hanging out in the neighbourhood, I feel much more grounded, much more connected. 

>**ST:** Do you have any dreams for intercultural solidarity within Chinatown here? 


**KL:** I’d really like to see more community events that feel public and grassroots that are safe for Indigenous and houseless folks to join, instead of being on the borders. Where everyone is extended the right to play, and people can join at any capacity while not gentrifying the neighbourhood through institutionally-built project planning. I would like to see more opportunity for folks to have the space to build neighbourly connections and relationships. I was thinking about that park event recently between the Enoch youth and the CBA [Chinese Benevolent Association] youth council and I was like, wow, this is such a great event centring a “come as you are” approach so we could all share space. 

>**ST:** Days after the tragic killings of two Chinatown workers in May, the youth gathering really instilled a lot more hope for me. It was one of the first times I’ve seen the Chinatown community host and centre an event around cultural bridging with the Indigenous community. We need more of these intercultural projects to heal and support one another. I think this is the future of Chinatown.[^5] 

[^1]: “The Quarters Downtown,” Edmonton, accessed October 8, 2022, https://edmonton.ca/projects_plans/the-quarters downtown 
[^2]: “kamâmak nihtâwikih cikan ᑲᒫᒪᐠ  ᓂᐦᑖᐃᐧᑭᐦᒋᑲᐣ,” Ociciwan, accessed October 8, 2022, https://www.ociciwan.ca/kamamak 
[^3]: In May 2022, two China town workers at an autobody shop and electronics store were tragically killed by a person who had been ordered to be under supervision but released by the RCMP. This happened just weeks before Edmonton City Council were set to vote on the annual police budget. As a result of the killing, the majority of Chinatown leadership supported an increase in police presence and the Edmonton Police Service got their request for $407 million. On August 15, 2022, city council also approved over $15 million to fund a “Healthy Streets Operations Centre” in Chinatown for two years, with most of that fund ing (over $10 million) going toward policing. 
[^4]: Inspired by land-defence activism in the city, where printed patches were handed out to protesters, Ociciwan (Kiona was the community co ordinator) organized a public land-defence patch-printing event in 2021 in the garden with support from SNAP Gallery and designs by Desiree Raton Laveur and Paul Giang & aiya哎呀. The patches were hung on the fence for anyone to take and were also intended to stand in solidarity with the community and land-defence movement. With the support of Latitude 53, aiya哎呀 applied for a city anti-racism grant to organize more community arts programming this year. Kiona and I are planning the next version of the land patch print ing in collaboration with Prairie Sage Protectors. We have decided to host it at Kinistinâw Park just down the road to make it more accessible for folks in the neighbourhood. 
[^5]: As a symbolic gesture to build intercultural relation ships in Chinatown, I received permission from Ociciwan to plant a medicinal Chinese goji berry plant in _kamâ mak nihtâwikihcikan_ ᑲᒫᒪᐠ ᓂᐦᑖᐃᐧᑭᐦᒋᑲᐣ with the help of artist Yong Fei Guan, who researches the cultivation of goji berries in Edmonton. It brought us joy to know there is a place where we can watch our cultural plants grow together. 

Kiona Callihoo Ligtvoet (she/ her) is a multidisciplinary artist practicing in amiskwaciwâska hikan on Treaty 6 territory. Kiona grew up west of the city near the hamlet of Calahoo where she lived with her moshom and relatives on scrip land. Her family lines are Cree and Métis descending from Michel First Nation, as well as Dutch and mixed European. Kiona’s work draws from feelings of loss and enfranchisement, but also from deep belly laughter and a gentle fond ness for where the histories between herself and her family overlap and disperse. Working alongside other artists in initiatives of community care, Kiona co-organizes Making Space in partnership with Sanaa Humayun. She likes visiting her moshom on the farm, and gossiping with her mom, relatives, and friends on the prairies. 


Speaker

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Indigenous

Shawn 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.


A Garden in Chinatown on Indigenous Land

**Peter Sealy** is a historian who studies the ways in which architects constructively engage with reality through indexical media such as photography. Current projects include a history of photography’s remediations and a study of the Berlin Wall as it appears in films. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. 


**Linda Zhang** is an architect, drone pilot, and educator whose scholarly and artistic practice studies memory, cul tural heritage, and community identity as they are indexically embodied in matter, emergent technologies (including VR, AR, and AI), and material processes. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo. 


After the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco destroyed the city’s centrally located Chinatown, community leaders strategically chose a team of white architects led by Bernard Maybeck to build a space white Americans would also love, replete with single-eave hip roofs, pagoda roofs, and other recognizable, if wildly out-of-context, tropes. This consumable architectural caricature still defines North American Chinatowns today and has helped Chinese communities “earn” the economic and political means to access space, at the cost of their continued tokenization and marginalization.[^1] As vernacular iterations of a place that never really existed, North American Chinatowns are the architectural equivalent of chop suey.[^2] Certain stereotypical Chinese architectural features have been recombined using whatever ingredients were available, with a total disregard for Western notions of authenticity. The result is an assortment of many different elements, neither wholly one thing nor another. 

Today, this architectural approach is met with mixed reactions across the intergenerational Chinatown community. In the wake of displacement, gentrification, and anti-Asian racism, there is a weariness toward the rationale that, more than a century later, strategic self-orientalization is still necessary and expected. Whereas a form of commodified “Disneyfication” was once a productive strategy for survival, it is now seen by many as a trap: what will happen if Chinatown’s architectural motifs survive without its long-time residents and businesses? Efforts to “protect” Chinatowns have embraced the need for preservation, such as the extension of heritage protection to the neighbourhood’s Chinese-character signage. But new forms of resistance, anchored in contemporary critiques of the ubiquity of Western modes of thinking, could be another way to make the space less centred on the appeasement of a white audience. 

South Korean–born German philosopher and cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han illustrates the fundamental differences between Western and Eastern thought through the notion of shanzhai, a Chinese neologism meaning “fake.” Han explains that “contradiction is not a Chinese concept. Chinese thought tends more towards ‘both-and’ [rather] than ‘either-or.’ The anti-essentialism of the Chinese thought process allows no fixed ideological definition.”[^3] He explores this difference through Eastern and Western approaches to painting. A Western painting is signed only by its author and dated, giving it a material and temporal origin. Reproductions challenge its essence. In contrast, Chinese landscape paintings are never dated. Instead, each successive owner adds their own signature with a steel stamp and sometimes a poem. These added elements do not detract from the painting but are considered part of its essential becoming, which is not linked to a discrete historical moment. As Han argues, “The Chinese idea of the origin is determined not by a unique Act of Creation, but an unending process, not by definitive identity but by constant change.” [^4]

The philosophical push-and-pull between the specificity of an image’s origin and the richness of becoming over time forces us to consider the limits of representation: what is captured by images, and what is deliberately excluded or simply unrepresentable, especially when we consider how Chinatown’s past has been recorded (or left unrecorded), its present represented, and its future projected. Indexical media such as physical casts, photographs, and 3-D scans all promise unmediated representations of reality, almost “the thing itself.”[^5] In historical preservation, 3-D scanning techniques like photogrammetry are charged with authentically recording and depicting place. This practice relies on triangulation and the averaging of hundreds of images to create a point cloud.[^6] This point cloud then creates a “final” image that is used to represent a space, often in the service of building, reconstructing, or renovating a structure. Designed for modelling static objects, the excision of the extraneous details at the heart of photography’s “reality effect” is written into photogrammetry’s algorithms. Moving people, waddling pigeons, flashing neon signs, or passing cars are all “averaged” out. Likewise, contingencies (strangely reflective, absorptive, or flat and evenly coloured materials) can still undermine the supposed exactitude of the resulting scan, producing unexpected shapes, forms, and even characters within it. 

Applied to photogrammetry, the concept of _shanzhai_ can productively challenge existing heritage practices to embrace “both-and” rather than “either-or.” There is something ineffable that escapes our capacity for digital representation, and within this gap, _shanzhai_ becomes operative and valuable. Each time an original 3-D scan is collaged, it is akin to adding another poem to a Chinese landscape painting. If the initial painting is a 3-D scan of Toronto’s West Chinatown during the first COVID lockdown, for example, each visualization of the space is a rewriting of the future of Chinatown in relation to all its previous iterations. By embracing multiplying indeterminacies, collaging photogrammetry is a counter to photography, which freezes Chinatown in a singular moment in time and a singular configuration in space. Instead, a _shanzhai_ approach to photogrammetry reinforces Chinatown as a space of excess—a haunting surplus—something that does not yet fit into Canadian society, and in so doing, will always challenge each of us to be more expansive in our thinking. 

Writer Helen Ngo shares in the short documentary film _Chinatown 2050_, “Neither my Dad nor I have ever been to China. I learned how to be Asian by being in Chinatown.”[^7] Ngo’s observation reflects how the complex associations elicited by Chinatown’s contentious iconography are available for reclamation by a new audience and can hold new meanings. In the face of racism and exclusion, the self-orientalizing model of pagoda rooflines and paifang gates was strategically chosen by Chinatown’s elders, a choice that remains a radical act of resistance, broadening who is allowed to occupy civic space. But embracing a non-essentialist approach to these spaces creates an alternative to this kitschy model minority architectural style and the tendency to “reduce an entire culture to one symbol.”[^8] Viewed in the context of _shanzhai_, Chinatown is singular _in its plurality_—its only certainty is its mutability.

**The Chinatown 2050 project began as a speculative fiction writing work shop that prompted participants to reimagine what Chinatown Toronto could be in 30 years. Taking place virtually in April 2020 amid heightened anti-Asian violence and continued discrimination in Chinatowns across Canada, community writers were asked: Who seeks change? Who seeks to prevent change? Who seeks different kinds of change? Eleven stories from these workshops comprise the anthology _Reimagining ChinaTOwn: Speculative Fiction Stories From Toronto’s Chinatowns in 2050_.**

**Using the Chinatown 2050 short stories and a photogrammetric 3-D scan of Toronto’s west Chinatown streets captured via drone during lockdown in spring 2020, Linda Zhang (re)created 3-D collages of each story’s reimagined Chinatown. Applying a _shanzhai_ approach to photogrammetry, Zhang used a process of iterative mutation to turn raw 3-D scanned data into architectural 3-D worlds. This process challenges the normative practice in architectural heritage that values the raw 3-D scan as authentic and instead places value on _shanzhai_ reimaginations.  Applied to a space like Chinatown, this approach explores the limitations of its architectural forms and challenges the stability of images and places, as well as our tendency to reduce the latter to the former.** 

**Workshop facilitators:  
Erica Allen-Kim, Tyler Fox, Biko Mandela Gray, Maxim Gertler-Jaffe, Morris Lum, Philip Poon, Howard Tam, Lexi Tsien and Linda Zhang, Shellie Zhang** 

**Stories by community writers: 
Eveline Lam / “Interval”; Michael Chong / “New Hong Fatt BBQ”; Amy Yan / “Chinatown Island”; Amelia Gan / “C For ChinaCloud”; Helen Ngo /  “Hotpot Politics”**

[^1]: Mae N. Ngai, “Transnationalism and the Transformation of the ‘Other’: Responses to the Presidential Address,” _American Quarterly_ 57, no. 1 (2005): 63. 
[^2]: Chop suey translates approximately to “assorted mix.” On this North American culinary phenomenon, please see Ann Hui, _Chop Suey Nation: The Legion Café and Other Stories from Canada’s Chinese Restaurants_ (Madeira Park, BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 2019). 
[^3]: Byung Chul-Han, _Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese_ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 76. 
[^4]: Han, 11. 
[^5]: The equation of photo graphs with reality dates to the medium’s origins in the 19th century. On this subject, please see Peter Sealy, “Fragments and Fragmentary Vision in Nineteenth-century Architectural Photographs,” _Word & Image_ 37, no. 1 (2021): 99–116. 
[^6]: Edgar Hynes Thompson, “Review of Methods Indepen dent Model Aerial Triangula tion,” _The Photogrammetric Record_, no. 5 (October 1965): 72–79. 
[^7]: Co-directed and co-produced by Linda Zhang and Maxim Gertler-Jaffe, _Chinatown 2050_ features the stories, hopes, aspirations, and fears of five community authors as they reimagine what Chinatown could be in 2050. Each author’s story is presented as an animated virtual 3-D space created through photogrammetric recollage of a 3-D scan taken on May 2020 of West Chinatown Toronto during the city’s first COVID-19 lockdown. The five stories are part of a large anthology of 11 short stories entitled _Reimagining ChinaTOwn: Speculative Fiction Stories from Toronto’s Chinatowns in 2050_ edited by Zhang. 
[^8]: Fay Chew Matsuda, “So Long, It’s Been Good Pagoda,” _Village Voice_, September 5, 1995, quoted in Greg (“Fritz”) Umbach and Dan Wishnoff, “Strategic Self-Orientalism: Urban Planning Policies and the Shaping of New York City’s Chinatown, 1950–2005,” _Journal of Planning History_ 7, no. 3 (2008): 231.

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153Zhang_Sealy.pdf

Linda Zhang and Peter Sealy explore the architecture of Chinatown, arguing 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.

Resisting Either/ Or: _Shanzhai_ Photogrammetry 

Letter

##### Dear C Magazine, 
In the back corner of the Royal Ontario Museum’s (ROM) Teck Suite of Galleries: Earth’s Treasures is a small, unassuming vitrine with three specimens of   fossil fuels: coal from Glace Bay, Cape Breton; oil-bearing limestone from Redwater, Alberta; and bituminous sands from Fort McMurray, Alberta. Part of the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame Gallery, the pieces are accompanied by text that simply states, “Canada  is one of the world’s largest producers of fossil fuels […] this natural resource wealth has played an important role in our economy, enabling us to meet our own energy needs and at the same time become one of the world’s leading exporters.” Throughout the Teck Suite, which bears the name of Canadian mining giant Teck Resources Ltd., the minerals are primarily interpreted by their formal properties or role in industry, with the social and environmental contexts of their extraction nowhere to be found. 

Maggie Flynn’s _Trickle Down_ begins to explain the absence of any mention of the role that fossil fuels play in the climate crisis, Indigenous sovereignty infringements, and the downstream health impacts of extraction. As Flynn notes, the flow of funding from mining and oil companies into cultural institutions serves to sanitize the public image of extractive industry. Beyond tools of public relations, however, the access, power, and influence enabled by so-called corporate “philanthropy” also work to shape the stories told in museum exhibitions. 

As designers, researchers, and cultural practitioners committed to critiquing institutional practices and linkages between culture and resource extraction, the three of us are part of the scholar-activist collective Beyond Extraction, which seeks to extend critiques of extraction beyond academic channels. This past June, we hosted an unsanctioned guided tour of the ROM’s Teck Suite timed to coincide with Toronto’s annual Prospectors & Developers Association of Cana da (PDAC) conference—the largest mining conference in the world. With many of PDAC’s member companies sponsoring the Teck Suite, the ROM gives a special-access tour of its behind-the-scenes vaults of gems and minerals to conference attendees each year. Our countertour, titled “Mining at the Museum” (a nod to Fred Wilson’s 1992 intervention), was developed in protest of these ongoing partnerships, and reveals untold stories of extraction in the mineral gallery. We invite readers to check out the online version of the tour at beyondextraction.ca. 

Take care,  

##### Zannah Matson, Christopher Alton, Camille-Mary Sharp 


##### Dear C Magazine, 
I was struck by nicole kelly westman’s essay accompanying _Mâkochî Nîbi Îhonîach (The Land is Close to Death)_ by Soloman Chiniquay. Chiniquay’s photographs document the Ada’itsx/ Fairy Creek Blockade that started in the summer of 2020, when Indigenous land defenders prevented the logging of old growth forest. westman does a great job of contextualizing Chiniquay’s images, beginning with the backdrop of Indigenous activists facing intense police aggression in Canada in the fight for sovereignty in 1990, 1993, and 1995. She offers context including the cops’ aggressive behind-the-scenes infrastructures: a shocking sum of over $10 million “on direct costs related to enforcing this injunction.” I appreciated how the essay also walked us through the unseen material struggles behind Chiniquay’s photos, such as the hauling of equipment up a muddy mountain, or the internal conflicts of protesters with different goals. westman and Chiniquay’s work was compelling, with both text and image complementing and contextualizing aesthetic efforts as profound political testimony. 

Thank you, 

##### Elisha Lim  


##### Dear C Mag,  
I’ve been thinking a lot about forms of exploitation that parallel resource extraction, yet occur in more tacit, psychic, and day-to-day ways. For example, I consider how the inner worlds of the so-called “creative class” are mined for purposes of urban development and real estate, the consumption of ideas for scholarly research, or in service to arts institutions without ever “trickling down” to anyone on the margins. Ironically, creating cultural work about extraction can (and often does) itself become extractive. It seems a difficult contradiction to avoid in these extractive, colonial, and capitalist times. The art world and the academy are particularly prone to this sticky trap wherein an extractive compulsion is rewarded through professional development, funding, or acclaim. I was grateful to see the inclusion of Maggie Flynn’s _Trickle Down_ flowchart in the latest issue, which made visible some of the entanglements that extractive corporate agendas share with art institutions and Indigenous communities, and that end up contributing to environmental demise. It should be noted that _Trickle Down_ was originally commissioned for _Canadian Art_, but was censored before its release. 

Dylan Robinson has said that in this “reconciliatory time and space that privileges forms of coming together […] there is an increasing amount of work that shifts the terms just enough _not_ to unsettle.” To resist extraction is a delicate, nuanced, and perhaps impossible balancing act, particularly because, as Flynn states, “uncontaminated dollars are scarce.” But, at the very least, maybe aiming for the quiet capacity to hold, listen, and be guided by a deep and vigorous sense of responsibility and reciprocity, towards refusing the extractive impulse and its superficial rewards, would be a good start. 

Sincerely, 

##### Shalon T. Webber-Heffernan


Zannah Mae Matson is an Assistant Professor at the University of Guelph School of Environmental Design and Rural Development. Matson’s research and design work focuses on the histories and contemporary reinterpretations of landscapes throughout processes of colonization, violence, and state infrastructure projects.

Elisha Lim’s social media activism catapulted them to fame as a queer advocate for the pronoun “they,” an award-winning filmmaker, a graphic novelist, a curator and an anti-racist festival director. Then they free-fell out of the social network spotlight and are currently writing a PhD on identity economics.

Shalon T. Webber-Heffernan is a writer, educator, and performance scholar. Her recent writing can be found in _Peripheral Review, Performance Matters, Theatre Research in Canada, Comparative Media Arts Journal_, and _Canadian Theatre Review_. 

153_Letters.pdf

Letters reflecting on Issue 152 "Extraction." 

Letters

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Guest Editor

Joy Xiang (she/her) is a writer and editor, born in Shanghai and based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Her work and life engages erotics, migration, material flows, and media nostalgia and futurity. She is currently Editor at _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_. 

Header

C Mag

Issue 153

Chinatown

Credits

Related Events

Letters

Letters

Editorial

Editorial: Chinatown

Pressing Forward

Explore Issue by Images

Features

The Spatial Imaginaries of Karen Tam 譚嘉文

Artificial Artifacts

AKA and Jin Jin Cuisine

Linda Mae’s: An Architectural Past Life

Queer Asian Diaspora as Sensibility

Vancouver Photohistory and the Politics of Disappearance

A Garden in Chinatown on Indigenous Land

Resisting Either/ Or: Shanzhai Photogrammetry

Artist Projects

The Spirit of Apollo by Simon Fuh: Text

The Spirit of Apollo

Columns

Composition: Dear Nellie

One Thing: Morris Lum’s Tong Yan Gaai

Tilling: How grunt gallery Advocates for Disability Justice in the Arts

Reviews

“Nikotwaso” — Catherine Boivin

“Nocturnes” — Jennie C. Jones

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

“Knowable Archives, Unknowable Vessels” — Shaya Ishaq, Daysha Loppie, Carianne Shakes, Nala Haileselassie

“BREATHLESS” — Flaka Haliti, Marguerite Humeau, Donna Kukama, Julius von Bismarck

“GHOST DAYS” — Terrance Houle

“Dream Your Museum” — Khandakar Ohida

G.B. Jones

"IN DEEP" — Frédéric Bigras-Burrogano, Lori Blondeau, Emily Critch, Gillian Dykeman, Tsēmā, New Mineral Collective

ComposingYou_Chinatown – Judy Jheung