Walking the Garden with Asia Jong

Walking the Garden with Asia Jong

Asia Jong is a curator who has flowered roots in Chinatown. For the first two years after she moved here, she never left. Her work feels like a love letter to this place. As a diasporic Chinese settler herself, Asia is attuned to the nuances of this deeply political, ever-changing community. At the core of her curatorial practice is people – and a way of being in relation that is as malleable, dynamic, and fluid as water. Her earlier works invite audiences to thoughtfully create relations to Chinatown, sending you searching for the color gold down Pender St, or offering cheap date ideas in Chinatown that are tenderly allusive to the intimacies of her own memories. 

Read More

In Place, Make Space: Home is An Ever-Shifting Place

In Place, Make Space: Home is An Ever-Shifting Place

What happens when home strays from the concept we learned and imagined as children? Local artists Amelia Earhart and Elena Imari Hoh explore this question and the ways that a seemingly simple concept, “home,” is complicated and distorted for mixed children of diaspora. Yet, their recent exhibition, In Place, Make Space, at Slice of Life offers home as something we find and embrace in memories, connections with people, and even foreign places; they celebrate home through the intangible and as something we actively form, rather than something we can lose.

Read More

The Golden Section challenges the conventions of hair

The Golden Section challenges the conventions of hair

Around 2020, I moved to a new apartment far away from my local hair store, into a new neighbourhood with no Black hair stores nearby. As I searched for adequate hair supplies for my fro’, I was led to online shopping. In this pursuit, I found a Black hair store in Alberta that had everything I needed: wigs, weaves, and hair masks of all kinds. Upon receiving my goods, within the crammed packages of hair, there was a skin lightening soap bar. I quickly threw the soapbox away.

Read More

How Indigenous Artists and Knowledge Keepers are using lens-based media to navigate conversations of care and action

How Indigenous Artists and Knowledge Keepers are using lens-based media to navigate conversations of care and action

In a time of climate disasters, humanitarian crises, racial injustices, reconciliation failures, economic downturn, and political theatre, Response: Soft Action asks us to pause and reflect on conversations about care, ideas of home, explorations of identity and belonging, and how that can translate into action/activism.

Read More

I Am Because They Were: A Review of Berlynn Beam and Chase Keetley's We Lost People: Diasporic Departures

I Am Because They Were: A Review of Berlynn Beam and Chase Keetley's We Lost People: Diasporic Departures

Throughout the past two years of civil unrest, financial collapse, and pandemic, we have each been reminded of the frailty of both our systems and our bodies. Whether this frailty struck us in the form of lost loved ones and Zoom-sponsored funerals, or through government-sanctioned murder turned viral video, it has become undeniably clear that radical systemic change is needed to address the continued subjugation of the displaced and disenfranchised. For those who, thanks to the sacrifices of those that came before, march for a post-colonial future either in spirit or in the streets, survival has also reminded us to breathe, to grieve, and to remember. In the same light, We Lost People: Diasporic Departures by Berlynn Beam and Chase Keetley of Black Arts Vancouver – on view at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology as a part of Sankofa: African Routes, Canadian Roots – invites viewers to pause and consider the land we gather on, the places we come from, and the people we have lost.

Read More

JOSEPHINE LEE EXPLORES HOME AND BELONGING IN LATEST EXHIBIT: /BORN IGNORANT IN AN ABYSS OF LIGHT

JOSEPHINE LEE EXPLORES HOME AND BELONGING IN LATEST EXHIBIT: /BORN IGNORANT IN AN ABYSS OF LIGHT

Vancouver-based sculptural artist and ceramicist Josephine Lee showcases her latest piece /born ignorant in an abyss of light at the Burrard Arts Foundation (BAF). Located in the garage on the left side of BAF’s entrance, you’ll peep through a glass tile window to view the scintillating piece. Three medium-sized porcelain vessels are laid out on separate cubic blocks forming a triangle and attached to a transparent curvy glass tube. The tube contains a current of electricity that sparks in accordance with a grainy, archival video loop of a house repeatedly blowing up, then becoming whole again.

Read More