Livestreamed on May 30th, 2021 

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Full Transcript:

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Richard Fung: 

Hi, everyone, I'm Richard Fung. I'm part of the organizing committee for Anti-Asian Racism Undone. Welcome to Artists in Dialogue: Past, Present, And Future. I want to start by locating myself at the traditional territories of the Huron-Wendat, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishnaabe and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. I also want to express my condolences for the 215 Indigenous children whose bodies are at the former Canada’s Indian Residential Schools. The genocidal violence of settler colonialism, underlined by this discovery, emphasizes for me how the work that we do around anti-Asian racism must be in solidarity with the anti-colonial struggles of the Indigenous people, and also with the movements against anti-Black racism, and all forms of racism and ethnic nationalism. 

 

I want to start by thanking Beverly Bain and Min Sook Lee for starting Scholar Strike, and maintaining this platform that has become really crucial in terms of progressive discourse, progressive discussion, that are bringing to light things that the mainstream media are not covering. So that's been really amazing. I also want to thank my fellow committee members for organizing this event. It's been a joy to work with. I want to thank Rajean Hoilett for technical support, Lokchi Lam for website and promotion, and today's captioner Denise. I also want to thank all the people who spoke yesterday and earlier today, including the last panel on sex work, which was pretty amazing. Because we imagine continuing a conversation that started before us and that will continue. 

 

For a long time I've been drawn to thinking through the work that contemporary art can do that is different from, but complimentary to, and sometimes overlapping with traditional scholarship, with activist interventions, and with journalism and popular media. What insights could it communicate, what visions can art do that other mediums cannot, and how it can affect us differently. So this panel today is really wide ranging. Yesterday, we started from Montreal to Vancouver, today we go from Stockholm to Vancouver. This pattern looks at six artists working across different mediums with different registers, and engaging in a range of topics and in different localities dealing, or having to contribute something to do with our compensation around engaging and countering anti-Asian racism. 

 

So what we’ll do, in addition to the short bios that I would read in turn, is each artist introduce themselves through one of their artwork. I thought, let's do something audio visual. And so I will start with the first artist, Jin-me. Jin-me Yoon is a Korean-born Vancouver-based artist living and working on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish people. Since the early 1990s, her lens-based practice has unpacked cultural assumptions while investigating site-related entangled local and global history. She's a faculty member at Simon Fraser University School of Contemporary Art. Jin-me, would you like to introduce us through your art work? And turn on your mic. 

 

Jin-me Yoon:

Can you hear me? Okay, sorry about that. I just want to thank you, Richard, for inviting me and all the organizers and the participants. I've just been so inspired by yesterday's sessions. And this morning session was just so powerful. And just before I start to address this work, the last session really reminded me that the incredible work that people are doing, and the fact that the militarized, sexualized violence against Korean women due to Japanese and American imperialism, and how the positivity of sex work and an empowerment and the agency of sex work needs to be supported. So it was amazing. My Anger is a Gift: Sex Workers Rights and Strategies and Knowledge really, really touched my heart and gave me such incredible reaffirmation about the importance of organizing and in solidarity in multiple ways. 

 

You suggested that I use Souvenirs of the Self. This image was made 30 years ago. I just finished a filming last week, all outdoors, work with Korean youth, many who are biracial and queer, thinking about different departure point, which is thinking about land, and water. And of course that means the absolute necessity of my indebtedness and our indebtedness to Indigenous peoples. But I thought I'd start here because it's still important for me to address white settler colonialism. As a part of that, even though as I said, I don't want to spend a ton of my energy anymore in terms of being reactive to frontal racism, of course, we have to fight that. But there are other ways that we could dream up other possibilities. And like I said, today's earlier session gave me opportunities to think through that and feel through that more deeply.

 

So I'm going to introduce this work very quickly, because you said we have three minutes by describing it particularly for those who are visually impaired. So there's a youngish woman who is visually coded as East Asian. Her hair is in a bob, she wears a nostalgic retro sweater that vaguely suggests Nordic or the North. She wears jeans and sensible Oxford-type shoes. Her pose is frontal and stiff, her hands are clenched and to her side, her facial expression is neutral. Though she seems to be squinting slightly from the sun, she stands on a human-made stone platform. There is snow as a lake is in the process of thawing. The backdrop is snow-capped Rocky Mountains. Aggressively perspectival, she is placed in the center of this scene. The figure ground composition is about 50-50, it is a photograph. 

 

Originally, this project was a six set of postcards that were placed in an intervention this way in the touristic shops. And then I made larger photographic works in 1996 for the gallery setting, which has a different context of course. So I need to begin by asking as an immigrant or diasporic settler, subject from South Korea, an arrivant according to Chickasaw scholar, Jodi Bird, whose ancestral lands my family and I have settled on, and as Richard has already said, I am settled on the the traditional territories, and the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples. And more specifically on Musqeuam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, in what is now known as Vancouver. And for me, while in my body and not just as a speech act, I understand the inequities faced by Indigenous peoples, the ongoing colonialism, I'm ambivalent about fully adopting the potentially totalizing term settler without qualification, as it does not take into account the different intersectional relationships to history and land within our continuing colonial and late capitalist context. 

 

So I made Souvenirs of the Self in 1991. And it's made within Canada's first national park, Banff, Alberta that was established in 1885. And without going into full detail, Banff National Park was instrumental in bringing wealthy tourists and also to encourage settlement out to the Rocky Mountains via Canadian Pacific Railway, largely built by Chinese workers doing the most dangerous work. And I want to say in my research, that definitely there were class divisions, not all whites were white. And also, during World War I internment camps were set up for immigrant prisoners from the Ukraine, Germany, Austria and Hungary in Banff. 

 

So I always wanted to interrogate, what does white supremacy mean in the context of colonial Canada, and what interests, whose interest does white supremacy serve? And so for me, while it seems like my body is a kind of projection to project whatever you want, because mostly when I went there to do this research in 1991, I was Konichiwa’ed, as a verb. Because the yen was very high, and there were many, many Japanese tourists, and of course, that kind of flattening is in concert with the formal strategies I use to flatten my body, almost like a collage strategy of sliding my body into the scene, and what does it reflect back. 

 

So on the back of the caption of the postcards, not in this version, but in the postcard version that says, “Lake Louise, feast your eyes on the picturesque beauty of this lake, named to honor Princess Louise Caroline Alberta, daughter of Queen Victoria. She discovered a lake on a sunny day before that she did not exist.” So I think this points to the fact that you know, this kind of naming, unpeopled colonial relationship to the land that's everywhere, everywhere you look, from your street names, to place names, etc. And if they're Indigenous place names, they're conveniently used in a way that really suppresses the reality of ongoing colonialism. So I think for me, I guess I'll just say that in terms of the Assiniboine and stony peoples that were forcibly removed for the park to come into existence, and also mining extraction as a part of what Banff was, in this case, and the differentiating class divisions with who were managers, who were workers. Although they were white, they were not equally white. And also the Chinese workers that built the railways in very dangerous terms and also continue to work in mining, they had to live on the other side of the waste products, literally somewhere else from the rest of the town - these histories are important to interrogate and also to make sure that we're not, as so-called racialized or visible minority - I think a lot of this made in the 90s was enfolded within this kind of benign multiculturalism that, yes, I need to I want to belong, but that was never my intention. I don't really want to belong, I want to belong to the communities in which I feel alongside with. But it was never my intention to simply slip myself in, insert myself to a kind of benign managerial multiculturalism of the Canadian state. 

 

So that's important to me that I continue to think through how it is, and which communities that I belong alongside with, and I would say that that's a flexible, fluid, creative act in itself. And I’m not sure - and I'll just end here by saying, I'm not sure I would have made this work that I made 30 years ago, if I was younger artist now. But the last year and more I have been told to go home, my family has been spat on, my mother no longer walks alone. And the vulnerable service industry jobs in the Korean community, and the mom and pop businesses, and service workers have suffered, and some have succumbed to COVID. And there are ongoing disparities, obviously, economically, in our communities. But when I came to Canada, I think it was a different Canada, but yet when I think to the current conditions, I wonder how much has really changed. But I think we can't afford to think through our racialized minorities’ supposed status in Canada as simply one of belonging. 

 

And like I said, I was really moved and inspired by the incredible speakers this morning, Mina, Elene and Mercedes, who really helped me feel a kind of possibility of healing in terms of the relationship to sexualized violence against Korean women and our disposabilities. There are so many histories of the Japanese use of Korean women's bodies as comfort women, as basically sexualized slaves, and the need for Korean women to do sexual work due to American military bases and to support families, as well as being shunned by their families, and then a different alternative way to think about sex work more agentively, in terms of positivity, and empowerment. And I really, really think that's why we are in solidarity, that we continue to learn and listen. And that is with other racialized communities, Black and Indigenous, queer, trans communities. And I'm very heartened by the fact that as an artist, I have the ability to listen, to learn and to be in conversation with all of you. So thank you.

 

Richard Fung: 

Thanks, Jin-me. We will come back to that question of intersectionality later in the conversation, but I wanted to thank you for starting us off both because that work Souvenir of the Self is so, such a landmark in relation to Asian Canadian contemporary art production. But it also starts us off in terms of the body and the land, the body and place. And you reminded me when you were talking about white supremacy, because I made a film in 1996, shot in Banff, and I interviewed the historian Nayan Shah. And one of the things he talks about is, he reminds us that in the era when settlement happened, the Irish Southern European Slavic people weren't considered white. That's the way in which white people have been, have been victimized by white supremacy too. And Kobena Mercer has said the problem with white supremacy is not white people, it's a white subject position. So I think to think about those things is really kind of important. 

 

I'm going to move on now to the next artist, which would be Immony Mèn, who is an artist and educator and community based researcher. He's an assistant professor in the Faculty of Design at OCAD University. His research focuses on developing a theoretical framework for understanding specifically Khmer Cambodian diasporic experience through media praxis, critical race theory and various forms of community engagement. Immony.

 

Immony Mèn: 

Okay, hello, everyone. Yeah, so I have a quick video to screen. Are you going to do that or do you - okay.

 

Video playback:

I was stunned silent. My smile left my face and not knowing what to say. I hurried along, a grown adult feeling helpless and humiliated by kids. Creative, intelligent, funny, racist kids. And that was when he was coming to walk closer to me. I could hear it and when I ignored him, and we walked directly past each other, that was when he turned and he spat in my face. And that was a real shocking moment, as you can imagine.

 

Immony Mèn:

Okay, so I'm here to talk a little bit about Receipts, but also joining this in this conversation. Hi, everyone. My name is Immony Mèn. I'm a Cambodian refugee artist, educator and community based researcher. I'm an assistant professor in the Faculty of Arts and Science, with a specialization in interaction design at OCAD University. I'm currently on the ancestral and traditional territories of the Mississauga Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishnaabe and the Huron-Wendat, who are the original owners and custodians of this land. 

 

I will talk a bit about this project titled Receipts. In addition to the direct health impacts of COVID-19, we're experiencing parallel shadow pandemics of racial discrimination and violence, housing precarity, and homelessness, and negative effects of isolation. These occurrences disproportionately affect our vulnerable communities. For example, Asian diasporic communities have seen troubling intensifications of racism that have had negative impacts on personal safety. Receipts is a multimodal interface that receives anonymized archives and performs the testimony of people that have experienced or witnessed anti-Asian aggression in public space. This work was created with Lilian Leung, Patricio Davila, Dave Colangelo, and with contributions from Asian participants in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. 

 

At its core, this project is concerned with addressing safety in public space by focusing on the social and technical aspects of recording and publicizing testimonies. We hoped to build this prototype in order to develop a robust and flexible tool that can be modified and employed by equity-seeking groups. This work applies technologies and processes that are commonly used to recognize faces, voices, and bodies as a way to protect the identity of individuals who wish to share their experiences, to bond, heal, and provide strategies. We’re working on developing a different type of recording. One that applies computer vision, speech to text and character reenact meant to protect the immigration statuses, professional networks and personal relationships of participants. This platform was developed with the intent of offering it to other vulnerable communities outside of the south, southeast Asian diasporas on Turtle Island. Visualizing these anonymized accounts humanizes the experience and memory. The rasp of the AI voice, the movement of the reenactment actors’ lips, my lips, is echoed through the storage container, words that I'm too familiar with. When I stand in front of this work, the text and computer generated faces illuminate the shipping container at the Bentway, the stories from individuals who have experienced anti-Asian racism, scroll across the screen as Watson, an AI speech to text software, demystifies the doubt that these sentiments and actions occur in public spaces in our neighborhoods, and to our loved ones. What we can see through these stories is the hyper visibility of faces, the racialization of the pandemic, and an anonymized voice asking you to feel the weight of their words. Seeing Receipts at the Beltway brought forward all these complex emotions I have for myself, my family, the Montreal Khmer community, and the student population at OCAD University about moving through public spaces, moving through anger, fear, biases, racism and collective healing.

 

Richard Fung: 

Thanks Immony. Again, very sobering to actually think through - to reconfront the context that is producing the work, and also interesting to think about work that responds so quickly. Often work that you know, what might see in poster form, but here you are working in an installation, that inserts itself in the public space is really interesting, and something again that we'll come back to in conversation. 

 

Next artist is Amy Lam. Amy is an artist and writer. And she has exhibited conceptual film and performance works internationally, both solo and as part of the collective Life of a Craphead with John McCurley, who I might add, was one of my students many many years ago, I still remember his brilliance. Actually, I was teaching him video and he did not do video, but he still got a great grade anyway, because his work was so good. Her first chapbook, The four onions, is available from yolkless press. She was born in Hong Kong and lives in Toronto. Amy.

 

Amy Lam: 

Hi, everyone. Thank you for the introduction, Richard. And thank you to all the organizers of Scholar Strike, and for organizing this panel. I'm really looking forward to speaking with everyone today. And it's been so great already just to hear more about Jin-me's work and Immony’s work. So I'll describe this photo. This is a work by Life of a Craphead, my collaboration with John McCurley, which spanned from 2006 to 2020. So in this photo, it's taken in Saskatoon, Treaty Six territory, and what we see are two buildings. One building, the one on the left, it looks more modern, it looks kind of forbidding. It's two stories, there's a large image across the top of it, the kind of balcony and the image is a black and white photo. And then on the front of the building the facade, there's a metal kind of grating with text on it, which is an artist text, which isn't the text - it's not the artwork that I'm actually referring to. But just so you get a sense of what that building is like. And then beside it, what we see on the right hand side is a smaller, also two-storey building that's covered in a kind of faded red plaster. Two small windows upstairs, and then one window on the downstairs floor with a small front door and a sign, handpainted, that says Jinjin cuisine. And then in Chinese the name of the restaurant, which unfortunately, I can't read Chinese so I can't tell you, or I can read like one word. 

 

So we see these two buildings side by side and the artwork is called Until Either One Closes. And what the work is, is an agreement or relationship that we, as Life of a Craphead, instituted between the gallery and the restaurant next door. And this was in 2019 as part of our exhibition that traveled to Saskatoon called Entertaining Every Second. And that exhibition was mostly focused on a research project around the American war in Vietnam, and the figure of the Asian woman in that war. And so just to go back to the specific artwork, the agreement, what the agreement actually is, which is still in place, is that all openings and events at the gallery, at aka artist-run, are to be catered by Jin Jin cuisine for the rest of time, until either one of the businesses closes or moves. And as part of the agreement, the logo of Jin Jin cuisine is also now included in the logo block of aka artist-run amongst other sponsors and funders, like the Canada Council, or whatever. 

 

And part of the context of wanting to institute this relationship is the fact that aka artist-run is located on 20th Street West in Saskatoon, which is a former, and also existing, currently existing Chinatown. But it's a neighborhood that is changing very quickly, and has changed a lot over the last decade, as with many other Chinatowns across North America. So for example, many other Chinese businesses like restaurants and markets still operate in the area, but it's mixed in with coffee shops and juice bars. One really interesting instance of how this takes place is, for example, there's a bar that's kind of like a new, cool, expensive bar. And it's located within a former Chinese restaurant. And they've kept the interior decoration of some of the Chinese restaurant elements, mixed in with their own branding. So they've kind of like incorporated this aesthetic of ruin. An important note to make is also that aka artist-run, which inhabits the building on the left along with Paved Arts, that building itself used to be a Chinese restaurant, which was called Toon’s Kitchen. And in the back of the building near the offices, they actually have one of the neons from that restaurant, which maybe was also used in a Karen Tam exhibition, I believe.

 

And so this relationship that's instituted speaks to the pressures of gentrification and displacement that Chinatowns face today. And it also speaks to the historical context of Chinatowns, right, which are that of legislative racism in North America, and also planned destruction. So, nearly every Chinatown in North America has experienced some kind of planned destruction through state expropriation. And in Saskatoon specifically, a Chinatown used to exist on 19th Street East, and the neighborhood was forced to move when the city expropriated the land for the Saskatoon Technical Collegiate Institute. 

 

So my three minutes is about up right now. But I just want to say finally, that this is also against the backdrop of the foundational theft of land from Indigenous peoples to create Canada. And so what this project points to is a possible type of interdependence or relationship between neighbors as long as it can last or as long as it can be maintained.

 

Richard Fung: 

Thank you so much. And again, I'm taking from this the question of the continuation of a conversation around the land, but also specifically now, pressures that are facing Chinatowns across Canada. So in Vancouver - you know that I'm involved with a project with Shelley around Chinatown in Toronto and the process of gentrification and appropriation of the markers of Chinatown, right, and then Montreal, also there are these struggles. 

 

But I'm also struck by, and I'd like you to come back again, to this about your work, thinking through the kind of institutional infrastructures of contemporary art and how it works, and the politics of funding and institutional structures. And I know that you have been part of that letter about the Koffler and artwork in relation to Palestine. So again, something else to come back to and a continuation of a kind of activist art intervention, in a way I think that carries on a conversation with Immony’s work as well. So now, we're going to jump to Ms. Nookie Galore. Having been raised to fear everything, Ms. Nookie Galore has an un/comfortable relationship with stories that haunt us. Creator of shows like Scary Stories People of Colour Tell in the Dark, Ms. Galore’s DRAG reminds us that dreaming is part of our survival and that nightmares are dreams, too. Nookie.

 

Patrick Salvani/Ms. Nookie Galore: 

Thank you. I'm so honored to be here and really nervous. It's not like my usual lip sync and let's do shots at the bar gig. So I feel very grateful to share this space and time with everyone here. So here's a picture. So as a performance artist, I was thinking of submitting a video, but as a drag performer, drag is also an art to be consumed visually. I definitely feel most comfortable in front of an audience, so thanks for everyone for watching, and a camera. Similar to the other artists around connection, memory, and action. I find drag is an opportunity to clear up pasts, presents and futures, and really critique assumptions around gender and my own Filipinoness. I would say my drag is centered around finding home. And home for me can be multiple things, whether it's like in the Philippines and my lack of memory from it, migrating to the US and then moving to Calgary when I was 13, and where Asians were racialized in a particular way as gang members and drug dealers. And yeah, I can neither confirm or deny my involvement in those things. 

 

So finding home is also about family. So you can see I'm in the kitchen setting here, family dinners. Like I saw how my mother, who had multiple business degrees, but her three jobs within North America were caregiver, someone who worked behind the cash register at a gas station. And she retired as a data entry clerk, so both my sister and I can have a better life. Or how my dad had to fight for accommodation within a workplace after working 20 years of service, following all the rules, and then was now being labeled as difficult and faced so much resistance because he was becoming blind. 

 

I also just recently saw my family. And I saw my mom, and we were going grocery shopping - I base everything around food. So we're going grocery shopping, and then there's like a lineup to the grocery store. And there's probably just six people, the lineup is going very fast, actually. But my mom just goes straight to the front of the line. And I'm literally like, this is so embarrassing. And then she was just like, even me? Do I have to wait in line, she's like, I just have to get my family bread. And like, she lied, she had to get more than that. But I think for my mom, and for my parents, it's just like activism, and that hustling is like a part of their life. 

 

And so for me and my performance art, it's like I wanted to queer that experience for the stage. So when I'm in this kitchen, being away from my family, being part of the diaspora, food can be the most accessible way for us to connect to home. So basically, I play with my food a lot, and if you ever see me perform, this picture also is kind of playing off one of my first shows, my first solo show actually, was SARAP!, which was about migrant workers and reimagining the story of like a migrant worker caregiver as a manananggal, which is the Philippine vampire. The manananggal is basically a half body beast, so the body would split in half, and then the top half would fly around, eat people, the bottom half is the one where you have to find to kill and stuff and to destroy everything. For me it was playing on that idea of just like what does it feel like, in terms of like migration, to have your feet planted in one place and then your heart somewhere else. 

 

So as you can see also, the makeup. I love makeup. This is my natural look today. I'm a horror story-telling drag queen. I grew up watching scary movies. My mom loves scary movies and my Lola, my grandma loved telling me like superstitions and folktales, so it really felt like home. And for me, I am a giant scaredy cat, I will literally scream and hide behind someone when watching a horror film. So, a really good date to bring to a horror film. But so as a child, fear is an emotion that I accessed the most. So there's also this Filipino proverb. It's like, “Ang taong walang kibo, nasa loob ang kulo.” So basically a chill persona, but they got some fire in them. So for me, what's inside of me is a demon, with unknown pronouns, but it becomes a constant battle with myself, and a lot of my performance is really showcasing my own journey, through working through my own emotions and finding ways to do better. And I think people hopefully can relate to that. And they love good exorcisms. 

 

So when I first started doing drag, I was really battling the idea of masculinity, and really trying to find myself in my own Asian masculinity, when you're constantly told to feel less than. Added to that I was, I grew up very fat. So I felt very disconnected from my own body and sexuality. So I was like this weirdo. That’s how I chose this shirt, low-femme weirdo. But also, I just had to code switch so many times to feel somewhat seen. So it almost makes you feel wanted in pieces. So for me performing means freedom, rewriting all the cultural and gendered violence I and others have experienced, not allowing my stories, histories, body, to be hidden for others to feel whole. Not everything comes in a pretty package, despite how society wants a model minority to be. It's messy and complex, we experienced hard shit. And to me, that is where our strength is Asians come from, and I really wanted to put that x in Filipinx. 

 

So I guess the last thing around this picture, too, is performance. If I do theater, lip sync, I want it to feel like home for others as well and feel as accessible as possible. Even like language-wise. I try to use very colloquial everyday language, pop songs. I like using pop songs and subverting the meaning through all aspects of performance, through movement, stage, to props, looks. Imagine singing your favorite song in different rooms in your house. And what stories does that tell. So basically playing with the idea of, I or you can say something out loud, you can sing a song with me, we're putting this into the universe into existence. And if others hear us we will be accountable to that. So like in SARAP!, I use the song when I grew up by the Pussycat Dolls to talk about immigrant dreams, hopes, and migrant disappointments, and how so much of those hopes and dreams and to support disappointments are colonial in nature. So for me, it's very much me trying to be as authentic to my Asian self as possible when I perform and do drag, and it's using a community approach to doing drag. So, finding home was always that in community, is finding community, especially as a queer and trans person because sometimes we can feel rejected and isolated within our own families. Yeah, and that's so finding home is what this picture represents for me.

 

Richard Fung: 

Thanks so much, Patrick. I've seen you perform before and to hear you speak, it really fills out - with a depth that I never quite appreciated the your persona, your drag persona, it's so interesting to hear because you know, it's funny to hear you say that you are interested in horror stories, but you're a scaredy cat, as am I, and I grew up also in Trinidad where everything is haunted. There’re all these figures of people who come out at night and shed their skins and fly through the air and suck your blood, or - so I grew up with that there was a kind of liberation to leave that behind and come to a big city which is not haunted in the same way. But again, and thanks for introducing the whole question of intersectionality that we will come back to. 

 

Next we have Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn, who is a visual artist and using archives and a broad range of media including, but not exclusively, photography, film, video, sound and printmaking to investigate issues of historicity, collectivity, utopian politics and multiculturalism via feminist theories. Currently based in Stockholm, she is a PhD candidate in the ‘Art, Technology and Design’ program at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design and KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Jacqueline?

 

Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn: 

Yes, thank you so much for this invitation. Thank you to the organizers and Scholar Strike really, it's so exciting to be able to talk about serious issues, but through the lens of contemporary art, but particularly cultural practitioners and how we position ourselves and how our work can actually resonate and challenge some of the infrastructures, the white colonial settler society that is being perpetuated. I'll just start with maybe showing a short video trailer of a recent production, which is titled Untitled (Entitled), that was recently shown at Bonniers Konsthall here in Stockholm. 

 

Video playback:

We have

We have the correct name. 

Do we have the correct pronunciation of your name? 

 

Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn: 

Yeah, so Untitled (Entitled) was a production that took about 10 years to complete, which basically looks at a series of interviews that I've conducted with people who have a history of migration, cultural workers, mostly, who carry a history of migration and for reason or another decided to change their name for a more Westernized version of their name. Either Francophone, Anglophone, and to use that as a departure point to this work. So if we could just have that image as an anchoring image to discuss the work, I'll just describe it for the visually impaired or people who might have difficulties actually seeing the work. 

 

So basically, the work is a series of structures that are lenticular prints that are mounted on chromed-frame structures and wheels. So there are five of them. Rajean, is it possible to show the image as well? So I'll just continue describing the work as I remember it. So basically, there's these five structures, and they're movable. And alongside with these structures, there are handles also in the gallery space. So the structures, because they are lenticular prints, it allows to show two images in one. And so depending on where the viewer places himself or herself in front of the structure, they decide what can be seen on this image, on this lenticular print. 

 

So because of the basics of animation that is inbuilt in the lenticular print, then it's possible to also activate the work with dancers. So this choreography was recently produced, we can just have that film still just there. So there's a choreography that I produce with three dancers, which move these structures around. And each of the panels are basically one person that I interviewed, and both their names, the name in their mother tongue, and also the Westernized version that they've adopted, or maybe their parents gave them, is printed together. So it's really up to the viewer to decide what he or she sees in this name, and the colonial legacy and history of what it means to be bearing these names. 

 

And I think we did mention about earlier naming and how streets are carrying names in the city, and what kind of histories that are being perpetuated. And it's the same, not necessarily exactly the same, but similar mechanisms that are in play with how our bodies are carrying these names and what kind of histories and cultural legacies we are perpetuating. And this we can observe it, and I don't want to flatten each of our different histories, but it's definitely mechanisms that we can observe at the recent, or very early colonial context with Canada with Indigenous people, Black Canadians also that were forced to change their names, and also the Chinese community already, during the building of Canada with the railroads were - many of the Chinese were forced to use this name of John Chinaman as being the shorthand to be able to name all these Chinese that for the white men looked as similar labor power that could just be interchanged regardless of their individuality. 

 

And although these mechanism maybe don't happen en mass in the same way as it historically has been, but it's highly internalized, and individualized, and what I've observed in these interviews that each individual thinks that is something unique that they're doing, but it's a much more commonly-practiced strategy. And so five years ago, Diane Dechief submitted her PhD research where she observed that actually applicants within the Canadian context, that applicants who apply with their name and their mother tongue often wouldn't be called back for an interview. But if you would change your name for Western English-sounding or French-sounding name, you have 30% more chances to be called back for an interview. So how names are so much embedded in this colonial legacy. 

 

And here I'll just read a short quote from Trinh T Minh-Ha, from When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, And Cultural Politics, in how actually clarity and communication can be seen as a form of tyranny for non-white people, that we bodies of color, have to constantly adapt herself and accommodate. So she says, “Since clarity is always ideological and reality always adaptive, such a demand for clear communication often proves to be nothing else, but an intolerance for any language other than the one approved by the dominant ideology, at times obscured, and other times blaming. This inability and unwillingness to deal with the unfamiliar or with a language different from one's own is in fact, a trait that intimately belongs to the man, of course, of power. It is a reputable form of colonial discrimination, one in which difference can only be admitted once it is appropriated. That is, one, it operated within the master sphere of having.” So I'll end the quote here. And yeah, I guess we can continue with the conversation together later on. But I just wanted to anchor my work with this recent production. We can't hear you Richard. 

 

Richard Fung: 

Sorry, I unmuted myself, so I wouldn't bother you when you're talking. That's my own difficulties with technology. Thanks for introducing the question of language, which again in the diasporic context is one of those points of friction for Asian communities. The face, the language, and those ones that go internal the food, which is Patrick was talking about, internal or external in terms of our identities, we will come back to that too. 

 

And finally, but not least, is Shellie Zhang, who is a multi disciplinary artist, she explores how integration, diversity, and assimilation are implemented and negotiated, and how manifestations of these ideas relate to lived experiences. Shellie is interested in how culture is learned and sustained, and how the objects and iconographies of culture are remembered and preserved. And finally, Shellie is also one of the organizers of this committee, and it has been wonderful to work with her.

 

Shellie Zhang: 

Thanks so much, Richard. I have the benefit of going last so I get to hear all the wonderful things and subjects that we're going to talk about in our discussion, but I also just want to begin by thanking everybody who spoke, the co-committee organizers and everybody who's supported the past few days. I'm really thankful to be able to share digital space with you all as we're all isolated in our kitchens and living rooms. And so on the screen right now is an image of a brightly-colored pile of plastic flowers in pink, orange, purple and white, on top of fake green grass against the backdrop of a yellow floral fabric. The Spork is from a series titled Means of Exchange which depicts still life displays of products manufactured from Yiwu and imported into Canada. And to give a bit of background, my family was permitted to live here in so-called Canada because we were rejected under one nation's economic qualifications for settlement, but qualified under the colonial project of Canada and seen as beneficial in this context. So notions of worth defined by economic contributions have always stuck with me as a framework. And earlier in my practice, I became really interested in ideas about “made in China.” 

 

And so in 2019, I became drawn to the city of Yiwu in Zhejiang province, which is, Yiwu is best known as the global supplier of dollar stores. It's a trade supplier of small commodities across the world. And because of its position, as a global trade market, the city has this really bizarre and interesting spin on multiculturalism, which is why I became really interested in a city of multiculturalism that is both contingent and informed by trade. And so in Yiwu there are these malls with specialized shops where you can meet with wholesale traders for everything you can think of from dollar stores. So from plastic inflatable balls, stuffed animals, or even, there are shops for just dancing Santas, for instance. And these shops are often filled to the brim with endless options of the same thing. 

 

Yiwu is kind of a popular place for filmmakers and photographers. And if you just do a quick Google of Yiwu, you'll see these really loud color box shops, usually staffed by one worker who facilitates purchases, in the way where things surround them, in a way almost engulfs the subject. And this is a common aesthetic scene for depicting the city. And so, from these images, I was reminded of an etching of Afong Moy, who was the first known Chinese woman to immigrate to the US in the 1830s. And Afong was brought from her homeland and Guangzhou and toured around the US and exhibited as the Chinese lady. And so in this, this etching of her, which you can also find on Google, I had a hard time picking one image, but in this etching you can find her, she's in the center of this display of things where she almost becomes an extension of those things in the setting. 

 

So Means of Exchange references this visual history, where Asian and Asian femininity is ascribed notions of commodity, impassivity, especially in visual history. But also how objects translate culture. How do objects versus people circulate in the global economy? And what terms these are often under. Thinking more recently, there's this really interesting conversation about how post secondary institutions can't exist without money from international students, even though there's rising hostility, and to be able to keep those individuals safe. Or I'm thinking of migrant workers who have statuses and contingent on the power of their employers, for instance, and are unable to lay down roots in a place as a result of that. So in my work, I often work with archival and photographic citations, and some folks have talked about this already, but I'm actually really interested in hearing about how everybody employs and references these modes of citations in their work. But I'll stop here.