Follow Suit | Kotama Bouabane and Henry Tsang

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Kotama Bouabane "Horse, 2011"

Kotama Bouabane "Horse, 2011" C-print 4" x 21"

Featuring photography by Kotama Bouabane and a video installation by Henry Tsang, Follow Suit facilitates consideration of the latent implications and effects of late 20th century acts of architectural replication in Beijing on cultural development and mutual understanding between China and the West.

In 2011 Toronto artist Kotama Bouabane traveled to Beijing and encountered Beijing World Park, an educational theme park of miniaturized global tourism destinations. He also visited Ju Jun, a suburban Beijing neighbourhood conceived in 1999 by Chinese real estate developers who commissioned Californian architect Aram Bassenian to design a neighbourhood like the numerous others he had built in Orange County, California. Beijing World Park, for its part, was built in 1993, in the years after the Tiananmen protests when Chinese GDP per capita was still below $600/year* and when China’s rising to join the jet-set ranks of wealthy nations was still very much uncertain.

Bouabane’s resulting photo series, "Follow Suit" (2011), provides a window into these two particular features of the Chinese built environment. Shown together, they blur the lines between fantasy spaces built for entertainment and education and those built for daily life. Thus far exhibited exclusively in Western urban settings and consistent with Bouabane’s often satirical approach, these images effectively spark a bemused curiosity about the seeming absurdity of Others going to varying lengths to consume, inhabit or associate with popularized icons of Western architecture. While at first glance these works may appear to demean their subject, perhaps it is in the moments after an amused chuckle that the art-work truly begins to occur; in the moment when the viewer comes to consider the manner and attitude of their own amusement. In this way Bouabane’s work can serve as a provocative doorway to a deeper dialogue; a means for putting our perceptions of how fantasy and reality relate to the spread of globalization and capitalism into the context of societies’ emergence from isolation and poverty.

With the same Ju Jun neighbourhood as one half of his backdrop, Vancouver artist Henry Tsang created a four-screen synchronized video installation entitled "Orange County" (2003). This video depicts Tsang seamlessly moving between indecipherably similar neighbourhoods on opposite sides of the globe. Tsang’s work not only investigates the impacts that migration and the global knowledge economy have had on the relationship between geographic location and human identity, but also, positioning America as exotic, this work acts as a poignant prompt to reflect on the evolution of perceptions of Otherness.

Kotama Bouabane is a Laotian born Canadian artist. He has an MFA in Studio Arts, Photography from Concordia University, Montreal. His work has been exhibited in many galleries including Gallery TPW, Parisian Laundry and Jen Bekman Gallery. His work has been published in Prefix Photo Magazine and Magenta Foundations Flash Forward in 2010 & 2012. He currently holds a position in the photography department at OCADU and York University and is represented in Toronto by ESP - Erin Stump Projects.

Henry Tsang is a visual and media artist and occasional curator whose work has been exhibited internationally. His projects incorporate digital media, video, photography, language and sculptural elements in the exploration of the relationship between the public, community and identity through global flows of people, culture and capital. He received the VIVA Award in 1993 and teaches at Emily Carr University of Art & Design.

Follow Suit will be on display from February 13 - April 12, 2014

An exhibition brochure with an essay by Chris Lee will be available at Centre A.