Crossing: Art, Heritage, and Personal Journeys

Reclaiming rituals that make us whole

by

Asian migration. Identity and heritage. Trauma and journeys both physical and spiritual.

Curated by Dr. Weng Wu, Crossing: Art, Heritage, and Personal Journeys, features the work of Asian-Canadian artists Yumie Kono, Andy Lou and Chrystal Phan, all connected around common themes of personal and collective experience.

The exhibition is on now through May 26 at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. 

Lou’s ink brush landscapes illuminate the first gallery like a fireworks display. Amid black and white calligraphic strokes, vivid blushes of pigment add a sense of ecstatic advent, as if these hues were being found as much in the act of painting as in its subject. This practice corresponds with that of 11th century “recluse painters,” who, fleeing the political upheaval of their time, found philosophical coherence in the country. In works such as Colour of the West Coast (2008), rhythmic shapes of trees or birds thread diagonal lines of light and shadow downwards from a saturated horizon to the viewer’s welcoming foreground. 

It is sobering to learn that Lou’s father, responding to Mao Zedong’s purgative Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, kept his son away from the factory and taught him to paint instead. This period was one in which traditional painters flirted with subversion in comparison with the western-style propaganda imagery favoured by the radical Gang of Four. The colours of Lou’s paintings burst out of that repressive silence even as they thematize fresh beginnings of migration.

Kono’s work represents an earlier generation, and crisis. Born in Japan to a family marked by tragedy during the bombing of Hiroshima, Kono immigrated to Canada in the ’70s. Among works in a variety of media, perhaps most distinctive are drawings in a whisper-soft greyscale. Works such as Drape (1976), an intently rendered study of a window behind a sheer curtain, are generated by the artist’s use of very hard pencils. These patiently repeated strokes — gentle but insistent pressure — condense an act of sustained attention, worn smooth as memories of memories.

Kono’s mother Hideko wrote a series of 60 Tanka poems grieving the deaths of her husband and son in the bombing of Hiroshima. Several of these poems are discreetly mounted near a glass vitrine displaying cast bronze buttons magnified in scale; each is approximately the size of a child’s fist. Ruptured and twisted, they are modeled from buttons of school uniforms worn by children who died in the blast. Swelling contours on their surfaces paradoxically recall the Scottish setting where Kono undertook the project, merging the transcription of a survivor’s landscape with the contours of scar tissue and an erased city.

Phan is the child of Vietnamese refugees. Growing up in Canada, she experienced a generational divide: stories of trauma were often withheld, while her first language became a fading text. Her exquisitely rendered, magical realist oil paintings are collectively presented as The Lucky Ones, an allusion to the paradoxical burden passed from survivor to child: to honour something nobody will talk about. 

A series of large paintings depict a family funeral at which members of Phan’s generation are presented as alienated from elders whose language, customs and hidden loss render them muted and remote. The young adults are presented listless and restless, not meeting each other’s eyes, some gazing obliquely and opaquely out at the viewer. They recall the colonized Tahitians of Paul Gauguin’s confused colonial allegory, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, a title that sounds eerily like one of Phan’s own.

A central character in these tableaux is a young man wearing a white wedding veil. It is a troubled metaphor: wearing white is a funerary custom in Vietnam, but the veil could also imply the transgressing of tradition represented by gay marriage. Perhaps this image speaks most defiantly to the silence that characterizes so much of Crossing: amid loss and estrangement, the need persists to reclaim and conduct the rituals that make us whole. I was reminded of these lines by a poet of Phan’s generation, Ocean Vuong:

In my language, the one I recall now only by closing my eyes, the word for

love is Yêu.

And the word for weakness is Yếu.

How you say what you mean changes what you say.

Some call this prayer. I call it watch your mouth.

Phan’s paintings are surrounded by ceramic apples painted with the pearlescent polish of Vietnamese nail salons. Apples — in the West, the old symbol of forbidden knowledge, health or propagation — are connected to the Buddhist mid-seventh lunar month “Hungry Ghost” festival, in which people make offerings, settling wandering souls. Thinking now of these apples alongside Kono’s buttons, I find myself wondering what it would be like to pick up one of each and weigh them in my hands. ■

Crossing: Art, Heritage, and Personal Journeys is on now through May 26 at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.

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