Gu Xiong

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Gu Xiong, “Facing Home – Harling Point,” 2020

HD video projection, 5:24 min. (camera, Yu Gu and Tom Campbell, editor, Tom Campbell)

Chinese immigrants first began settling Vancouver’s Chinatown, a vibrant neighbourhood filled with family-run businesses, in the late 1800s. But the COVID-19 pandemic has reduced foot traffic and forced many local shops  to shutter. The silence that enshrouds the normally bustling Sun Wah Centre, a four-storey community hub that houses two galleries hosting an exhibition by Vancouver artist Gu Xiong, seems eerily appropriate to his subject matter – abandoned heritage sites on the West Coast.

Xiong's show, The Remains of a Journey, renders visible forgotten narratives about the places once occupied by Chinese immigrants, who often laboured in British Columbia’s gold and coal mines. The show, at Centre A, an international centre for contemporary Asian art, and Canton-Sardine, opened by artists originally from Canton, reanimates those stories and underlines how our memories of mass migrations inform our views on globalization.

“The Remains of a Journey examines the way in which our understanding of contemporary migration issues is contingent on memories of historical migrations,” says Xiong, who emigrated from China in 1989 and became an art professor at the University of British Columbia. “Critical to this work is the idea that memory is not simply a record of the past, but also the framework based on which people interpret and respond to today’s world.”

Xiong’s photographs and multimedia works focus on various sites: Chinese cemeteries in Victoria and Greater Vancouver; Cumberland’s former Chinatown, once the largest on Vancouver Island; and the leper colony that the provincial government established in 1891 on D’Arcy Island, north of Victoria. He also looks at Canada Village in China’s Guangdong province – a project built by Chinese immigrants who returned home to create what Xiong calls “their ideal society, a fusion between Western and Chinese culture, and the tragic failure of this dream at the time.” 

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“Glass Negative – 'Chinese Leprosy Patient', #1 - #6,” 1922-1932

inkjet print, each 38” x 30” (courtesy of the Royal BC Museum and Archives, Victoria)

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Gu Xiong, “Isolation and Memory – D’Arcy Island,” 2020

HD video projection, 8:06 min. (camera, You Gu and Tom Campbell, editor, Tom Campbell; thank you to D’Arcy Island, Gulf Islands National Park Reserve, B.C.)

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Isolation and Memory – D’Arcy Island, a video featuring aerial and close-up footage of the island, demonstrates how history is formed by layered memories. The leper colony, which operated for more than 30 years, was home to 43 Chinese patients who lived in a state of limbo, awaiting death or deportation. Archival images of these patients, as in the series, Glass Negative – "Chinese Leprosy Patient" #1 - #6, are reminders of a largely forgotten history. Xiong’s photographs of the island, now part of the Gulf Islands National Park Reserve, show lush forest reclaiming the site.

Land is a significant theme throughout Xiong’s work. It evokes belonging, displacement and colonialism, all at once. He asks viewers to contemplate their notion of home and its connection to land. Is our home the place we were born? Or is it the land where we have created community and made a life? The inclusion of cemeteries emphasizes migration and settlement by Chinese immigrants – they have contributed to the Canadian economy and are an important part of this country’s history. 

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Gu Xiong, “Vanished Cumberland Chinatown,” 2020

installation view (courtesy Centre A, Vancouver)

In the video, Facing Home – Harling Point Chinese Cemetery, the camera lingers on the Victoria cemetery’s gate, which displays the Chinese character for ‘faithful’ on top of a maple leaf. At one time, this was the site of a bone house, a building where the bones of immigrants, exhumed after a seven-year burial, were cleaned and wrapped so they could be sent back to China. The Sino-Japanese War in 1937 put an end to the practice and the remains of about 900 people were buried at the cemetery. Their graves look across the Pacific Ocean toward China. 

Walking down Keefer Street after leaving the Sun Wah Centre, I see a line of people waiting outside Kent’s Kitchen and smell the Sun Fresh Bakery’s BBQ pork buns. Just as Xiong reanimates narratives from the past, the inhabitants of Vancouver’s Chinatown continue to tell stories of their community, acting as memory-keepers for the histories of home. ■ 

Gu Xiong: The Remains of a Journey at Centre A and Canton-Sardine in Vancouver from Nov. 13, 2020 to Feb. 13, 2021.

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