Laiwan

Work questions language, colonialism and identity.

by

While Laiwan’s retrospective at UBC’s Belkin Gallery uses old and new moving image technologies, what stands out most is her love of a venerable technology – the book – and its components, words. Laiwan, born to Chinese parents in Zimbabwe, a former British colony with 16 official languages, immigrated with her family in 1977 to Canada, with its two official languages. For her, language is not just a marker of colonialism but also becomes an art medium.

MACHINATE, an installation of projections and audio, includes analogue 16 mm films, as well as digital projections. But beyond the screens, in the corner, on a diminutive wooden desk sits a tiny book with pages made from computer motherboards; a pencil sits in the partly open drawer. Buddhist chanting can be heard while the screens show cameras exploring esophageal tunnels one moment and distant galaxies the next. Technology’s potential to go as far within as it goes without is what interests Laiwan, but it’s the easily missed presence of the pencil, a handheld tool to channel the flow of ideas onto paper, that’s the key to her work as a questioning of language, colonialism and identity.

Flipping through Working text diary reveals ethnographic photographs alongside her methodical abstract paintings – small, repeated gestural marks made directly on the pages. Whether she is drawing attention to the book’s subject – vanished civilizations – or masking it as an act of erasure is an open question. 

Agile is a series on pages removed from a discarded Chinese-English dictionary. Most of the text is blocked out with white correction fluid, leaving phrases that highlight the dominance of male pronouns, showing the bias this creates in learning languages. While curious about the ambiguities of English, Laiwan is fascinated by the fact that Chinese, a tonal language, has many homophones, words that sound the same but have different meanings. With such an abundance of possible meanings, how does one know what is being said? Post-structuralist thought, which suggests that linguistic meanings are constantly shifting, is hinted at in much of the work, which hinges on the malleability of language and how it directs our understanding of the world and shapes our identity. 

In African Notes, Laiwan returns to Zimbabwe. This installation includes a slide show of the archaeological ruins of a stone city, Great Zimbabwe, a UNESCO site inhabited by thousands of people before it was abandoned some 500 years ago. In school, she was told the site was too sophisticated to have been built by Indigenous peoples. This has since been disproven, but an education founded on racism may be the kernel that led to Laiwan’s decades-long investigation into language and identity. ■  

Laiwan: Traces, Erasures, Resists at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery in Vancouver from Jan. 7 to April 10, 2022.

Correction Jan. 28, 2022, 10:55 a.m. An earlier version of this article identified the object in a desk drawer in MACHINATE as a pen. It is, in fact, a pencil. The post has been updated to reflect this.

PS: Worried you missed something? See previous Galleries West stories here or sign up for our free biweekly newsletter.

Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery

1825 Main Mall, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z2

604-822-2759

please enable javascript to view

Visit Website

Tues to Fri 10 am - 5 pm, Sat and Sun noon - 5 pm.