Lam Wong
Ghostly whispers of clandestine love reverberate a century later.
Lam Wong, “Elizabeth,” 2020/2022
Chinese ink, acrylic and oil on canvas mounted on cradled wood panel (courtesy the artist and Canton-sardine)
Vancouver artist Lam Wong’s solo exhibition, Ghosts from Underground Love, is based on clandestine love letters written by delinquent teenagers in Belgium in the early 1900s. Wong started his project in 2017 and continued working through the pandemic, seeking to illustrate the young women’s trauma, yearning for love, and desire to escape institutional control.
The show, on view until Nov. 26 at Canton-sardine in Vancouver’s Chinatown, is based on research by Laura Nys, a Belgian historian who studied the personal experiences of young women held in state reformatories for reasons such as misconduct, as judged by the moral standards of the time. Nys, who had access to their letters, has written about the “remarkable” intensity of their emotions, not only when they confess their love, but also when they discuss their pain and anxieties. Wong, the father of a transgender daughter, was drawn to the material through his interest in human suffering.
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Lam Wong, “Underground Love,” 2022
installation view at Canton-sardine, Vancouver (courtesy the artist and Canton-sardine)
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Lam Wong, “Underground Love, ” 2022
detail of installation at Canton-sardine, Vancouver (courtesy the artist and Canton-sardine)
Before entering the gallery, visitors are faced with a massive wall installation that resembles a giant tombstone on which a Buddhist sutra about love and suffering is written in Chinese calligraphy, along with a somewhat obscured passage from the secret letters, all of it covered by earthen-coloured concrete dots. While it takes a bit of effort to identify all the visual elements, the emotional power comes across instantly.
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Lam Wong, “No, They Will Never Prevent Me To Love... (Solitary Confinement),” 2022
transparency in lightbox, and (on right) “Désiré,” 2020/2022, Chinese ink, acrylic and oil on canvas mounted on cradled wood panel (courtesy the artist and Canton-sardine)
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Lam Wong, “Ghosts from Underground Love,” 2022
exhibition view at Canton Sardine, Vancouver (courtesy the artist and Canton-sardine)
In the gallery, a lightbox shows a photo of the corner of a prison cell, a work titled No, They Will Never Prevent Me To Love ... (Solitary Confinement) that is intended to bring the historical backdrop to the fore. Nearby, portraits of 10 young Belgian women are grouped on two walls. Wong painted them from his imagination based on the emotional power of their letters, following his artistic impulses. Made with Chinese ink, as well as acrylic and oil paints, the portraits seem peaceful. Yet, when you look more closely and read extracts of the letters on accompanying panels, you can almost hear, between the lines, the urgent whispers of love in their potent mix of pain and desire.
To further explore this century-old world, visitors can sit on the gallery floor and watch a 17-minute video, Insights from the History of Emotions (State Reformatory). This looping slideshow presents the original love letters, some written in an incomprehensible coded language of the women’s own invention. Delicate gifts exchanged between the women, they reveal intimate feelings and personal struggles.
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Lam Wong, “Billets Clandestines,” 2022
detail of mixed-media installation (courtesy the artist and Canton-sardine)
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Lam Wong, “Ghosts from Underground Love,” 2022
exhibition view at Canton Sardine, showing, on left, “Billets Clandestines,” (courtesy the artist and Canton-sardine)
As an extension of this video’s content, a wall installation, Billets Clandestine, invites visitors to consider an array of crafted objects, small souvenirs of love that Wong both reinterpreted and created from his imagination – hand-written love letters on the back of playing cards, crocheted sachets contributed by friends and his wife, strands of hair from various people, including his daughter. As a complex amalgam of sweetness and bitterness, this installation demonstrates the strength of love and the power of emotions, serving as a manifesto of bravery in dark times.
Lam Wong, “The Lacemaker III (1977), ” 2022
Chinese ink, acrylic and oil on wood panel, 36” x 60” (courtesy the artist and Canton-sardine)
Finally, there is Wong’s painting, The Lacemaker III (1997), which shows a woman with delicate fingers working on a piece of fine lace in a windowless room. An homage to The Lacemaker, a painting Dutch Baroque artist Johannes Vermeer completed in 1670, it also incorporates elements from the 1977 French film The Lacemaker, which portrays the love and suffering of a young woman. In Wong’s peaceful but suffocating painting, layered stories entwine like a rondo sonata, echoing the silent desperation the young women must have felt in the reformatory, where they were forced to work as lacemakers, their re-education through labour.
Wong, through his creative interlacing of art genres and subjects – both sophisticated and delicate – creates a beautiful and powerful show that reflects his compassion for human suffering and his desire for spiritual solutions, while also offering a tribute of love to his transgender daughter. ■
Lam Wong, Ghosts from Underground Love, at Canton-sardine in Vancouver from Sept. 10 to Nov. 26, 2022. Curated by Steven Dragonn.
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Canton-sardine
268 Keefer Street, Unit 071, Vancouver, British Columbia V6A 1X5
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