Xiao Han's Remembrance of (Racist) Things Past
Xiao Han, “The Restaurant: Yee Clun, White Women's Labour Law,” 2017
photography, 48” x 48” (permanent installation in Regina’s Art Park)
Xiao Han role-plays: she fictionalizes history. Her work is seductive and imaginative, but addresses trauma. She is the actor in photographic genre scenes that work as film stills for movies that haven’t been made. Her art direction is plush and nostalgic, replete with studied bric-a-brac and antediluvian fashion. While her beautiful Proustian memories combine with official history to affect her viewers, they never allow for settled conclusions. Instead, they produce what former German chancellor Helmut Kohl once voiced as his aspiration for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. He said Germans don’t need a denkmal, a monument; what they need is a denkpause, a thinking break.
Han’s latest work is a new twist on public memorials, and comes as a coy rebuff to the horsey heroics of 19th century commemorations: photographs, dress-up, performance. Her memorial pays tribute to Yee Clun, a restaurateur and prominent member of Regina’s Chinese community who, in 1924, challenged a racist law that effectively prohibited Asian men from hiring white women. Three of Han’s images, commissioned by the Lost Stories Project at Concordia University’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, with funding from Canada 150, are now permanently installed in Regina’s downtown Art Park. Although modest in budget and scale, her project points to a more integrated approach to the production of public art.
Fusing Cindy Sherman’s iconic appropriations, and the synoptic narratives of medieval paintings where the protagonist appears numerous times in the same scene, Han is a surrogate subject and plays multiple roles: the waitress, a bourgeois man (Yee Clun?) and, most provocatively, a bourgeois Asian woman (Clun’s wife?). The film set is a domestic interior, or maybe it’s Clun’s restaurant. The space is detailed with contemporary Chinese décor, illustrations of Chinese flappers and Clun family portraits. The actors are carefully choreographed in stylized poses and period costumes.
The bourgeoisie sit at a table, drinking tea and reading a newspaper, seamlessly montaged with stories pertaining to Clun’s court challenge. Only headlines are legible, but the stories were actually published in the Regina Morning Leader in 1924. They chronicle the pervasive racism and sexism that gave rise to the law, but a few also reveal a nascent egalitarian impulse that eventually saw it repealed in 1969, albeit 45 years later.
Public unveiling of Xiao Han’s work about Yee Clun and the White Women’s Labour Law, a permanent installation in Regina’s Art Park in August.
Photo courtesy Xiao Han.
Crucially, and so appropriate to this memorial, rooted as it is in a performative impulse, Han, who earned her Master’s degree at the University of Saskatchewan last year after moving from China in 2008, put high value on the personal relations she established with Clun’s descendants as she conceived and produced her work. Most of his daughters and grandchildren live in Vancouver, where she travelled to meet with them. Some 20 family members came to Regina in August to celebrate the work’s unveiling, with dancing dragons and a reception sponsored by the Chinese Cultural Society of Saskatchewan. While Han paid close attention to historical and aesthetic details, she used artistic license to perform in explicitly fictive, but carefully crafted evocations of her subject.
Her integrated approach to the commission is a model for the production of meaningful public art and memorials. It eschews the masterly voice, taps into imaginations and aspires to be both beautiful and a “thinking break.”
Nobody can predict the future public life of a work of art, but research that included listening to and investing in primary stakeholders has given this piece an auspicious start.
