At Sun Yat-Sen Garden

Occupying Chinatown
鹹水埠溫哥華/咸水埠温哥华/Haam Sui Fow Wun Goh Wah
July 13 to September 23, 2018

OCCUPYING CHINATOWN is Paul Wong’s year-long artist residency at the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden that launched in Spring 2018. Wong will be creating a series of multidisciplinary artworks based on 700 letters in Chinese sent by 90 writers to his mother Suk-Fong Wong.

This residency will evoke memories and loss for the generations of Chinese-Canadians who built a community within a segregated Chinatown. OCCUPYING CHINATOWN throughout the seasons will feature collaborative contemporary works of art with various artists, and will engage visitors and community with diverse programming, workshops, performances, events, and a book.

The first new site-specific work to be created as part of this residency is 鹹水埠溫哥華/咸水埠温哥华/Haam Sui Fow Wun Goh Wah (Saltwater City-Vancouver). These two text pieces acknowledge Chinatown’s Toisanese settlers, and are presented at the Garden: one “wooden” and the other neon.

In addition, there is an exhibition of LAIWAN’s film Movement for Two Grannies: Five Variations in the Scholar’s Study. This piece features two Chinese grannies engaged in a moment of intimate and affectionate friendship. Paul Wong has been creating daring work for over 40 years, pushing the boundaries of conventional cultural stereotypes and art. He has produced large-scale interdisciplinary artworks in unexpected public spaces since the 1970s. His work subverts stereotypes in form and content. Many works are bilingual and trilingual, meshing English, Cantonese and Mandarin codes. Works include: Ordinary Shadows, Chinese Shade (Cantonese and English) (1988); Chinaman’s Peak: Walking the Mountain (1992); Blending Milk and Water: Sex in the New World (1996); Widows 97 (1997), Wah-Q: The Overseas Chinese (1998) and Refugee Class of 2000 (2000). www.paulwongprojects.com

OCCUPYING CHINATOWN is a public art project commissioned by the City of Vancouver Public Art Program in partnership with the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden. With support from The Audain Foundation.

In Chinatown Today

Mobile Barnacle City was mentioned in Vancouver Chinatown Today news! Thanks Louis Lapprend.

Installation of Mobile Barnacle City

On April 14, 2018 we installed Mobile Barnacle City on location at Quebec Street at Keefer Street. There is something about the brave adventurousness, hearty support and enthusiasm of young artists that really warms my heart! Taking over the street to install sculpture. Many thanks to Emilie Grace Lavoie for creating the beautiful, quietly glittering barnacles, volunteers Melina Querel, Hannah Doyle, Jack Kenna, and Mae Stark for the hard work of installing the sculptures, and Leah Weinstein for continuing vision with the SiteFactory project.

For more information please visit the MOBILE BARNACLE CITY webpage.

Mobile Barnacle City Live/Work Studio

My upcoming project Mobile Barnacle City Live/Work Studio is a temporary site-specific installation at the intersection of Keefer and Columbia Streets in Chinatown, Vancouver, with SiteFactory / Leah Weinstein, featuring barnacle sculptures by Emilie Grace Lavoie.

Opening reception and open salon on SUNDAY APRIL 15, 2018 2:00pm­‐5:00pm
Location: Quebec St at Keefer St (South West side)
Installation runs from April 15-29, 2018.

Located within the SiteFactory bus at a contentious site of ecological transformation, historical and cultural significance, and development pressure, Mobile Barnacle City Live/Work Studio examines conditions of displacement and disparity where Chinatown meets North-East False Creek. The intersection of Keefer and Columbia Streets points to where water of False Creek used to flow under the Georgia Viaduct reaching up to the Sun Yat Sun Gardens, now covered by Andy Livingstone Park and the surrounding development.

Over the course of two weeks Mobile Barnacle City Live/Work Studio will be hosting FREE open salons with refreshments including: "Luq’luq’i : a herbal lounge" with T’uy’t’tanat - Cease Wyss & Anne Riley.

The Mobile Barnacle City School will offer four FREE seminars:
• Imagining l’avenir — what is to come and a possible Chthulucene
• Indigeneity and decolonial mobility
• Strategies to counter artwashing and gentrification
• Remembering Chinatown (with guest Chipper John Mah, who as a boy was featured in the CBC 1956 film Summer Afternoon)

Schedule and registration for seminars here: RSVP
Volunteer to help: email <mobile.barnacle.city@gmail.com> (Subject line: Volunteer)

Thanks for additional sponsorship from Artspeak Gallery, Vancouver, the East End Food Co-op, and support from the Goddard College Faculty Development Fund, Plainfield, VT.

Mobile Barnacle City Live/Work Studio is part of Ten Different Things. Curated by Kate Armstrong, the series is a collaboration between CityStudio Vancouver, and Living Labs at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and supported by the City of Vancouver Public Art Program. It features new commissions launching Spring 2018 in Vancouver where artists were invited to create new works in the spirit of free inquiry at the intersection of public art, community engagement, and civic process. Projects are temporary and take a variety of forms—events, installations, residencies, interventions, workshops—and provoke new visions of art and civic life. How can we create structures, processes or dynamics to produce new ways of living in, interacting with, or occupying the city? Where are the intersections in public life where artists can produce alternate outcomes?

Artists: Colleen Brown, Instant Coffee, Laiwan, Khan Lee, Holly Schmidt, Henry Tsang, Janet Wang, Casey Wei, Jen Weih, and Denise Holland and Pongsakorn Yananissorn.

Find more information about upcoming Ten Different Things events on Facebook.

Update to Interdisciplinary Collaboration with UBC's Department of Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric Sciences (EOAS)

Images: December 2017 presentations by the directed studies students in our work together at EOAS, UBC.

We are into a new semester and I continue to work as artist-in-residence with the research materials generously developed by directed studies students — Hannah Avenant, Elias Braunstein, Lutairan Chen, Isabel Jankowski, Katarina Kusa, Dorothy Yan — led by Dr Tara Ivanochko and assisted by Dr Michael Lipsen at UBC's Department of Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric Sciences (EOAS).

It is exciting to be working in collaboration with Dr Ivanochko as we continue to engage in art - science exchanges toward the public art project slated for Fall 2018. Stay tuned for more to come soon.

At the Belkin Gallery, UBC "Beginning with the Seventies: GLUT”

Runs from January 12 to April 8, 2018

The Readers Respond: Wednesdays, January 24, February 14, March 14 and Friday, April 6, 2 pm
Symposium: Groundhog Day Redux: Friday, February 2, 3-6 pm
Lecture: Maura Reilly: Friday, March 2, 5:30 pm
Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon: Saturday, March 10, noon-5 pm

Celebrating the excessive abundance of the archive, Beginning with the Seventies: GLUT is concerned with language, depictions of the woman reader as an artistic genre and the potential of reading as performed resistance. 

Many thanks to Lorna Brown and the Belkin Gallery, UBC, for including my works in this fascinating exhibition that worthily revisits the significance of reading and rereading within the archives.  Installed are an early version of she who had scanned the flower of the world...  (1987+) , along with drawing collages The Senseless Series: Treasure Island and The Heartless Series: Little Women (1996), along with the assemblage The Blind Heart: A Book Fan (1996). All live in the Belkin Gallery collection. 

Thanks also to Owen Sopotiuk and the Belkin Gallery preparators for the lovely install.

Photo: Anne Riley

ECU's 88 Artists from 88 Years | An Alumni Retrospective

Sorry I was away for the big ECU new campus reveal and the reception for the Alumni Art show "88 Artists from 88 Years | An Alumni Retrospective".

For those of you wondering what those two small slide mounts on the wall are — either was submitted to accompany a giclee print, one for the surface scan and one for the transparency scan for each slide. For your curiosity here are the images. They are from the ongoing project she who had scanned the flower of the world...  I couldn't imagine how 88 artists would be fitted into the new concourse. Nevertheless, thanks and acknowledgements to the organizers Jonathan Middleton, Cate Rimmer, and Chelsea Yuill, with Susanna Browne and Kathy Slade for putting the show together.

And BIG thanks to the gardener, Steve Bridger, who submitted this set of original flowers for my ongoing giclee print series. Thanks also to Goddard College Faculty Development Funds for financial assistance toward the printing of the giclee series.

I am also pleased that for the first time, I am in a show with my nephew Tom Chung, also an ECU alum. We should try to show together more often, Tom!

Interdisciplinary Collaboration with UBC's Department of Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric Sciences (EOAS)

Laiwan is developing a public art project, working in collaboration with the Department of Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric Sciences (EOAS) directed studies students at the University of British Columbia led by Dr. Tara Ivanochko, Director of Environmental Science. Laiwan will be researching interdisciplinary approaches and opportunities to bridge the arts and sciences with the EOAS starting September 2017 until May 2018. More information to come soon.

As one of the largest and most diverse Earth science departments in the world, UBC’s Department of Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric Sciences (EOAS) is an international leader in both research and teaching innovation. EOAS researchers together with undergraduate and graduate students investigate processes happening at Earth’s surface, within its interior, atmosphere, and ocean, as well as processes happening on other terrestrial planets. EOAS instructors utilize cutting-edge, evidence-based pedagogy in the classroom, spearheading the University-wide initiative to improve undergraduate science education. The department’s main outreach hub, the Pacific Museum of Earth, showcases EOAS’s commitment to engage and educate the public on a myriad of Earth science phenomena.

Talk at Foreshore, Other Sights

Thanks Jen Weih, Barbara Cole and Other Sights for inviting me to present alongside with Will Plowright for the Foreshore series. I loved the interdisciplinary expansiveness of the programming and the resulting discussions, and big thanks to the friendly and engaged audience! Till again soon. 

[Photos by Anne Riley]

The Foreshore | Session 15
Laiwan with seagrass, jellyfish and dying stars &
Will Plowright on his research with insurgents
Tuesday May 16, 7pm
The Foreshore
Other Sights at Access Gallery
222 East Georgia, Vancouver BC
 
Please join us for two short presentations followed by discussion.
In an approach to decolonization in tentacular thinking, an approach to staying with the trouble, making oddkin, and in a pitch darkness cast by the Enlightenment, Laiwan will speak nearby with recent research navigating creative practice that is, where and what is, distinct from human exceptionalism and instrumental logic.

Plowright will discuss his work with armed groups (some labelled ‘terrorists’), and the attempts to come to an understanding of them as human beings, rather than as monsters, criminals or deviants.

Cease Wyss & Patrisse Cullors at MFAIA Residency

As a faculty member of the Goddard College MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts, I had the pleasure to learn collectively with our community and our Spring 2017 Residency Guest Artists Cease Wyss (Ceremonial Activist, artist and member of Idle No More) and Patrisse Cullors (artist, activist, and Black Live Matter Co-founder) in March at Fort Worden, Port Townsend, WA. Cease and Patrisse worked with us for a week exploring the Residency theme "What is Enough and When Enough is Enough: Contemporary Activism, Well-Being and the Practice of Art". A rich and nourishing week it was! Thanks Cease and Patrisse!

Tentacular Thought and Creative Practice at ECU

It is my pleasure to be teaching a HUMN 311-S004 class at the Emily Carr University this Spring 2017 semester: Tentacular Thought and Creative Practice
This course examines how to expand perception and consciousness for artistic practice informed by contemporary conditions in the world. Shifting away from bracketed thinking that evolved through Cartesian philosophy, this course will instead guide and nurture skills in how to discover an embodied abundance in the world rooted in a practice of deep listening to phenomena. How do we develop sustainable and resilient practices in perception and consciousness aware of abundance and affective dynamics, rather than be propelled by dominating systems rooted in scarcity and panic? Tentacular thinking is a term used by Donna Haraway in her latest book “Staying With The Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene”. This course develops practices that investigate valuable proposals in creatively approaching the ‘trouble’ we face with agility, responsibility, and new possibility.

Thank you to the fabulous class of students for courageously participating in our experiments preparing for the Chthulucene.

Making waves for the Chthulucene

Summer Light

In the spirit of unconventional art practices — always bring your wind-up flash-light to help out as the sun goes down on the bus, SiteFactory: Mobile Art Platform, with Leah Weinstein. Thanks Joni Low for the photo.

Artists talk on unconventional practices

The wondrous view from my seat on the SiteFactory: Mobile Art Platform's bus, with artists talks by prOphecy sun, Jay White, and readings by Kristoff Steinruck and myself. It was a lot of fun, I liked sitting in the bus amid the changing evening sky, listening to thoughts on art and practice.

Look out for SiteFactory's forthcoming Indiegogo campaign that will help pay for installing a solar electricity supply — because yes, we did run out of juice for the projector with the small generator. Nevertheless, I loved sitting in the dark dusk of evening light and the beautiful city sky. Thanks to the attentive and engaged audience who came out to find the bus and to Leah Weinstein for SiteFactory: Mobile Art Platform.

SiteFactory: Mobile Art Platform — Artist Talks on Unconventional Art Practices

Join us for our first public event, an evening of artist talks with Vancouver artists: prOphecy sun, Jay White, Kristoff Steinruck, and Laiwan. SiteFactory's bus location is noted below.

Presenting Artists:
prOphecy sun is a Vancouver–based sound artist, performance artist, and media artist, whose work involves sound and movement in live performance, video and video installation. Her interdisciplinary performance practice threads together both conscious and unconscious choreographies, sound, and environment, to create exploratory works that invoke deep body memory and draw from an interior landscape of dreams.

Jay White's work is distributed and translated through oral tellings, multi-media installations, and virtual archives. Through performances and objects, remote or unseen areas become shared spaces, and people become implicated in reciprocal and embodied relations with the animate entities that surround them. Jay's work has shown worldwide and his films have won various awards internationally. He is sessional faculty at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

Kristoff Steinruck's artistic practice integrates installation, video, sculpture, photography, and performance. His work is influenced by an interest in nature and science, speculative fiction, film, and conceptual art. Based in Vancouver, his current artistic research is focused on technology obsolescence, mycology, and non-human subjectivity through the production of film and video works.

Laiwan is a Vancouver based interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator with a wide-ranging practice based in poetics and philosophy. Born in Zimbabwe of Chinese parents, her family immigrated to Canada in 1977 to leave the war in Rhodesia. Since 2000, Laiwan has been investigating embodiment through performativity, audio, music, improvisation, and varieties of media, along with bodily and emotional intelligence, so as to unravel and engage presence. Recent public commissions have also enabled her to focus on issues of urban development touching on poetic and philosophic themes related to current issues of the environment and built cityscape of Vancouver. She teaches at the MFA in Interdisciplinary Art Program, Goddard College, USA.

Location will depend on available parking on Friday July 8th.
The location will be EITHER:

385 Thornton Street (also called Prince Edward St on some maps) @ E 1st Ave (just off of Great Northern Way near the entrance of Equinox and Monte Clark Galleries)

or

Earl Finning Way (also called Earl Finning Pl), parallel to Great Northern Way, one street north, between Fraser St and Foley St, just east of the new Emily Carr University site.

This event is free and open to the public.

See FACEBOOK EVENT listing here

Granville & Robson Street installation shots

Here are a variety of shots of the Barnacle City installation sent in by a variety of folk. Thanks Dan Bull, Sharon Bayly, Anne Riley, Leah Weinstein and others for the photos.

Barnacle City Installed

At the corner of Robson and Granville Streets in Vancouver. We waited a while before Barnacle City played. The anticipation was a curious delight and then it unexpectedly came on. More photos of the other venues will be posted soon!

Barnacle City Event Page on Facebook

Barnacle City — The Movie is now installed at outdoor venues in downtown Vancouver, Canada! 

Venue: Robson & Granville St large LED screens
Additional venues include: the CBC Plaza on Hamilton St.; Telus Gardens on Georgia St.; the Terry Fox Plaza; the Vancity Theatre before each film screening and the Pacific Cinematheque, also before each film screening.

Visit the Facebook Event page here (click image):

SiteFactory's first dinner!

On June 3, 2016, the first bus warming dinner was held at Leah Weinstein's SiteFactory with the beautiful backdrop of Spanish Banks, and a glorious, fresh, 5-star vegetarian meal courtesy of Guest Chef Jason Feehrer. Be sure to check SiteFactory's website, under 'Submissions' to send in your proposals for activities with the bus!

Clematis in May

The month of May means clematis from my neighbour's garden — thank you, dear clematis, for "she who had scanned the flower of the world..."

Watched over by a young eagle

A great day on April 10, 2016, working with my cinematographer, effects director and collaborator John Fukushima, and blessed by a young eagle who hung about near us while we worked. I always enjoy working with John, and this project is for my tiny action summer blockbuster, a commission for the City of Vancouver, coming soon to a big screen somewhere near you.