Beyond Exclusion is Don Kwan’s first solo exhibition in Vancouver. Based in Ottawa, Kwan is a queer third-generation Chinese Canadian artist whose work is influenced by his upbringing in a family-owned restaurant in Ottawa’s Chinatown. He uses mixed media, found objects, and sourced personal text and photographs to explore questions of identity, belonging, and place, reflecting on his family history while weaving intriguing stories about the Chinese Canadian diaspora.

Beyond Exclusion brings together Kwan’s diverse body of work along with new site-specific installations. In the exhibition opening on July 28, Kwan will perform Altering the Flow of Exclusion to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his grandfather’s arrival in Canada from China through the port of Vancouver to Ottawa. Kwan’s brother, Edward, will host the opening as Ottawa’s legendary drag queen China Doll.

Don Kwan: Beyond Exclusion is presented by the Pride in Art Society (SUM Gallery) in collaboration with On Main Gallery and Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden as part of the Pride in Chinatown festival. The exhibition is curated by Debbie Cheung, Mark Takeshi McGregor, and Paul Wong. Don Kwan: Beyond Exclusion is generously funded by the BC Arts Council, City of Vancouver, and Deux Mille Foundation.

This exhibition is held on traditional, ancestral, and unceded lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.

I was born and raised in Suzhou, China. While traveling across the Pacific to Vancouver, Canada, I have experienced both peace and conflict. I brought with me those beautiful childhood memories and my deep Chinese culture.

I struggled to learn the Canadian culture in order to fit into this society. I realize my self transforming through space and time interweaved to produce complex configuration and individuality and identity. Like barrels of thread I brought to Vancouver, the threads then blended with my new home and western culture, creating something new inch by inch. These notions combine and overlap to form into different patterns and multiple layers, and finally become to my new transcultural identity.

The occupation of weaving as one of the important traditional industries in Suzhou was passed on from my grandma and mum to me. I apply this tradition into my contemporary art practice, creating a new format and meaning of weaving on canvases. My nineteen artworks presented in the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, modelled after the traditional Suzhou garden, brings the new possibilities and connection between two different cultures and two different regions.

This exhibition is held on traditional, ancestral, and unceded lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.

I was born and raised in Suzhou, China. While traveling across the Pacific to Vancouver, Canada, I have experienced both peace and conflict. I brought with me those beautiful childhood memories and my deep Chinese culture.

I struggled to learn the Canadian culture in order to fit into this society. I realize my self transforming through space and time interweaved to produce complex configuration and individuality and identity. Like barrels of thread I brought to Vancouver, the threads then blended with my new home and western culture, creating something new inch by inch. These notions combine and overlap to form into different patterns and multiple layers, and finally become to my new transcultural identity.

The occupation of weaving as one of the important traditional industries in Suzhou was passed on from my grandma and mum to me. I apply this tradition into my contemporary art practice, creating a new format and meaning of weaving on canvases. My nineteen artworks presented in the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, modelled after the traditional Suzhou garden, brings the new possibilities and connection between two different cultures and two different regions.

This exhibition is held on traditional, ancestral, and unceded lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.

Inspired by childhood memories of watching her mother weave in their home in Suzhou, China, Xiangmei Su’s exhibition Intangible Thread – Part 1, uses the traditional medium of thread to create contemporary works that explore questions of identity, migration and modernity.

“My sixteen paintings and one installation showcase weaving as an important traditional craft that has dramatically changed over time and space in my hometown of Suzhou. This change is mirrored in the constantly shifting lives of people as a big wave of outward migration impacts Suzhou, and all of China. I, as one part of this migration, face the new challenges in a new country, and start questioning myself: who I am.”

This exhibition is held on traditional, ancestral, and unceded lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.

Look Towards the Sun is an artistic exchange between Lam Wong, a Chinese Canadian diaspora artist from Hong Kong and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, an artist of Cowichan and Syilx First Nations ancestry. All living beings and spirits are interconnected. We reside under the same sun. Creating reflection and dialogue on environmental concerns and the interconnectedness of place, people, and culture is at the essence of this exhibition.

Yuxweluptun’s bold paintings unreservedly celebrate and assert Indigenous ways of living and being. His work shines a powerful light on Indigenous title, rights, and sovereignty on unceded territories.

Wong’s expressive paintings and contemplations as an immigrant shape his practice as the artist-in-residence at Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden. This show includes a personal response to the horrific findings of the remains of 215 children buried at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, the school that Yuxweluptun is a survivor of.

This exhibition is held on traditional, ancestral, and unceded lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.

Rivers Have Mouths, is the first of two art exhibitions from the public art program: Solidarity, which brings together local Indigenous and Chinese Canadian Artists.

It focuses on intergenarational dialogue and public education on wellbeing and recovery through art, history, knowledge and culture.

Presented by Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, Rivers Have Mouths was born out of a desire to call attention to our interconnected histories and lived experiences on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh-ulh Temíx̱w (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ təməxʷ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.

The complete list of artists is: Kelly Cannell – ʔəy̓xwatəna:t, Angela George – qwənat, Rick Harry – Xwalacktun, Laiwan – 朱麗雲, Sarah Ling – 凌慧意, Lam Wong – 王藝林 and Cease Wyss – T’uy’t’tanat

Visit the website here

Gardens are universal, but why do we actually create them? According to Glenn Lewis, gardens perhaps evoke a utopian ancestral memory of a time when we lived in caves, surrounded by primeval forests. Gardens allow us to put aside “the world of red dust” (our troubled and deluded minds) and become free and focussed in the natural world. Gardens are humankind’s first home, our primeval place in nature. Like the mythical Garden of Eden, which houses both the tree of knowledge and the tree of enlightenment, gardens in their ceaselessly changing seasons remind us of life’s impermanence and the endless cycle of birth and death.

Luminous Garden, the third art exhibition organized and presented by Lam Wong during his year-long artist residency at Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, investigates the concept of the garden as a sanctuary for spiritual growth: a place to connect to nature and arouse enlightenment through contemplation and meditation. The exhibition features a collection of garden photography by Glen Lewis and Lam Wong, coupled with ceramic tea wares by Lewis.

Originally from China, Xiangmei Su is a multidisciplinary artist who uses the mediums of painting, photography, installation, and video to explore questions of the relations between cultural, natural, social and individual spaces.

Su has exhibited several solo and group shows in both China and Canada, including solo exhibitions at the Changshu Art Museum in China and the Seymour Art Gallery in North Vancouver.

Su was also the host of a Tedx Talk in 2020, where she discussed her experience in moving to Canada and rediscovering herself as an adult in a new country, surrounded by an unfamiliar culture and language, and how this experience has inspired her art.

Programming:

Winter Exhibition | Intangible Thread – Part 1 

Spring Exhibition | Intangible Thread – Part 2

Lam Wong is a Canadian visual artist, designer and curator. His interest is primarily rooted in regional West Coast art history, with an emphasis on the development of painting and its avant-garde narrative. Lam’s creative approach is often concerned with blending Eastern philosophies and challenging the notion of painting.

After immigrating from Hong Kong during the 1980s, Lam studied design, art history and painting, both in Alberta and British Columbia. He is currently practicing painting and tea related artwork as his main media.

Lam and the Garden most recent collaborations were in: Chaji 茶寂,  his first exhibition that celebrated tea, as a gathering where people could come together to appreciate the beauty in the simple things of life. And also, for the exhibition Investigation of Things 格物, where he participated as a curator. Investigation of Things focused on how two different cultures observe, study, and understand individual items and objects, and how they fit into the world around us.

Lam sees art making as an on-going spiritual practice. His main subjects are the perception of reality, the meaning of art, and the relationships between time, memory and space. Lam has lived and worked in Vancouver BC since 1998.

“I want to create layers of meaning, not just by building relationship, making connection and creating dialogues of the art works, but also by bringing alight the invisibles, the gaps or intervals, and the mystery. It is achieved by expanding the dimension of time and space in my works.”

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). paulwongprojects.com

身在唐人街/Occupying Chinatown was Paul Wong’s year-long artist residency at Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden that launched in Spring 2018. Wong created a series of multidisciplinary artworks based on 700 letters in Chinese sent by 90 writers to his mother, Suk-Fong Wong.

His residency evoked memories and loss for the generations of Chinese-Canadians who built a community within a segregated Chinatown. Occupying Chinatown featured collaborative contemporary works of art with various artists, engaging visitors and community with diverse programming, workshops, performances, events, and a book.

Programming

Spring exhibition | Ordinary Shadows, Chinese Shade

Summer exhibition | 鹹水埠溫哥華/咸水埠温哥华/Saltwater City Vancouver

Summer event | Pride in Chinatown

Fall exhibition | 媽媽的藥櫃/Mother’s Cupboard

Winter exhibition | 淑芳你好嘛/Suk-Fong, How Are You?

Occupying Chinatown was a public art project commissioned by the City of Vancouver Public Art Program in partnership with Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden. With support from the Audain Foundation and the British Columbia Arts Council.

Started in 2017, the Artist-in-Residence Program is a key component of the Garden’s cultural programming. It invites artists to use the Garden as inspiration to curate exhibitions hosted within the various rooms and courtyards of the facility, and provides them with the opportunity to showcase their works to an international audience.

Currently, the residency period consists in one artist (or artist collective) per year. However, to better facilitate greater exchange among local and internationally based artists, the residency period will be shortened going forward. Beginning in 2021, each residency will be for a period of six months. Two exhibitions can be held within each residency term, and resident artists are permitted to collaborate with other artists for their exhibitions. If applicants believe six months are not enough, they could apply for two terms in the application.

We encourage the Artist to be creative in their thinking and make full use of the Garden and our exhibition space in their art; however, works must refrain from touching on topics regarding politics or nudity, and cannot incur risk of damaging the fragile and special infrastructure of the Garden.

For more information about the program and ways to get involved, or to contact us about a potential collaboration, reach out to us today.