Exhibition Title: Gone With the Wind
Curators: Steven Dragonn, Ho Tam
Artists: Harvey Chan, Dorothy Cheung, Samson Cheung, Jimmi Wing-ka Ho, Kitkit Para, Tung Pang Lam, Grace Y.M. Tang, Ying Chi Tang.
Date: 2024.06.08 – 07.27
Opening reception: 06.08 Saturday 2-5pm
Venue: Canton-sardine, #071 – 268 Keefer st, Vancouver, BC, Canada
5 years, it can be long, or it can be but a moment. For most people in this world, the past 5 years, though challenging to define, has mercifully remained familiar. Yet for others, it’s an epoch of change—a place, and a way of life that may never return, only drifting away with the wind.
The Hollywood film Gone with the Wind has a beautiful yet unrelated Chinese name in Hong Kong, called “亂世佳人”, meaning “beauty amidst turmoil.” This translation mirrors Hong Kong’s cultural ethos—the adaptability driven by local economic pragmatism. In essence, the reimagining of Western film titles into Chinese names, both easily understandable to Chinese audiences and poetically appealing is purely for the purpose of attracting viewers to the cinema, rather than being driven by nationalism or cultural autonomy. Unfortunately, this “uniqueness” is like the title, either fleeting with the wind or drifting to the right place to start anew.
Renowned Hong Kong pop culture scholar, Chua Lam, once said: “Living in a place for a long time, you establish what’s called a social network. Like the veins in a leaf, the people we know spread throughout society, relationships accumulated over many years. With just one phone call, you can find the help you need. Migrating halfway, these human relationships need to be rebuilt, which is indeed troublesome. This is the most inconvenient thing about going to a strange place.” Humans cannot halt change, only confront and adapt to it. As individuals depart and settle anew, what do they leave behind? What do they carry forth? What remains ours, and what must we relinquish? And how do we acclimate, absorb fresh knowledge, and hone new skills?
Co-curated by Steven Dragonn and Ho Tam, Canton-sardine presents recent works by Hong Kong diasporic artists Harvey Chan, Dorothy Cheung, Samson C.S. Cheung, Jimmi Wing-ka Ho, Tung Pang Lam, Kitkit Para, Grace Y.M. Tang & Ying Chi Tang. Their focus primarily centers on the tumult wrought by time, encompassing shifts in circumstance, language, sentiment, outlook, relationships, and aspirations, alongside the resilience amid displacement.
Artists’ bio and artworks description
Harvey Chan
Born in Hong Kong, Harvey Chan has been a professional illustrator, fine artist and art educator for many years. Harvey also taught at many art and design institutions in Toronto including his alma mater, Ontario College of Art (Now OCADU). In 2011, he returned to Hong Kong, establishing Art For Life Studio. Since moving to Vancouver in 2021, Harvey has been focusing on his personal works and exhibitions.
Harvey’s collection of on-location drawings was created amidst the protests against the implementation of national education and occupation in Mongkok and Central during the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong in 2014. Utilizing an accordion format sketchbook, he aimed to capture the panoramic perspective of these events, imbuing them with a sense of scale and the passage of time. As both an onlooker, reporter, and participant, Harvey found this to be his natural expression as a visual artist amidst a social movement so deeply intertwined with his daily life.
Dorothy Cheung
Dorothy Cheung (b.1987) is a filmmaker and artist. Her practice explores the notion of identities and home through a double perspective – personal and political, memory and forgetfulness. Her moving-image works are selected for film festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Leeds International Film Festival, Seoul Women’s Film Festival, South Taiwan Film Festival and Queer Lisboa.
Be careful (of what you wish for) is a short essay film on journeys from one home to another through time, and in between fiction and truth.
Memory Palace is a moving image work exploring memories attached to the personal objects of ethnic Chinese people in Manchester. The work challenges conventional understandings of the Chinese community, questioning what it means to be an ethnic Chinese individual in this city and highlighting the great spectrum of identities beyond nationality.
Samson Choi Sang Cheung
Samson Choi Sang Cheung, from Hong Kong, initially explored art through playful mediums like sound performances and installations. After becoming a father, he shifted to creating narratives through videos and images, especially those related to his father’s role and new immigrant life. Before moving to Vancouver in 2022, Cheung participated in exhibitions and residencies in Hong Kong, Chicago, Kyoto and Taipei. He is pursuing an MFA at Emily Carr University of Arts and Design in Vancouver, Canada.
Home is a series of five photographs expressing the sentimental relationship in the artist’s family, and the being away from home in Hong Kong as well as settling down in Vancouver.
Learn how to walk is a six-channel video about perceived environmental adaptation from the artist as a newcomer from a tropical place to a northern state.
Jimmi Wing-ka Ho
Wing Ka Ho Jimmi, (b.1993), is a Hong Kong photographer who lived in the United Kingdom. His photography focuses on political, social, and immigration issues, using the ongoing changes in migration experiences and identity, which create a new language of memory. His latest project, “So Close And Yet So Far Away,” reveals the traces of Hong Kong’s history and vanishing memories, exploring how displacement and trauma shape individual consciousness and sense of belonging, as well as their connection to modern society. His works have been featured in The Photographers’ Gallery(UK), Hong Kong International Photo Festival(HK), the Kyoto International Photography Festival(JP), and he is also one of the recipients of the 2021/22 Royal Photographic Society Postgraduate Bursary(UK) and a nominee for the C/O Berlin Talent Award(DE).
Tung Pang Lam
Born in 1978, Lam Tung Pang shares the same experience with other Hong Kong artists who grew up in the 1990s, whose coming-of-age coincides with drastic social changes, a result of his homeland’s decolonisation from constitutional monarchy and new allegiance to China in a short span of time. Traversing between the media of painting, site-specific installation, sound and video, Lam’s works engage the themes of collective memories and fleeting nostalgia, which articulate an ongoing negotiation of the overlapping city-state’s reality. Lam currently lives and works in Vancouver.
Push, is a 4min video showing Lam Tung Pang pushes against the white wall with his body, each pushing attempt lasts around 1 min, 4 attempts are in total. Breath and sound are taken out, this silent video showing the body pushing the outer world as well as against himself, his body.
Kitkit Para
KitKit Para (b.1993) is an interdisciplinary artist born in Hong Kong, he received his Bachelor of Fine Art from University of Guelph in Canada, Para is currently pursuing his masters at Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn, Estonia.
This work is a collaboration between the artist’s mother and the artist. His mother has been working in a warehouse at the same company for over fifteen years after immigrating to Canada. And this is how she got her job and was forced to abandon her previous professional career in the design industry, because of zero working experience in Canada. Although it’s not a high-wage job, she has supported the artist and artist’s sister for many years. Para chose to collaborate with his mother on this project not only because she exemplifies the Niagara Dream as a female worker, but also because of the curiosity of the art her son created. Working together on this project giving her a chance to better understand what he does for a living.
Grace Y.M. Tang
Having grown up in Hong Kong, then pursued further study in England, Grace Tang was influenced by the differences of the two cultures and environments. Her works concerned the four basic elements of survival: Clothes, Food, Shelter and Mobility, looking from the perspectives of city and pre-historic times. Graduated from Goldsmiths College, University of London and University of Westminster, Grace Tang started making art from 2006 in Hong Kong. She is now based in the United Kingdom.
In 2019, Hong Kong had experienced a turbulent time, everyone was forced to think and ask questions, trying to figure out what was going on and also of our future, where Tang had never experienced before. Grace wanted to record this particular moment, so she started to make drawings about her questions, feelings and opinions, then resulting in this series of 24 drawings.
Ying Chi Tang
Obtained her bachelor’s degree in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College of the University of London in England, and master’s and doctoral degrees in Fine Art from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University in Australia respectively. Ying Chi Tang is an active arts practitioner who merged various roles as practicing artist, educator, curator and writer.
The series of paintings The Place (2020-2022) which was created after the social movement 2019 (Hong Kong protest) and during the pandemic period in Hong Kong to respond to the thinking of finding a better place to reside. It is an imagined landscape with references from Chinese landscape painting where multi-perspectives are composed in a way that viewers can walk in with their free will. It is also a reflection in the personal understanding that the ancient Chinese literati painters pursue their individual freedom spiritually by creating this type of Chinese landscape painting.
About the Curators
Guest curator Ho Tam (b.1962) is a visual artist and curator whose practice spans video, photography, graphic design, painting, and print media. His work has been exhibited in public and alternative galleries across Canada and internationally. As part of his art practice, Tam edits and publishes artist’s books. He is the founder and operator of several small presses, including hotam press, 88Books, and XXXzines. Tam’s work is concerned with mass media representations of race and sexuality. He is based in Vancouver, Canada.
Founder, Director and Curator of Canton-sardine, Steven Dragonn (b.1981 in Guangzhou China) is an interdisciplinary visual artist and curator beyond Conceptualist and Neo Hyper-real Pictorialist across Communicatics and personal visual experience. Specifically, ideological concern, political and social awareness in cultural geography are the main field where he’s working on, while several specific interests of Curatorial, such like individual experience, immigration of minorities, minor gender, identities, social political sufferance appeared in Dragonn’s studies. He is also based in Vancouver, Canada.
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