Charlotte Yao : “Let’s Go to America”
Curated by Steven Dragonn
Duration: May 24 – July 12, 2025
Opening reception: May 24, Saturday, 2-5pm
Venue: Canton-sardine, 071-268 Keefer st, Vancouver
Gallery hours: Weds-Sats 12-6pm
”Let’s Go to America” is inspired by a lie told by Charlotte’s paternal relatives when she was five years old, which led to her being taken away from her mother that night and sent to the home of another paternal relative in a different city. During this late-night journey, a random courtyard iron gate was pointed as the gateway to America, passing by in a flash.
Years later, Charlotte gradually realized the long-lasting impact of the trauma formed that night on her subsequent life. She searched online for various photos of courtyard iron gates and edited them, trying to recreate the fleeting “gateway to America” from that night. At the same time, she sifted through the archive of family photographs organized by her mother to seek for details and clues about that night. She revisited the city of her birth, wandering through locations that carried the fragmented memories of her childhood, and re-enacted that late-night journey. Through interwoven dialogues, memories, and field notes, the artist gradually unfolds an inquiry into the diasporic subjectivity.
As an immigrant, Charlotte’s family is a quintessential real-life example of what Jia Zhangke’s film Mountains May Depart (2015) depicts as the “Chinese-style triple jump”—from a small rural village in central China to a major Chinese metropolis, and then across the Pacific to North America. These leaps have shaped her unique perspective as both a woman and an artist, enabling her to develop a deep vertical understanding of Chinese society from its grassroots to the middle class, as well as a horizontal, cross-cultural awareness on a global scale. Drawing from this unspeakable experience, she delved into the intersections of gender through the lens of a diasporic Chinese woman.
About the artist
CHARLOTTE YAO is a Chinese-Canadian artist, curator, and researcher now residing in London, UK. Her practice focuses on decentration, presenting marginalised perspectives of female, migrant, queer and the disabled. Charlotte is pursuing her practise-based PhD at the University of Arts London. Intermediating between photographic imagery, moving image, and text, her research attempts to uncover narratives of Chinese feminist diasporic subjectivity through memories and cultural texts.
Her works have been featured in Capture Photography Festival (Vancouver, Canada, 2018), A4 Art Museum (Chengdu, China, 2020), West Bund Art & Design (Shanghai, China, 2021), Trinity Square Video (Toronto, Canada, 2022), Modern Fuel (Kingston, Canada, 2023), Triangle Space (London, UK, 2024). She is the recipient of the Peckham 24’s curatorial open call (London, UK). Her research thesis ‘Tail of the Real’ was published in the Holt journal of artistic research. She was a recipient of the Royal College of Arts New Photography Prize 2021(London, UK).
CANTON-SARDINE 