Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art

2024 Art+Feminism

Counter-Archives through the Practice and Hermeneutics of Care

Dr. May Chew

Saturday, March 9, 2024

12 – 1:30 PM PT

Zoom

RSVP HERE.

Centre A will be kicking off our 2024 Art+Feminism event series with a virtual presentation by Dr. May Chew that revolves around the history and practice of counter-archiving in Canada. As an Assistant Professor at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema and the Department of Art History at Concordia University, Dr. Chew’s research centers on diasporic media and archives, haunting, decolonial aesthetics, and critical genealogies of immersive technologies. Following Dr. Chew’s virtual presentation, participants will have the chance to ask questions and engage in thoughtful discussion as we reflect on alternative methods of knowledge preservation, memory, and networks of care.

We Should Talk: An Art+Feminism Reading Group

Co-Led by Carmen Levy-Milne and Diane Wong

Saturday, March 16, 2024

1 – 2:30 PM PT

Centre A (in-person)

No RSVP required.

Join Centre A for an in-person reading group to share and reflect on Marsya Maharani and Petrina Ng’s article, We Should Talk: Obvious Truths About Working in the Arts. As this year’s Wikipedia Edit-a-thon puts an emphasis on BIPOC led art institutions and grassroots organizations, in this reading group we look to the importance of these spaces and how alternate forms of display and communication (whether it be gossip, archives, artist-run-centers, and more) can build community care and networks of solidarity. Co-led by Carmen Levy-Milne and Diane Wong, this reading group will be structured using guiding questions to prompt productive discussion, where participants will then have the opportunity to share their thoughts and reflections with each other in the format of an open conversation.

 

Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon

Saturday, March 23, 2024

12 – 3 PM PT

Centre A (in-person)

No RSVP required.

Each spring, art communities around the world come together to help correct Wikipedia’s gender biases and improve the content of under-represented persons on the tenth-most-visited site on the internet. Centre A invites participants of all genders and expressions to be a part of this local and global effort.

We will be creating and editing Wikipedia pages for a diverse range of artists, artist-run-centres, and more. If you wish to attend, please bring an electronic device you can edit on. Refreshment and childcare* will be provided. 

Feel free to sign up for our Dashboard in advance to save time setting yourself up.

*If you require childcare, please email [email protected] by 11:59pm PT, March 15.


Accessibility: The gallery is wheelchair and walker accessible. If you have specific accessibility needs, please contact us at (604) 683-8326 or [email protected].

Centre A is situated on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. We honour, respect, and give thanks to our hosts.

Podcast: Pigeon, Seagull & Crow: Centre A Chronicles

Centre A is pleased to launch our inaugural podcast series, Pigeon, Seagull & Crow: Centre A Chronicles.

The series explores different pivotal points in our 25 years as an arts and culture institution, featuring 8 artists and curators with a wide range of practices that the organization has worked with since our inception in 1999: Hank Bull, Makiko Hara, David Khang, Gu Xiong, Paul de Guzman, Diyan Achjadi, Patrick Cruz and Lan “Florence” Yee. During these conversations, we focus not only on the practices of the selected artists, but also Centre A’s role within the evolving contemporary art scene in Vancouver and Canada, touching on topics such as community organizing in Chinatown, intergenerational connection, migration experiences and the changing cultural landscape within the Asian-Canadian sphere.

Listen now on Spotify or Apple Podcast, through the links below:

Episode 1: Hank Bull

Spotify

Apple Podcast

Transcription

Hank Bull was born at Moh’kins’tsis, Calgary and lives in Vancouver, on the traditional and unceded territory of the xwm??kw?y??m Musqueam, Sk?wx?wu?7mesh Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. His work combines various media, including painting, sculpture, photography, performance, music, video, publishing and curating. He has contributed to the development of artist-directed economies of exchange and produced numerous international projects. He was a co-founder of Centre A in 1999, where he continued in the role of executive director until 2010. During this time, he was responsible for the production of over 100 exhibitions, performances, and symposia, and supported the careers of such curators as Steven Tong, Sadira Rodrigues, Joni Low, Alice Ming Wai Jim and Makiko Hara.

 

Episode 2: Makiko Hara

Spotify

Apple Podcast

Makiko Hara is an independent curator, lecturer, writer, and art and cultural consultant based in Vancouver, BC. She received The Alvin Balkind Curator’s Prize in 2020. From 2007 to 2013, she was the Chief curator / deputy Director of Centre A —Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. She has worked with many visual artists on a variety of international projects as an independent curator, including: ScotiaBank Nuit Blanche, (Toronto, Canada, 2009), AIR YONAGO, Tottori Geijyu Art Festival (Yonago, Japan, 2014-15), Fictive Communities Asia-Koganecho Bazaar (Yokohama, Japan, 2014), Rock Paper Scissors, and Cindy Mochizuki, (Yonago City Museum of Art, Tottori, Japan, 2018). Hara was appointed to the Advisory director of the International Exchange Center, Akita University of Arts, Akita, Japan in 2017-2020. She is a co-founder of Pacific Crossings, BC based curatorial platform since 2018 that has initiated and organized numerous conversations, residency and online /offline cultural exchange across the pacific. Hara founded My Kitchen Anthropology Museum in 2020 in response to the Covid 19 Pandemic lockdown, and held Hank Bull and Marcia Crosby solo exhibitions. Recently she was a guest curator for Vancouver Art Gallery’s Offsite and curated Lani Maestro (2022-23) and Pedro Reyes (2023-24).  

 

Episode 3: David Khang

coming soon

David Khang’s practice is informed by education in psychology, theology, dentistry and law. Khang selectively borrows from these disciplinary codes to compose interdisciplinary languages in visual, textual, and spoken forms. By performing with his body in time-based installations, Khang interrogates social constructions of race, gender, and interspecies relations to re-imagine their poetics and politics.

Khang holds a BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design and MFA with Critical Theory Emphasis from UC Irvine. 

From 2005 – 2015, Khang taught at ECUAD and Goddard College, before pursuing legal education. Khang was born in Seoul, and lives on ancestral, unceded, and unsurrendered territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish, where he divides his time between art, dentistry, and law.

 

Episode 4: Gu Xiong

coming soon

Gu Xiong is a professor and multimedia artist at the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, UBC. He works with installation, painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, photography, video, digital imagery, text, and performance art. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, including more than sixty solo exhibitions and three public art commissions. He has participated in over one hundred prominent national and international group exhibitions. His works are represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the China National Museum of Fine Arts, and the Vancouver Art Gallery, among many other museums and private collections.

Gu’s practice centres on the creation of a hybrid identity arising from the integration of different cultural origins. Through the critical angle of visual art, his work encompasses the dynamics of migration, invisible labor, globalization, local culture, and seeks to create an entirely new identity.

 

Episode 5: Paul de Guzman

coming soon

Born in Manila, Philippines where he studied Engineering, Paul de Guzman immigrated to Canada in 1984 and resides in Vancouver. He continues his self-education in art by reading texts on art, theory and architecture. His artistic practice is governed by nomadic gestures and transient objects, characterized by a concept-driven approach across a variety of media. An important outcome of his current artistic investigation recognizes the role of language, architecture and urbanism as mechanisms for social control through the lens of social engagement and post-colonialism.

In 2010, de Guzman founded a virtual and itinerant museum called MAA – Museum for the Administration of Aesthetics. MAA is a research-based nomadic entity that documents our experiences of the urban environment through art and social engagement. Using relational and documentary strategies, MAA employs various methods to present an archive of social experiences and ideas pertaining to art, urbanism and personal pedagogy. MAA’s most recent iteration is the Youtube channel “Paul de Guzman presents … Art”, a social media platform that engages through multiple levels of artistic, pedestrian and critical dialogue. De Guzman has shared his work widely at conventional white cube venues but is fond of the unconventional ones.

 

Episode 7: Patrick Cruz

coming soon

Patrick Cruz creates installations that draw on aspects of diasporic experience, play and folk spirituality. He received the prestigious Thirteen Artist Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2021, was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2019 and won the RBC Canadian Painting Competition in 2015. Cruz is co-founder of two curatorial collectives. The Kamias Collective along with Toronto based curators Su-Ying Lee and Karie Liao and most recently Ben Flores Fan Club Collective with Vancouver based artist Christian Vistan. Cruz is a cross appointed Assistant Professor in Studio Art at the Arts, Culture and Media department at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Master of Visual Studies at Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

 

Episode 8: Lan “Florence” Yee

coming soon

Lan “Florence” Yee is a visual artist and cultural worker based in Tkaronto/Toronto & Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. They collect text in underappreciated places and ferment it until it is too suspicious to ignore. Lan’s work has been exhibited at the Darling Foundry (2022), the Toronto Museum of Contemporary Art (2021), the Art Gallery of Ontario (2020), the Textile Museum of Canada (2020), and the Gardiner Museum (2019), among others. They co-founded the Institute of Institutional Critique with Mattia Zylak in 2019 and the Chinatown Biennial with Arezu Salamzadeh in 2020. They obtained a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from OCAD U. Lan has been awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Council for the Arts, and the Toronto Arts Council. They are a recipient of the William and Meredith Saunderson Prizes for Emerging Artists (2023).

This project is generously supported the Community Arts Council of Vancouver and the Vancouver Heritage Foundation.

 

Chris Hamamoto and Federico Pérez Villoro: Unseen.Garden

Unseen.Garden

Project by Chris Hamamoto and Federico Pérez Villoro

Software development by Greg Monroe

Sound design by Tiger Dingsun

July 13 – December 15, 2023

Web-based project 

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Check out Unseen.Garden, HERE.

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This website compiles a series of stock-image timelapses displaying flowers blooming and decaying with auto-generated captions added to them by a custom-made program. Viewers can toggle between various stages in the machine vision model’s training progress as they are presented with a new plant every time the page is loaded. 

The project explores the intransferability of meaning between text and images and the reproduction of taxonomic orders in both stock imagery and machine vision. A technical reenactment of NeuralTalk, an early model designed to write sentences that describe images’ contents, this adaptation of it for contemporary computers exposes the limits of object recognition technologies — its inaccurate outcomes make explicit the unstable relation between images and their conceptual representations.

The ability for computers to segment and operationalize visuals as textual data marks a major shift in the role of photographs today. In the case of NeuralTalk, and this derivative, the algorithms over-identifies human forms due to their architecture and training datasets. By applying the software to images of plants in stages of transformation, this exploration makes cite of the anthropocentric mischaracterization coded into machines and the capabilities of computer vision when confronted with information that falls outside of a specific worldview.

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Artist Biography:

Chris Hamamoto and Federico Pérez Villoro’s collaborative work investigates the impact of emerging technologies in contemporary culture and politics. 

Chris is based in Seoul, South Korea and works as a designer and educator. He is an assistant professor at Seoul National University, and has taught at Rhode Island School of Design, California College of the Arts, and University of San Francisco. 

Federico is an artist and researcher living and working in Mexico City. In 2019, he founded Materia Abierta, a summer school on theory, art, and technology and has served as a faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design and the California College of the Arts. 

Chris and Federico have lectured as schools such as ETH Zurich, Rutgers University, CalArts, The New School, UNAM, KARTs, and Hongik University and their work has been exhibited, published and recognized by institutions such as Printed Matter, the Walker Art Center, OCAT Shenzhen, The Serving Library, Gwangju Design Biennale, IDEA Magazine, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

 

Poster design by Chris Hamamoto and Federico Pérez Villoro.


Accessibility: The gallery is wheelchair and walker accessible. If you have specific accessibility needs, please contact us at (604) 683-8326 or [email protected].

Centre A is situated on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. We honour, respect, and give thanks to our hosts.