Pa-pag-page

Pa-pag-page Publication Launch & Performances

Friday, November 2, 2018

Richmond Art Gallery (RAG)

7:00–9:00 PM

Readings and Performances at 7 PM

The papag will be installed from November 2nd-10th.

The Richmond Art Gallery is located in the Richmond Cultural Centre at 7700 Minoru Gate, Richmond, BC and is open Monday to Friday, 10AM-6PM
Saturday & Sunday, 10AM-5PM

This event takes place on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Musqueam peoples.

Christian Vistan’s installation, Papag, features a custom built 5.5 x 7’ papag, a Filipino bamboo daybed. It is accompanied by a sound work by Yu Su, which emanates from beneath the structure, and interweaves the sounds of mallets, gongs, and bamboo with field recordings from a mall and a Canto pop song. This score alludes to the papag’s construction and its original installation in a storefront reading room at Centre A, located within the Sun Wah Centre, a 1980s-style Cantonese mall in Vancouver’s Chinatown. At Richmond Art Gallery, Papag echoes a reminder of the social ambience and bustling activity of nearby malls and community hubs, such as the CF Richmond Centre and the Richmond Cultural Centre itself.

Occupying a liminal space adjacent to two galleries within the Richmond Art Gallery, the papag offers a place for pause. As a common seating structure, it gathers a public, offering a space for interactions, words, thoughts, and conversations. In the spirit of this assembly, Vistan and Centre A assistant curator Shizen Jambor invited artists and writers to contribute to a publication entitled Pa-pag-page, whose launch inaugurates the installation at RAG.

Over the course of its installation in Centre A’s reading room, Papag has emerged as a project that provides numerous platforms in support of various forms of expression. During the installation’s first month at Centre A, Vistan held a series of listening sessions guided by different artists. In these sessions, the contributing artists brought sounds or music to share based on a loose theme and attendees would respond with sonic contributions that they were reminded of while listening. Vistan describes his thinking on the project as a “propositional publication,” one comprising elements both tangible and intangible, from the conversations between the people seated upon the papag, to the contributions of writing and images included in Pa-pag-page, to the sounds and music shared at the listening sessions held upon it. The physical proportions of the papag reference the standard page’s 8.5 x 11” dimensions, reflecting Vistan’s assertion that the papag itself acts as a page—one that is constantly being written.

Pa-pag-page can be considered a physical manifestation of the ideas at play in the broader project, a platform in support of—and supported by—the papag itself. Its pages parallel the countless pages written only in the memories of those who have sat upon the papag. As a tangible vessel for ideas and expression, Pa-pag-page reflects the network of supports and communities comprising Papag, while considering the word “publication,” and the potential it holds for the making of publics.

On Friday, November 2nd, we will celebrate the launch of Pa-pag-page with readings and performances from four of its contributors: Yu Su, Stacey Ho, Simon Grefiel, and Christian Vistan.

This event is a collaboration with the Richmond Art Gallery and was developed with the help of Richmond.