Book Launch: Ghosts From Underground Love

Book Launch: Ghosts From Underground Love

Lam Wong

Saturday, November 4, 2023

4 – 6 PM

Centre A

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No registration required.

Join us at Centre A for the official book launch of Lam Wong’s Ghosts from Underground Love. The book launch will include an artist talk and in conversation with Lam Wong and Rhys Edwards. 

Proceeds to support Centre A and Canton-sardine.

Lam Wong’s solo exhibition of the same name, Ghosts From Underground Love, at Canton-sardine features a series of all-young female portrait paintings that Wong has started working on during his Griffin Art Projects residency in summer 2019. His new works depict the powerful emotions of bravery, passion, love, desire, fear, and hope of young women concealed in the underground network of secret lover letters during their prison times under authoritarian surveillance, institutional oppression, and unjustified punishments.

Focusing on his concern for love and suffering, two fundamental conditions of human existence, Wong is again turning his attention to investigating the constructs of emotion and trauma. Inspired by and based on Laura Nys’ research on “Emotional Refuge” and the love letters of juvenile delinquents during the early 20th century in Europe. These are portraits of young lost ghosts, tortured by love, scarred and burned, undimmed by courage, forgotten… now eternally immortalized.

The book will be available for purchase for a special discounted price of $50 (Regular Price: $55) 

Details about the book: 

• Hardcover, 144 pages, full colour
• Texts by Dr. Laura Nys, Rhys Edwards, Steven Dragonn, and Lam Wong
• Published by Canton-sardine 
• Limited edition of 300

This project is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

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Lam Wong (b.1968, in Xiamen, China) is a visual artist and curator who immigrated from Hong Kong to Canada during the 1980s and studied design, art history and painting in Alberta and British Columbia. Wong works with painting, installation and performance to engage with themes such as the perception of reality, the role of art and the relationship between time, memory and space. He sees artmaking as an ongoing spiritual practice and his work draws upon his knowledge of Western art history and his interest in Taoism and Buddhism. Wong’s creative approach is often concerned with blending Eastern philosophies and challenging the notion of painting.

Lam Wong has been based in Vancouver, BC, on unceded Coast Salish territories since 1998. He has recently exhibited his work and performed at Campbell River Art Gallery, Canton-Sardine, Centre A (Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art), Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, Griffin Art Projects, Unit 17, Western Front, Walter Phillips Gallery, and Vancouver Art Gallery.

Rhys Edwards is an artist, writer, and curator. His writing has appeared in Canadian Art, The Capilano Review, C Magazine, and BC Studies. He graduated with a degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of British Columbia in 2014, and he lives and works in Vancouver, BC, on unceded Coast Salish territories.

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.