Programs & Events
Programs & Events
Kick the winter blues with a pair of guilt-free shoes at Centre A’s Annual Shoe Party at John Fluevog’s beautiful Gastown location, while supporting public access to contemporary Asian art in Vancouver!
LOVE SHOES? SUPPORT CENTRE A WITH YOUR NEXT PAIR!
The only thing better than a great party is knowing that you’re doing good while having fun. That’s why Centre A is once again partnering with John Fluevog Shoes to throw a Shoe Party in style!
You’ll find tasty bites from local eateries. A cash bar featuring craft beer from Faculty Brewing, and two exclusive “signature tea cocktails” created for this event only — courtesy of Treasure Green Tea Company and Sons of Vancouver Distillery. Live performances from a mystery guest. And shoes, lots of shoes.
Enjoy John Fluevog’s gorgeous Gastown space with some of the best company in town. Best of all — 100% of all ticket and cash bar sales for the event, as well as 50% of all shoe sales will go directly towards Centre A’s 2019 programming.
We’d love to see you there!
Date: Wednesday, November 28
Time: 7:00-10:00PM
Location: John Fluevog Shoes in Gastown (65 Water St., Vancouver)
EXCLUSIVE OFFER
With this event only, you can sign up to be a Centre A member (regular $20) for 50% off! See option to purchase your discounted membership with your ticket below.
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.
October 24
Evening screening 7:00 — 8:30 pm
Centre A is excited to present a program of four films by Ho Chi Minh City-based artist and filmmaker Tuan Andrew Nguyen, including the Canadian premieres of The Living Need Light, the Dead Need Music (co-authored as a member of The Propeller Group) and My Ailing Beliefs Can Cure Your Wretched Desires.
As both a solo artist and a member of The Propeller Group, with Phunam and Matt Lucero, Nguyen’s work over the last two decades has explored migration, diaspora, and intersectional coalition-building between post-colonial peoples. For example, Nguyen’s 2008 solo work Letters From Saigon to Saigon takes the form of a long letter penned by Wowy, a young rapper based in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly known as Sai Gon), to the American rapper Saigon. Nguyen describes the work as “part fan-letter, part foreign diplomacy, touching upon the overlapping moments of pop culture, politics, and history.”
Another key concern of Nguyen’s work is Vietnam’s rapid economic growth and rise to “new Asian Tiger” status, meditating on colonial histories and indigenous belief systems hidden within twenty-first century Vietnamese modernization. The Propeller Group’s The Living Need Light, the Dead Need Music (2014), originally commissioned for New Orleans’s Prospect Biennial, suggests affinities between elaborate, multi-day Vietnamese funerary practices, which had been partially outlawed by previous Communist regimes and resuscitated after the state’s 1986 economic reforms, and the similarly carnivalesque character of New Orleans’s so-called “jazz funerals.” Nguyen’s two-channel solo film My Ailing Beliefs Can Cure Your Wretched Desires (2017) reflects on the irony that contemporary Vietnam’s reverence for animals has caused their overconsumption, which in turn has resulted in the extinction and near-extinction of numerous species. Posed as a Socratic dialogue between the spirits of the last Vietnamese Javan rhinoceros and Hoan Kiem turtle, the film brings together conspicuous consumption of rare animal meat, the recently-wrought belief that rhino horn can cure cancer (which appeals to the wisdom of Traditional Chinese Medicine but is nowhere to be found in its annals), and the symbolic importance of the film’s protagonist animals as totems for Vietnamese independence.
Also included are the short video work The Two Tuans (1998), created when Nguyen was an undergraduate student at the University of California, Irvine; and the music video for Wowy’s song “Ke Toi Do” (2017), which Nguyen directed and collaborated on.
Nguyen is a partner in TPG Films, a production firm that has served as The Propeller Group’s commercial shadow. In addition to working with artists such as Dinh Q. Le and the collective Superflex, and on various ad campaigns, TPG Films has also been a force in Vietnamese pop music, producing numerous videos for the country’s younger generation of musicians. TPG Films’s music video aesthetic has bled into Nguyen’s and The Propeller Group’s artistic work, and is especially visible in The Living Need Light, the Dead Need Music.
- The Two Tuans, 1998
- The Living Need Light, the Dead Need Music, 2014, co-authored as a member of The Propeller Group
- Ke Toi Do, 2017, co-authored with Wowy
- My Ailing Beliefs Can Cure Your Wretched Desires, 2017
This program will last approximately one hour and thirty minutes, including a short introduction to the artist’s work by new Centre A curator Godfre Leung
Please RSVP, as space is limited
Please note that Centre A is now located on the second floor of 268 Keefer Street
This screening will take place on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded Coast Salish territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations
TUAN ANDREW NGUYEN graduated from the Fine Arts program at the University of California, Irvine in 1999 and received his Masters of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts in 2004. He is a co-founder and currently board member of Sàn Art, an artist-initiated exhibition space and educational program in Sài Gòn, Vietnam. Nguyen has shown work in numerous film festivals and international exhibitions, and has works in the collections of the Queensland Art Gallery, Carre d’Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. He has received several awards in both film and arts, including an Art Matters grant in 2010. His work explores strategies of political resistance through rituals, the making of objects (both as testimony and as devotion), supernaturalism, and the impact of mass media on these moments of resistance. In his continual attempts at reworking the power dynamics of public space and mass media in general, he founded The Propeller Group in 2006, a platform for collectivity that situates itself between an art collective and an advertising company. Accolades for the collective include the main prize at the 2015 Internationale Kurztfilmtage Wintherthur and a Creative Capital award for its 2011 video project Television Commercial for Communism. The collective has been featured in numerous international exhibitions including the The Ungovernables (2012 New Museum Triennial), Made In LA (2012 Los Angeles Biennial), Prospect 3 (New Orleans Triennial 2014), and the 2015 Venice Biennale. In 2017, My Ailing Beliefs Can Cure Your Wretched Desires was presented at the Armory Show in New York and The Island at the Whitney Biennial.
Centre A will have a table at this year’s Vancouver Art Book Fair, taking place October 19th-21st! Please note that the gallery will be closed during the fair.
Our table will feature an array of books, catalogues, patches, posters from various local and international artists, writers, and collectives, including Trinh T. Minh-ha, Yoko Ono, Tom Cho, Jim Wong Chu, Shellie Zhang, Kendra Yee, Simon Grefiel, Jenny Lin, Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes, Sam Soon, Hae Jin, Shireen Ahmed, Alanna Reeves, Plum (Collective), Jia Sung, Haejin Park, Yellow Jackets Collective, and many more.
Our Curatorial Assistant, Shizen Jambor initiated Centre A’s participation in the fair, and with the help of Gallery Assistant Viola Chen, reached out to numerous artists and collectives based across Canada and the US. The resulting collection of books represents a polyphony of voices addressing an assortment of topics including the racist misrepresentation of MSG, colour theory’s relations to coloniality and imperialism, pop culture-grounded science fiction, poetry, expressions and explorations of queer, trans, non-binary identities, representation of Asian diasporic femmes, and the history of Vancouver’s Chinatown.
For more information about the fair, click here.
June 8-14
Artist talk June 8, 6:30pm
Centre A is pleased to present a newly reworked sound installation and accompanying artist talk by Brooklyn-based artist C. Spencer Yeh.
In Yeh’s Mei-Jia & Ting-Ting & Chih-Fu & Sin-Ji (2018), an ensemble of three computer-generated voices designed to emulate Chinese languages from Taiwan, Mainland China, and Hong Kong, read a fragmentary text written by the artist. Yeh’s voice joins this triad, attempting to mimic the input-output synthesis of vowels and consonants generated by text-to-speech protocols, which was inspired by the Chinese traditional performance art of vocal mimicry known as kouji, or “mouth skill.” The convergence of computer and human over phonemes enables the artist to evade any immediate obligation to meaning. This freedom from the semantic occasions a kind of indeterminacy that unsettles conventional dialectics between human and machine. In this realm of experimentation and ambiguity, the interplay of mimesis, language, and technology justifies the question, “Who is imitating whom?”
In conjunction with the sound installation, Centre A’s Shizen Jambor, Curator of Public Programmes, and Andrew Rebatta, Assistant Curator at the Museum of Chinese in America (New York), will co-moderate a discussion with artist C. Spencer Yeh on the sound installation’s situatedness and acoustic restructuring of the Sun Wah Centre mall—the new home of Centre A. The work on display will be used as a starting point to explore the past work of interdisciplinary artist C. Spencer Yeh, including the previous night’s live performance of his recent album “The RCA Mark II” (2018) at Deep Blue in Vancouver (details below). Additionally, the curators and artist will delve into the acoustic politics of the Sun Wah Centre, a small scale shopping mall established in Vancouver’s Chinatown in the early 1990s, where the main language spoken has been, and continues to be, Cantonese, mixed with usage of Mandarin. In consideration of this context, the discussion will reflect on the Sun Wah Centre as an environment of social conditions, exchange, and habit, and the new presence of Centre A within it.
Performance: “The RCA Mark II”
Deep Blue, 255 East Second Avenue, alley entrance
June 7th, 9pm
C. SPENCER YEH is recognized for his interdisciplinary activities and collaborations as an artist, improviser, and composer, as well his music project Burning Star Core. His video works are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix and he is a contributing editor to Triple Canopy and BOMB magazine. Yeh also volunteers as a programmer and trailer editor for Spectacle Theater, a microcinema in Brooklyn NY.
Recent exhibitions and presentations of work include “Shocking Asia” at Empty Gallery Hong Kong, “Two Workaround Works Around Calder” at the Whitney Museum NYC, “Modern Mondays” at MoMA NYC, “Sound Horizon” at the Walker Art Center Minneapolis MN, “The World Is Sound” at the Rubin Museum NYC, “Mei-Jia & Ting-Ting & Chih-fu & Sin-Ji” at MOCA Cleveland Ohio, “Closer to the Edge” in Singapore and “Crossing Over” in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, “The Companion” at the Liverpool Biennial 2014, the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, “Tony Conrad Tribute” at Atelier Nord/Ultima Festival in Oslo Norway, “Great Tricks From Your Future” at D-CAF in Cairo Egypt, and LAMPO at the Renaissance Society in Chicago IL.
In 2015 he was an Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room NYC, and was included in the performance program for Greater New York at MoMA/PS1. A new project on vinyl record, “The RCA Mark II,” was recently published by Primary Information.
ANDREW REBATTA is the Assistant Curator at the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), and has worked on exhibitions at community-based museums in New York, Chicago and Washington, DC. In 2017, he organized FOLD: Golden Venture Paper Sculptures, which featured artwork created by detained Chinese asylum-seekers. Andrew was also on the curatorial teams for Sour, Sweet, Bitter, Spicy: Stories of Chinese Food and Identity in America, and MOCA’s current exhibition Chinese Medicine in America: Converging Ideas, People and Practices. Prior to MOCA, Andrew worked for the Smithsonian Latino Center, Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum, and the National Museum of Mexican Art. In 2011, he was Curator-in-Residence at the Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City, and in 2013 and 2014, he organized programs for the annual New Forms Festival in Vancouver, BC.
May 16 to June 2
Opening Wednesday, May 16 | 5:30 to 8:30
Next Wednesday, May 16, we’re very excited to welcome Contemporary Musiking Hong Kong (CMHK) to Centre A for the presentation of a selected program from the Sound Forms festival, featuring works composed by Hildegard Westerkamp, Larry Shuen, Alex Yiu, Barry Truax, Remy Siu & Russell Wallace, and Vanissa Law. CMHK Artistic Director and Sound Forms curator Samson Young will be in attendance. Held last month by CMHK and Hong Kong Art Centre, Sound Forms was the first festival in Hong Kong to focus on multi-channel sound.
The program consists of 2 new commissions and 1 newly remixed piece by 3 Hong Kong composers, as well as 3 pieces by Canadian composers. The selected pieces fall under 3 themes: soundscape compositions based on field recordings; beatbox, rap, and rhymes made by electronically fragmented vocal patterns and heavily processed speech, which trace tenuous lines in space; and experimental additive synthesis changing the timbre of sound in a multi-channel setting.
Sound Forms is born out of the conviction that one of the most important features of auditory experience is its capacity to reconfigure space: the ephemeral destabilizes rigid structures. It aims to use focused listening to rekindle an ancient understanding of sound as colliding masses, as projection of carrying speeds and infinitely trans-muting forms; in turn, we might reimagine space as fluid, living, and resourcefully voluminous.
About Sonic Anchor:
CMHK’s Sonic Anchor is an experimental music and sound art concert series jointly presented with Hong Kong Arts Centre, which provides the cozy venue of McAulay Studio. Sonic Anchor brings curious audiences and adventurous artists together to enter into a conversation of mutual discovery and respect. It aims to be a playground for musical and sonic experiments.
In April 2018, CMHK presented a special series of Sonic Anchor – Sound Forms – a multi-channel sound festival. The week-long festival presented 5 new commissions, 21 international artists, 21 Hong Kong premieres, and 2 world premieres in 7 concerts and 6 exhibitions.
5:30 pm | Sammy Chien New Media Residency Presentation
Next Wednesday also marks the conclusion of the inaugural residency at our recently established Byron Aceman & Caron Bernstein New Media Gallery, located in Centre A’s new space on the 2nd floor of 268 Keefer St.
Sammy Chien, our current artist-in-residence, will be starting off the evening’s program with a presentation of the work-in-progress he has been developing at Centre A, a solo interdisciplinary new media performance piece called We(a)ves. This work will investigate migration, race and gender politics, transcultural identity, and spiritual philosophies, all articulated through Chien’s own performance language, which draws from digital technologies, audiovisuals, text, contemporary dance, and Qi Gong practices. We(a)ves will tell a story of life in Vancouver at the intersections of immigration, queerness, racialization, and mental illness.
Please note that this presentation has been rescheduled for Wednesday, May 16th and will no longer be taking place on Saturday, May 12th.
Sound Forms Composers
ALEX YIU SIU LUNG
Born in China and raised in Hong Kong, Alex Yiu is a sound artist, composer, and co-founder of Hong Kong Community Radio. Otherwise, Alex Yiu is also a DJ and music producer under the name ‘Alexmalism’. By immersing avant-garde musical materials and underground dance music elements, his experimental beats are the manifestation of his sound world.
As a sound artist, his artistic output concerns and experiments with the interpretation of language, power representation in music, and narrative poetics. His works reply on different medium, including video, sound, performance, visual collage, multimedia and etc. After completion of his first degree in Music Composition/ Production at the Hong Kong Baptist University, Alex obtained a MMus in Sonic Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2015.
BARRY TRUAX is a Professor Emeritus in the School of Communication (and formerly the School for the Contemporary Arts) at Simon Fraser University where he taught courses in acoustic communication and electroacoustic music. He worked with the World Soundscape Project, editing its Handbook for Acoustic Ecology, and has published a book Acoustic Communication dealing with sound and technology. As a composer, Truax is best known for his work with the PODX computer music system which he has used for tape solo works, music theatre pieces and those with live performers or computer graphics. In 1991 his work, Riverrun, was awarded the Magisterium at the International Competition of Electroacoustic Music in Bourges, France. Truax’s multi-channel soundscape compositions are frequently featured in concerts and festivals around the world. Since his retirement in 2015, Barry has been the Edgard Varèse Guest Professor at the Technical University in Berlin, and Guest Composer at the 2016 BEAST Festival in Birmingham, as well as similar events in Hamburg, Lisbon and Milan. He has guest edited two theme issues on soundscape composition for the Cambridge journal Organised Sound, and is co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Sounding Art.
HILDEGARD WESTERKAMP
Composer Hildegard Westerkamp focuses on listening, environmental sound, and acoustic ecology. At the beginning of her career she worked with R. Murray Schafer and the World Soundscape Project, is a founding and board member of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology and was long-time editor of its journal Soundscape. She has conducted soundscape workshops, given concerts and lectures, and has coordinated and led Soundwalks locally and internationally. Excerpts of her compositions appear in Gus van Sants’s films Elephant and Last Days and more recently she collaborated on the soundtrack of Nettie Wild’s film Koneline. Her newest composition Klavierklang for pianist Rachel Iwaasa had its world premiere at ISCM’s World Music Days in Vancouver, November 2017. In 2017, Hildegard’s ways of composing and listening were presented on CBC Ideas.
LARRY SHUEN LAI YIN graduated from The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts Honors in 2016, majoring in music composition and electronic music.
Shuen has a keen interest in music composition and a wide range of compositions. His music ranges from solo, chamber, electronics, choral, multimedia and orchestral works, which are premiered in the Hong Kong, Philippines and USA by various musicians, including Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, Michigan State University Chamber Choir, Jenga Percussion Ensemble, Ido Akov, RTHK String Quartet, Romer String Quartet and The Greeners’ Sound.
Currently, Shuen is pursuing a Master’s degree in creative media, and working across the fields of music, sound art and media art as a freelancer. He is also the conductor of The Greeners’ Sound, a local choral society in Hong Kong.
REMY SIU (b.1990) is a composer and new media artist based in Vancouver, BC. Recently, his work has involved the construction of automated and variable performance apparatuses that employ light, sound, software, and the body. He is interested in creating friction and stakes between the performer, the interface, and the system through the use of game mechanics and failure. His output spans chamber music, dance, theatre, installations, and audio-visual work.
He actively creates with Hong Kong Exile (interdisciplinary arts company) and Mahaila Patterson-O’Brien (choreographer), and has worked with Vicky Chow, Turning Point Ensemble, Quatuor Bozzini, Centre A Gallery, Pi Theatre, Theatre Replacement, the Western Front, and others.
His work has been presented internationally at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival (Vancouver), Sonic Anchor (Hong Kong), CanAsian Dance (Toronto), UNO Fest (Victoria), Sonic Boom Festival (Vancouver), Dancing on the Edge (Vancouver), Centre for New Music (San Francisco), Constellation(Chicago), Seattle International Dance Festival, Vancouver Art Gallery, The International Symposium On Electronic Art(2015 Vancouver, 2016 Hong Kong), and more. He has received a SOCAN Foundation Young Composers Award and an honourable mention in the Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music (2016).
Remy holds a BFA (Hons.) in composition from Simon Fraser University Contemporary Arts (Vancouver, BC) where he studied with David MacIntyre, Owen Underhill, and Barry Truax. He has also studied with Rodney Sharman and received lessons from Ken Ueno, Claus-Steffan Mahnkopf, Suzanne Farrin, and Detlef Heusinger.
He is currently the Artist-in-Residence for the Push International Performing Arts Festival with Hong Kong Exile, the Co-Artistic Director of Hong Kong Exile, and the Co-Director and Manager at the Gold Saucer Studio. During 2017-2019, he will be one of two Composers-in-Residence with the National Arts Centre Orchestra (Canada).
RUSSELL WALLACE is from the Lil’wat Nation in BC and is a traditional singer and contemporary composer. Wallace composed music for many soundtracks for film, theatre, dance, and tv productions. His credits include 1491, Wild Foods, Indspire Awards show 2017, Ernestine Shuswap gets Her Trout, and Ecstasy of Rita Joe. Wallace was the composer in residence for the Aboriginal Dance Program at the Banff Centre from 1996-2003 and is a founding member of the Aboriginal Writers Collective West Coast as well as the Artistic and Managing Director for EMUSE-Aboriginal Electronic Music Festival. Amongst many other jobs Wallace teaches at Simon Fraser University, Capilano University, and is the Cultural Coordinator at NEC Native Education College.
VANISSA LAW was born in Hong Kong and began her studies at the Hong Kong Baptist University in 2004, started out as a piano major and studied piano with Chinese composer Mr. Cui Shiguang. After graduating from HKBU Vanissa turned her focus towards electroacoustic music composition during her stay at Ball State University, Indiana, majoring in voice and music composition. Vanissa returned to Hong Kong in 2010 and obtained her PhD in 2017 under the supervision of Prof. Christopher Keyes.
Friday, April 27 | 3 pm
Centre A (2nd floor, 268 Keefer St.)
Next Friday, we are pleased to welcome you for a conversation with visiting artist Tiffany Chung here at Centre A. The event will consist of a 20 minute talk, followed by a question-and-answer/ conversation period with the audience.
Chung’s work engages with contemporary and historical experiences of conflict, migration, and urban change. Her practice includes cartographic drawings, videos, performance, and sculptures that have been presented around the world, including at the 2015 Venice Biennale, the Mori Art Museum’s 2017 Sunshower exhibition, and the 2018 Sydney Biennale.
This visit marks the beginning of a research project in which the artist will engage with Vancouver.
