Keefer St.mp3 & Centre A Tote Bag Launch

Friday, November 10, 2023

7 – 10 PM

Centre A

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Purchase your tickets for Keefer St.mp3, HERE.  

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We invite everyone to Keefer St.mp3 & Tote Bag Launch, Centre A’s end-of-year party that will be held simultaneously to our first-ever launch of our tote bags. Before we say our winter holiday goodbyes as we close our gallery for space renovations, we will be hosting a Y2K-themed party with our Tote Bag launch, where we have prepared a variety of throwback materials for you to customize your very own Centre A Tote Bag.

For the party, we also invite ticket holders to submit up to five of your favorite early 2000s music to contribute to the Keefer St.mp3 shared playlist that will be responsible for the tunes, all night long. 

For the tote bag launch, we will have a station where you can customize your tote bag with a range of patches, rhinestones, and markers to your liking. Regular tote bag price will be $30.  

There will be drinks, sangria, snacks, as well as a special Keefer St.mp3 cocktail that awaits. 

Keywords for dress code are: Y2K, 2000s, and throwback. 

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Sliding Scale: $15 – $25

Pay it forward: Create a donation to Centre A for an X amount of tickets. We’ll pool the tickets and provide it to individuals or organizations of your recommendation. (If you’re donating through CanadaHelps, please write a memo on the notes.)

Regular Cover: $25

Friends of Centre A: Free entry

Tote Bag Launch Price: $10 (includes customization material) 

All else, email us at [email protected], and we’ll add you to the list of pooled tickets, generously provided by our Friends and supporters.

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*Become a friend of Centre A today to have the cover fee waived! 

*Centre A Tote Bags will be available for purchase at the event.

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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.

// Liminal Futures // 

Curatorial Conversation 

Thursday, July 27, 2023

12 – 1:30 PM 

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No registration required. 

We would like to invite everyone to the public critique and discussion of Centre A’s current exhibition // Liminal Futures // with UBC CCST MA Candidate Diane Hau Yu Wong and Laura U. Marks.

Moderated by Erin Silver and Nuno Porto of the UBC Critical and Curatorial Studies MA Program, the public critique and discussion will be followed by an audience Q&A.

This program is presented in partnership with the Killy Foundation and the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies through the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory in collaboration with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at The University of British Columbia.

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Diane Hau Yu Wong (She/Her) is a Cantonese-Canadian emerging curator based on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish First Nations. She received her BFA in Art History from Concordia University and is currently an MA Candidate in the Critical Curatorial Studies program at the University of British Columbia. She is also the Programming Manager at Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and has curated exhibitions at espace pop, Art Matters Festival, Nuit Blanche, articule, and Centre A. She was the inaugural recipient of the articule x MAI Curatorial Mentorship in 2020/2022 and the 2020 Momus Emerging Critics Residency program.

Her curatorial practice and research are broadly based on the intersection between technology and new media art, predominantly focusing on the world-building possibilities of different iterations of Futurism, such as Afrofuturism, Indigenous Futurism, and Asian Futurism. She is particularly interested in examining the depiction of Asian bodies as cyborgs and non-humans in science fiction through Techno-Orientalism and the current development of Asian Futurism.

Laura U. Marks: I work on media art and philosophy, with an intercultural focus and an emphasis on appropriate technologies. My fifth book, The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. With Azadeh Emadi I co-founded the Substantial Motion Research Network. I founded the Small File Media Festival, and lead research on the carbon footprint of streaming media. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, I teach in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.

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Find out more about the exhibition HERE.

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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.

 

Film Screening of SuperNova & Artist Talk with Rah Eleh

Friday, August 11, 2023

2 – 3:30 PM PDT 

Zoom Webinar

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Register HERE.

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Join us via Zoom for a film screening of Rah Eleh’s SuperNova followed by an artist talk, facilitated by the curator of // Liminal Futures //, Diane Hau Yu Wong. The artist talk will be followed by a short Q&A period. 

SuperNova (2019, 14:50 min.) is a talent show parody that consists of seven characters the artist performs. The performers are Oreo, Fatimeh, and Coco and each of their acts examine issues of race and ethnic performance; Oreo performs a magic trick with a deck of white “race cards,” Fatimeh sings and performs a neo-orientalist ethnic identity and Coco performs a dance as a diasporic and hybrid subject. The talent show sets an ideal stage to critically examine race and ethnic performance. 

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Artist Biography: 

Rah Eleh is a video, digital and performance artist and a PhD candidate at the die Angewandte in Vienna, Austria. Rah’s work has been exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally at spaces including: Venice Biennale (ECC Palazzo Mora), Nuit Blanche (Toronto), Museum London, Carleton University Art Gallery (Ottawa), Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown, Massachusetts), Miami Art Basel, Nieuwe Vide (Haarlem, Netherlands), Pao Festival (Oslo, Norway), Kunst Am Spreeknie (Berlin, Germany), Kunsthaus Graz Museum (Graz, Austria), and Onassis Cultural Center (Athens, Greece). She has been the recipient of numerous awards including: Longlisted for the 2023 Sobey Art Award, Chalmers Arts Fellowship, several CCA, OAC and Toronto Arts Council grants, and a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship for her MFA and her PhD. She has been awarded several residencies including the Intergenerational LGBTQ Artist Residency (Toronto Island, 2019), Koumaria Residency (Greece, 2016), Studio Das Weisse Haus (Vienna, 2014) and the Artslant Georgia Fee Residency (Paris).

Diane Hau Yu Wong (She/Her) is a Cantonese-Canadian emerging curator based on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish First Nations. She received her BFA in Art History from Concordia University and is currently an MA Candidate in the Critical Curatorial Studies program at the University of British Columbia. She is also the Programming Manager at Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and has curated exhibitions at espace pop, Art Matters Festival, Nuit Blanche, articule, and Centre A. She was the inaugural recipient of the articule x MAI Curatorial Mentorship in 2020/2022 and the 2020 Momus Emerging Critics Residency program.

Her curatorial practice and research are broadly based on the intersection between technology and new media art, predominantly focusing on the world-building possibilities of different iterations of Futurism, such as Afrofuturism, Indigenous Futurism, and Asian Futurism. She is particularly interested in examining the depiction of Asian bodies as cyborgs and non-humans in science fiction through Techno-Orientalism and the current development of Asian Futurism.

Image courtesy of Rah Eleh.

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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.

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.

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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.

Dispatches from Bidong

Presented by Alvin Luong 

August 2, 2023

Multimedia (video and text) 

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In June, artist Alvin Luong visited Pulau Bidong, a small island in Malaysia that formerly hosted thousands of Vietnamese refugees in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The crowded refugee camps on Bidong once made the island one of the most densely occupied places on earth. Today, few traces remain of the camps on the paradise-like island.

Over the course of the summer, the artist will share a series of reflections, images, and recordings related to Pulau Bidong. This project builds on the artist’s practice of creating artworks that reflect upon historical development and its intimate effects on people’s lives.

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Dispatch #1/6 from Bidong

 

 

In June 2023 I visited Pulau Bidong, a small island located off the east coast of the Malaysian mainland. The island once hosted tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees who had fled Vietnam towards the tail end of the America-Vietnam War (1955-1975) and its aftermath. I was drawn to the island because my father was among one of the refugees who lived on Bidong. I have created artworks, like “Hole Story” (2023) and “Ration Market Special” (2022), by reinterpreting my family’s oral history of surviving the War to anticipate how people in Vietnam may fare in a future severely impacted by climate change. Building off of this trajectory my trip to Bidong is a next step to form the conceptual foundations for new artworks. Little information can be found about the history and contemporary state of this significant site. So I hope that these reflections may provide elucidation for others interested in Bidong and also give insights into how I process the world through my practice. These reflections of primary research stem from oral histories shared to me by my tour guide Alex, from my own experiences traversing through Bidong, and cross references with my father’s experience living on the island.

The first wave of refugees had originally arrived on the Malaysian mainland by the port town of Merang and its surrounding sea shores in the state of Terengganu. By 1978, the number of refugees arriving to Malaysia had grown dramatically which led the Malaysian government to relocate the refugees to Bidong and to allocate the island as a sanctuary zone for further incoming Vietnamese. The refugees lived on the island from months to years to find sanctuary in other countries through humanitarian immigration and asylum programs. These countries included Australia, Canada, and the United States of America. Life on the island was partially self-sustained through the labour of the refugees themselves to build and maintain the camps using materials like wood that was scavenged and extracted from the forested mountain of the island. More robust materials needed to fabricate the camps such as metal, concrete, stone, and pipes were imported from the Malaysian mainland. A long undersea pipe was built between the mainland and Bidong to supply freshwater to the camps. In terms of sustenance, some food was grown on the island or caught in the surrounding ocean waters yet the majority of the food was imported from the mainland.

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Dispatch #2/6 from Bidong

Today, the majority of the camps have disappeared from the repurposing of materials, decades of decay, and the regrowth of the non-human ecosystem of Bidong. A small number of people now visit the island including recreational campers, scuba divers, marine biology students, people like me, and groups of former refugees who make yearly pilgrimages back to Bidong to pay their respects to those who had passed away on the island and to keep the place clean. I’ve come to learn that taking care of the island and preserving what remains of the former camps is a labour carried out by volunteers who typically visit the island during the Grave Sweeping Festival (Qingming Festival). Organized trips and historical tours to Bidong are also mostly conducted by word-of-mouth and are advertised in a subtle manner because the island is embroiled in a geo-politically sensitive situation. Preserving and sharing the important humanitarian history of the island is a point of friction between the Vietnamese and Malaysian governments who are strategic partners in Southeast Asia. The island reveals a side of history that is disharmonious with the contemporary national project of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. These factors make it difficult to find clear instructions to reach the island.

It takes about two-and-a-half-days to reach Bidong. First, I traveled to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia with an international airport. Aftwards, I traveled to the coastal city of Kuala Terengganu, the largest city with a regional airport in proximity to Bidong. Bidong can be seen from a distance from the coasts of Kuala Terengganu. I began the last leg of my journey to Bidong with a chartered van ride from Kuala Terengganu to the nearby port town of Merang where a chartered boat would take me to the island. The boat ride from Merang across the sea to Bidong lasted approximately thirty-minutes. I was accompanied by my guides Alex and Darrius; as well as the boat captain and his child. As the Malaysian mainland faded from our view we were surrounded by the vast ocean. It is hard to imagine that people had once packed themselves on boats and sailed for days to reach Bidong. Overcoming the ocean was itself a mortal challenge before even setting foot in the camps.

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Dispatch #3/6 from Bidong

When we reached Bidong we docked on a newly built jetty. Tiny fish swam in the deep blue waters around the boat. Dark blotches were visible below the surface of the water which indicated that corals had repopulated the seabed of Bidong. On the beach shore several small buildings had been recently constructed to support attempts to use Bidong as a recreational campsite and as a fishing ground. Behind the beach was a grassy field and further behind that was a forested mountain. Punctuating this scene of paradise is a rusting metal ship that had been abandoned on the beach by the refugees. Decades of corrosion from the ocean water has given the ship a skeletal appearance as if it were an omen for the history of the island.

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Dispatch #4/6 from Bidong

 

The terrain of Bidong features steep rocky cliffs that rise from the ocean with the exception of two connected beaches on the southern tip of the island. These two beaches provided the level terrain required for people to live on the island yet also corralled them into a dangerously crowded situation. Thousands of people lived in makeshift camps; plumbing and water systems sprawled across the island floor; and graves still dot the higher grounds of the mountain. The former presence of the camp buildings can be witnessed from exposed structural foundations made of concrete or brick that occasionally protrude from sandy or forested floors. When Bidong was a refugee camp the island was partially deforested, the fish were gone, the water was murky, and the corals had disappeared. It was hard to imagine all of this from where I stood on the pristine beach.

On the eastern side of the beach is a set of aged concrete stairs that lead up to a natural rocky cliff which faces the ocean. This area hosts a large monument that was built by the refugees in the shape of a sail and a boat. The monument features inscriptions in Vietnamese, Malay, and Chinese that express gratitude towards the island and pays homage to those who had passed away in their journey to the camps and while living in them. Around this monument are several concrete altars and religious statues. These religious fixtures were once enveloped inside buildings that had by now disappeared. The area is also the curious site of many stone plaques that have been adhered onto various rocks by former refugees who had returned to Bidong. These plaques often denote the former refugee’s name, the identification number of the boat they had used to get to Bidong, where they had resettled, and the date of their return to Bidong. These plaques announce to others that they are not alone in their experiences of Bidong.

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Dispatch #5/6 from Bidong

Connecting the commemorative and religious area is a forested trail that leads to the foot of the mountain. Abandoned drinking water storage facilities are found along the trail and further up the trail are grave sites belonging to those who had passed away on the island. These graves are regularly maintained by visitors who trim the encroaching grass and maintain the tombstones. Foil wrapped biscuits and empty shot glasses were recently left behind by visitors paying their respects. The tour guides and I took a detour from the trail and hiked down a steep slope that was formed from a pile of garbage that accrued from the camps. Soil, small plants, and tree roots intermixed with occasional bottles and woven plastic tarps that protruded from the ground. At the bottom of the slope was the second beach. This beach had many newly constructed recreational camping structures, a coral growing facility, and very pristine sand. Sea turtles lay their eggs on this part of the island which in turn has prompted the Malaysian government to consider designating Bidong as a protected national park. If Bidong becomes a national park then the recreational camping facilities will be removed and access to the park will become easier.

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Dispatch #6/6 from Bidong

 

The guides and I returned to the first beach by climbing a cliff that led us back to the commemorative and religious area. From there we walked back to the jetty, undocked the boat, and left Bidong for the Malaysian mainland. As we sailed back to the port town of Merang my guide Alex informed me that across the river from our dock was the former site of the first Vietnamese refugee camp in the area that formed in the late
1970s. Several informal grave sites were also set up along the beaches by Merang belonging to the earliest waves of refugees who did not make it through the sea voyage to Malaysia. This all occurred before Bidong was transformed into the designated landing and living area for the Vietnamese refugees.

I have mixed feelings about visiting Bidong. I knew beforehand the island is a place where people had faced the lowest points of the human condition. This knowledge created for me an expectation that one should experience the place through an austere pilgrim-like sorrow. Yet despite this, I had a rush of excitement and a complex joy when I journeyed through Bidong. As an artist my experience of Bidong was heavily mediated by a duty to feel, witness, and learn about the history of the island and also its contemporary state. The appearance of paradise on the island and the presence of the occasional fisherman or recreational camp staff changed my whole perception of Bidong. The emotional register of Bidong alters as history is allowed to pass through the island with the disappearance of the camps and the new uses of the island. If the Bidong were to be fully “museumified” with anachronistic preservations or reconstructions of the camps then the fate of the island would be predetermined. The material changes of Bidong in the regrowth of its non-human ecosystem and the edification it brings to recreational campers, scuba divers, marine biology students, and a curious artist all signal that the futures hoped for by the refugees may have arrived.

My thanks to Centre A for supporting the trip to Bidong and to Henry Heng Lu for inviting and encouraging me to conduct this life altering journey. I would like to acknowledge my tour guide Alex who has for decades worked to support the healing and self-discovery process of former Bidong residents and their descendants. Since the 1990s, Alex has facilitated journeys to Bidong and has become an unofficial historian of Bidong through the oral histories that are shared with him by countless visitors. Fate has assigned a strange duty to Alex to which I am grateful that he has dedicated a large part of his life to continuing.

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Artist Biography:

Alvin Luong works with stories of human migration, land, and dialogues from diasporic working class communities to create artworks that reflect upon historical development and its intimate effects on the lives of people. His focus is expressed through videos, photographs, and sculptures. The artist’s working method is driven by an ethical desire to transcend communication barriers with his community. This ethical desire is articulated through the use of humour and the creation of forms that complicate existing aesthetics that are vernacular to the sites and cultural practices of the artist’s community.

Luong has shown and screened artworks in places including the Images Festival (Toronto), Boers-Li Gallery (Beijing), Gudskul (Jakarta), and The Polygon Gallery (Vancouver). The artist has held research and resident artist appointments at the Inside-Out Art Museum (Beijing), HB Station Contemporary Art Research Center (Guangzhou), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), and Gallery TPW (Toronto). The artist’s works have been acquired and shown by The Rockefeller Foundation (New York City).

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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.