Open Call: Centre A x Taylight Brewing Label Design Campaign

Centre A is pleased to announce the collaboration with Taylight Brewing for a Label Design Campaign that will decorate an upcoming limited-edition beer. To celebrate our 25th year anniversary in 2024, we are launching our very own beer with the grateful support of Taylight Brewing, a community-inspired brewery with a mission to storytell through the power of beer.

As Canada’s only public art gallery dedicated to Asian and Asian diasporic perspectives, our collaboration with Taylight Brewing is especially important to our ongoing strive to initiate meaningful projects, create an uplifting community, and to support artists through unique opportunities.

The submission will remain open until December 15, 2023, 11:59 PM PST. The chosen artist will be notified in January, 2024.

To participate, please read each of the following steps thoroughly:

How to Participate:

Create a concept draft for the label; the final design will not be necessary–a starting vision for the label that you see to represent our values (ie., a moodboard, a rough sketch, a compilation of visual ideas, etc.,) is sufficient
Please fill out each of the required boxes on the Google Form
Double check your information and then click submit

Submission Guidelines:

Only original submissions will be accepted
Suggested themes: Asian diaspora, Vancouver’s Chinatown, Asian heritage, celebration, community, harmony (you may incorporate more than one theme)
The proposal must be accompanied by a brief explanation (one paragraph) of the design and the main ideas represented
Submissions must include a biography of the artist (one paragraph)
A portfolio is optional, but may strengthen your submission as we would be able to get to know you better
The final design must include both the Centre A and Taylight Logo, and the phrase: 25 years

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About Taylight Brewing

We’re all about craft beer and community

All breweries have to start somewhere, and Taylight started with a bit of inspiration — our community. Port Coquitlam is made up of incredible humans from around the globe, each with their own experiences and stories to tell.

Wouldn’t it be beautiful if our beer was as unique as they are? So we embarked on a journey to do just that — create craft beer inspired by the diversity of the people drinking it. As our team began to grow, our inspiration grew alongside it. We wanted to do more than brew something for everyone, we wanted to make space for them too.

It became our goal for our tasting room to serve as a safe place to explore craft beer and form community connections. Now, as Taylight continues to evolve, we strive to give our beer a bigger purpose — both in and outside the brewery.

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.

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.

Keefer St.mp3 & Centre A Tote Bag Launch

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.

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.

Intimacy and Distances: Artist & Curator Talk

Intimacy and Distances: Artist & Curator Talk

Saturday, September 16, 2023

2 – 4 PM

Centre A; 205 – 268 Keefer St., Vancouver, BC, V6A 1X5

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No RSVP required.

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Join us in person at Centre A for an artist talk in conjunction with our current exhibition, Intimacy and Distances, with Tokyo-based interdisciplinary artist Maiko Jinushi and guest curator Makiko Hara. The artist and curator will be joined by artist Akira Takaishi. Takaishi’s solo exhibition, Place Far Away From Anyone or Anywhere, at CSA Space is happening in collaboration with Centre A.

Find out more about Intimacy and Distances here.

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Artist Biography:

Maiko Jinushi, born 1984 in Kanagawa, Japan. Lives and works in Tokyo. Jinushi obtained her MFA in Painting from Tama Art University in Tokyo, Japan, and recently participated in a residency at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, the Netherlands in 2019-20.

Her work has evolved from drawings and novels on themes of personal tales, to the creation of a new form of literary experience that comprehensively combines elements including video, installations, and performances.

Her recent solo exhibitions include “MAM Project 031: Jinushi Maiko” (Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2023), “Brain Symphony” (Hospitale Project, Tottori, Art Center Ongoing, Tokyo, 2020), “Sound of Desires” (Hagiwara Projects, Tokyo, 2018). Recent group exhibitions include “Universal / Remote” (Contemporary Art Museum Kumamoto, Kumamoto, 2023), “Till We Meet Again IRL, Best Wishes, Asia-Art-Activism (Co-curated by Annie Jael Kwan, Arianna Mercado, Cuong Pham and Howl Yuan)” (Online, 2020), “The Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions” (Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo, 2019), “The Ecology of Expression -Remaking Our Relations with the World” (Arts Maebashi, Gunma, 2019), “Zero Gravity” (Matadero Madrid, Madrid, 2015), “Koganecho Bazaar 2014” (Koganecho area, Kanagawa, 2014).

Artist Website: http://maikojinushi.com

Akira Takaishi (born/resides in Japan, b.1985) has been creating land art, installations and implicit paintings showing distorted spaces using twisted perspectives. Through them, Takaishi focuses on hole-shaped structures as convoluted reflections of societal structures and individual identities, at times somewhere to escape into, and at the same time, be trapped by. Takaishi has had numerous solo and group shows, and recently also curated a group show ‘Subterraneans’ at Gallery ?M, Tokyo (2021).

Artist Website: http://www.akiratakaishi.com

Curator Biography:

Makiko Hara is an independent curator, lecturer, writer, and art and cultural consultant based in Vancouver, BC. Makiko Hara 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. Hara is a co-founder of Pacific Crossings, BC based curatorial platform since 2018 that has initiated and organized numerous conversations, residency and online /off line 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 Hara was a guest curator for Vancouver Art Gallery’s Offsite and curated Lani Maestro (2022-23) and Pedro Reyes (2023-24).

Maiko Jinushi photo credits: Marisa Shimamoto. Akira Takaishi photo credits: Guenter Zorn.

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

// 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.

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

Film Screening of SuperNova & Artist Talk with Rah Eleh

Friday, August 11, 2023

2 – 3:30 PM PDT

Zoom Webinar

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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.

Image courtesy of Rah Eleh.

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.

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.