• hearty magazine features an interview with Andrea on her inspirations (“observing strangers on public transit[...] alleyways, badly designed store signs, posters and found objects in alleyways—anything random with a story attached.”), the connection between her formal training and her style, and her motivation for joining Twitter (@andrea_wan). Andrea also reveals that she’s doing her first group show this month.
• enRoute features an illustration by Andrea for CBC Literary Award-winner for creative non-fiction “Flo” by Stéphane Bigras (French only).

Photo by: William W. Ting

March 4 – 27, 2010
OPENING Thursday, March 4, 2010, 8:00 – 11:00 pm
ARTIST TALK @ 8:30pm
FLIM NIGHT: Films curated by artist Kaori Kasai, Friday, March 26, 8:00 – 11:00pm
Blim, 197 E. 17th Ave, Vancouver
More information: 604.683.8240

Looking for something to do after the Olympics? Kaori Kasai, featured in Ricepaper 10.2, has an upcoming exhibition at Blim, co-hosted by the Powell St. Festival. Kasai’s exhibition is also the launching event for Powell Street Festival’s 2010 season of events. Kasai will give an artist talk on March 4th, curate a Flim night (film event) on March 26th, and present new works produced during her residency at BLIM.

Back in 2005 (the time of Ricepaper 10.2), Kasai had been a working artist for over a decade and was a full time student at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. But she was already receiving recognition for her signature “cheeky evil dolls”, wood/canvas paintings, and t-shirt designs from the Washington Post, Vancouver Courier, and yes, Kelly Clarkson. Since then, she’s continued producing creative and personal work and for this exhibition, she has created “storyboards of short vignettes about kinship, alienation, emotional boundaries and our interactions with physical environments.”

Forthcoming in 2010 for Kasai is a children’s book entitled Monchan’s Bag, published by Simply Read Books.

Go here for more details about the exhibition http://www.powellstreetfestival.com/news/news.html

Kaori Kasai’s website http://www.kaorikasai.com/

There are few people who can address the seriousness of colonialism and cultural appropriation in a manner that is both humorous and aesthetically meaningful. Brendan Lee Satish Tang is one artist who has successfully sparked a dialogue on the increasing influences of globalization and technology on cultural identity. Tang’s ceramic sculptures, Chinese Ming dynasty vessels fitted with techno-pop armour, capture the viewer’s attention and encourage audiences to reconsider the current state of Canada’s multicultural reputation.

Born in Ireland to Trinidadian parents of Chinese and Indian descent, Tang has been an artist since childhood. “I started drawing when I was fairly young. I guess I have always felt that art has been a part of me.” After immigrating to Canada and becoming a naturalized citizen, Tang continued his studies at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where he earned his BFA, and then at the Southern University of Illinois Edwardsville to receive his MFA. While still a student, Tang transitioned into the medium of ceramics. “I began working with ceramics for the emotions and feelings that it allows me to access,” he explains. “It also allows me to create better 3D images due to its forgiving and malleable nature.”

The fact that Tang is an Irish-born, half Chinese, half Indian, Canadian citizen exhibiting his work across North America emphasizes the multicultural nature of his work.

It seems appropriate that Tang would engage in the art of ceramics, as much of his family history can be traced back to Asia and, after all, the Chinese have always been regarded as the undisputed masters of ceramic vessels. In his most recent collection, the Manga Ormolu series, the ceramic sculptures take on another iconic character of Asian culture—Japanese anime and manga. Although not a fan of either himself, Tang finds the cultural sphere associated with such art forms fascinating. “I personally don’t watch too much anime,” he says, “but I do appreciate the design sensibilities of the work and I do have a lot of friends that watch anime and read manga.” It seems that Tang appropriates these Japanese pop-art forms, not so much out of passion, but more out of respect. His choice to fuse ceramic art tradition and techno-pop art brings attention to the elitism of popular culture and its strong hold over the way we view our world. “I am very much into popular culture,” Tang says. “I am constantly amazed by culture in general and how we all identify ourselves via a particular culture.”

Tang explains the inspiration behind his work, the 18^th century Ormolu: a French practice that adorned Chinese ceramic vessels in finely ground, high-karat gold. These ceramics were transformed into curiosity pieces for aristocrats, an example of early globalization, whereby Chinese artifacts were appropriated for a western market. Tang’s updated and repurposed practice of Ormolu—the hybridization of Chinese Ming dynasty vessels and futuristic pop imagery—leads viewers into discussing and thinking about Canada’s most reputable attribute: multiculturalism. The fact that Tang is an Irish-born, half Chinese, half Indian, Canadian citizen exhibiting his work across North America emphasizes the multicultural nature of his work.

“I played hockey and I only speak English,” [...]  “Cultural appropriation and assimilation seem like a natural part of my identity.”

The idea or practice of globalization is not a recent trend, as nations throughout history have used mechanisms of war and trade routes to buy, adopt, and pillage technologies and cultural artifacts from one another. And viewed in this way, the advent of the Internet and online social networking has simply accelerated the movement of people and technologies amidst countries and nations. Tang asserts, “It has not yet yielded cultural uniformity.” Instead, globalization has only blurred the boundaries of identity and left one’s perception of self subject to consistent change. Raised in Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island, Tang understands first-hand how particular aspects of “other” cultures can be adopted. “I was raised in a predominantly white culture. We had a couple of Asian knick-knacks around the house, but generally speaking we accepted the traditions of the dominant culture,” Tang explains. “I played hockey and I only speak English,” he goes on to say. “Cultural appropriation and assimilation seem like a natural part of my identity.” That being said, not everyone is so quick to assimilate and Tang is aware of this. “People look for comfort in communities and I search for things that inform these cultures.” Finding one’s place and identity within two different sets of cultural standards is difficult, and this is where Manga Ormolu comes into play. The ceramic sculptures—composed of delicate and detailed ancient Chinese vessels countered by the bulkiness and intrusiveness of robot prosthetics—and their presentation within Canada, mirror Asian influence in Canada and the overbearing reach of popular culture.

Manga Ormolu sculptures are important for another reason: the popularity of the work coincides with the increasing demand for designer vinyl toys (i.e. Kidrobot), and the commercialization of street/urban art and graffiti. Tang’s subtle criticism of consumerism goes hand in hand with his beliefs about globalization. Tackling the topic of cultural appropriation is far from easy, especially in the form of ceramics, but as Tang emphasizes, “the role of the artist is to present information and ideas, and to present them in ways that are not the most direct. As an artist, I think the most important thing is to instigate conversation.” Tang’s work offers viewers many different ways in which to enter into a discussion about pop culture, multiculturalism, and identity.

The frivolousness of manga and anime are qualities which make Tang’s ceramic sculptures approachable and accessible to all people, enabling them to grasp the deeper meaning of his delicate Chinese ceramic vessels fitted with futuristic robotic prosthetics. And even if viewers don’t fully realize the artist’s intentions, hopefully they will simply “pause and reflect,” as Tang puts it, on the piece that stands before them. He adds, “artists aim to help others understand and view our world in a richer and much more interactive way.”

The characters in Ha Jin’s latest collection of short stories, A Good Fall, are suspended between desire and obligation, their personal freedoms often impaired by a debt  from the past. Entering the stories through memory, or the arrival of family members, or encounters with fellow countrymen, China is an invisible force that interrupts the lives of many of these characters who have immigrated to America. Thousands of miles from their native land, the men and women who inhabit these deceptively simple narratives navigate life in New York, pursuing freedom, love, fortune, and success in the midst of some kind of uncertainty or dissatisfaction. They may have crossed the ocean to America, but the tentacles of personal history are far reaching. “I used to believe that in the United States you could always reshape your relationships with the people back home—you could restart your life on your own terms,” one character opines. “But the internet has spoiled everything—my family is able to get hold of me whenever they like. They might as well live nearby.”

Here, familial ties are often a source of friction which leads to the dissolution of relationships, to defection, or to attempted suicide. Jin presents sensitive yet uneven portraits of people whose problems stem not only from external forces but also from their own individual sense of duty. Frequently, they are helpless to remedy their situations because to do so would have negative consequences on their families or loved ones. A husband questions the fidelity of his wife and the paternity of their daughter when he sees her feeding nuts to another man in the bar of a hotel. A graduate student becomes embroiled in a love triangle involving a mother and daughter. A monk leaps from a five-storey building after his income is withheld, ashamed of the financial burden that it will bring his parents.

As one of the most acclaimed writers of Asian American literature, Jin has received numerous accolades including the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Asian American Literary Award, and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. His writing is notable for the simplicity of its language, the way he can convey, vividly, the worlds of his characters without resorting to literary pyrotechnics. He has a cinematographic ability to set a scene, utilizing detail to sharpen the image in the mind’s eye, thereby absorbing the reader into the physical and emotional interiors of his imagination.

These gifts are on full display in titles like the National Book Award winning novel, Waiting, and the short story collections Ocean of Words and The Bridegroom. The moderate tempo of these works compliments the languor and high-definition imagery of Jin’s prose. These sensitive examinations of love and marriage, patriotism and duty, government and injustice, are excellent introductions to the author’s body of work. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about A Good Fall. The characters and their scenarios in this latest volume of short fiction do not linger in the reader’s memory. Very few, in fact, make much of an impression beyond the finale of their respective stories.  Composed predominantly of previously published material, the twelve pieces in this collection do not do justice to the author’s narrative power.

In this volume, Jin’s characteristically intricate landscapes are underdeveloped, the sensory dimensions no longer palpable. His storytelling is flushed with delicate psychological observations that enrich the reader’s experience, yet in A Good Fall these details seldom convey the kind of texture that informed his prior books and made them luminous.

A Good Fall opens with the original story, “The Bane of the Internet.” In it, a sushi waitress in Brooklyn finds herself blackmailed by her sister in Sichuan who has “caught the national auto mania” and has resorted to delusional measures in order to buy a car. “If she messed up her life,” the narrator thinks, “there would be nobody to care for our old parents. If I was living near them, I might have called her bluff, but now there was no way out.”

Family conflict extends across generations in the scathing “Children as Enemies.” An elderly couple bitterly regrets migrating from Dalian City as they witness their grandchildren’s rejection of “everything Chinese except for some food they like.”  The resentment they feel towards their son and his clan, towards elementary education and morality in America, leads to a family divided. America in A Good Fall is provider of both opportunity and corruption. The characters have arrived to better their lives but with new terrains come new struggles.

Turmoil ranges from ordinary — like the disconnect among relatives in “Children as Enemies” and “In the Crossfire,” and the uncertainty of landing a coveted job as described in “An English Professor” — to epic, as superbly illustrated in “The House Behind a Weeping Cherry.”

   

By Gillian Sze and Fred Wah

POET GILLIAN SZE SPEAKS WITH GOVERNOR GENERAL LITERARY ARTS AWARD WINNING POET FRED WAH ABOUT HIS LATEST BOOK OF POETRY, IS A DOOR.

GILLIAN SZE: Your most recent book, is a door, is a collection that includes a chapbook, poetry projects, and incidental poems previously published in magazines and small presses. How did you envision is a door in terms of how the poems work with each other in this single collection?

FRED WAH: Notions of the “book” or a “collection” are both generative and problematic for most poets. My book before this one, Sentenced to Light, was a collection of poetic texts that shared their performance as part of collaborations with visual artists. is a door is a more fragmented, and somewhat more common, book of poems, not necessarily related to one another formally or thematically. At the same time, though three of the four sections are from separate “projects,” I see the poems, finally, as participating in certain themes and attention that have become iterative in just about all my writing: race, hybridity, citizenship, place, and other things. There’s a certain “fakery” involved in almost any book of poetry that also has to do with “packaging.” Such qualifications as a “first” book, the “most recent” book, the “selected” or “collected,” and so forth, are part of performing the work in public. Publishing and publishers are a consequential part of literary production, and having an editor like Karl Siegler at Talonbooks—someone I’ve worked with for over twenty years—has become part of the writing process for me.

GILLIAN: In Poetics & Hybridity, you write: “Writing would have a lot to do with ‘place,’ the spiritual and spatial localities of the writer. I see things from where I am, my viewpoint, and I measure and imagine a world from there.”

What does Mister In-Between serve for you as a writer, “standing in the doorway / Minding the commotion”? How’s the view? – Gillian to Fred

In is a door, poems are generated by your travels (Telchac Puerto, Thailand and Laos) and the speakers are often “in-between”: between beach and water, puerto and puerta, between the fingernails, between the pieces, or standing in the doorway neither “in” nor “out.” At the end of your poem, “Sheet Music,” after the speaker questions why one should not “mess with pandemony,” he states, “Word’s out / What I need to do is mess around / with Mister In-Between.” The first section, Isadora Blue, concludes with the poem, “Mister In-Between,” and I want to ask: what does Mister In-Between serve for you as a writer, “standing in the doorway / Minding the commotion”? How’s the view?

FRED: The poetics around/of hybridity that I’ve been trying to unpack for many years is on constant lookout for any dynamic that might help substantiate the site of “betweeness.” Mister In-Between, as I remember hearing it sung by Bing Crosby and the Andrews sisters, poses that sometimes energizing force of “going against the grain” as a kind of mindfulness, a way of being present that, because of its agonizing (and frictional) position brings heightened awareness to an otherwise controlled and frequently tyrannical world. Sometimes the dirt is where the roots are.

GILLIAN: That reminds me of something you had written in your critical essays: “To write is to move.” Specifically, “to move past the comfort of a ruled discourse; in order, to move on, beyond order.” I’m thinking about your poem, “Race, to go,” and its interrogative style, the insistence of the “she” to categorize or label:

You ever been to ethni-city?

How ‘bout multi-culti?

[…]

What are you, banana

or egg? Coconut

maybe?

[…]

What side of John A. Macdonald’s tracks you on anyway?

A question that’s always up for debate is: what constitutes a Canadian author? In Ken McGoogan’s essay, “You, you and you, but not you” (Aug. 7/09), he states: “To my mind, Canadian literature is variously bilingual, multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic, postcolonial, postmodern and even multinational.” Following, to some degree, McGoogan, can we say that Canadian identity is a problem that must be faced by Canadian authors? What I mean by “problem” is something open to various “solutions” but none that can ever be definitive or determinative. So being a Canadian author means nothing more and nothing less than confronting a problem that evolves by means of responses to it—even as it transcends them.

Image: SFU News Online

By Deanne Beattie

Milton K. Wong is, in person, every bit the leader you might imagine him to be. By reputation, he is known as a quick and resourceful businessman and community leader,  and a fervent dragon boat supporter as well. He and his wife—arts patron and philanthropist Fei Wong—have supported various initiatives ranging from national art exhibitions to community-based art galleries. Until recently, Milton was Simon Fraser University’s Chancellor, and he now remains a leader in the SFU capital fundraising team.

What’s surprising is that this lifetime of community service was accomplished in addition to a very successful business career. A graduate of University of British Columbia (1963), Milton went on to found his financial firm, M.K. Wong and Associates, a preeminent financial service provider in the Lower Mainland of B.C., in 1980. The firm became a solid success, and was eventually bought by HSBC in 1996. Since then, Milton has remained a leader in the financial sector. But to meet him, like I did, in his home on South Cambie—a modern home, with sweeping windows and an eyeful of art—is to affirm that this man has vision. Observing his firm handshake, unassuming demeanor, and slow, warm smile for his wife Fei, one can see precisely why the couple is spearheading community support for the School for Contemporary Arts facilities at SFU in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, located within the new Woodward’s development. Opened officially in January 2010, the facilities house the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre. The development will be the first of its kind in Western Canada and a landmark achievement for the Olympic city.

Vancouver’s Woodward’s district has been pushing boundaries—and buttons, and budgets—in myriad ways. The retail centre-turned-squatter territory has been re-imagined in recent years as a social and economic panacea for Vancouver’s desolate Downtown Eastside. In addition to the School for Contemporary Arts, the Woodward’s building will come to house community art studios, flexible performance spaces, and offices for arts organizations and social enterprises. The development, however, is also juggling a few lofty goals. Outwardly, the government agents and community leaders behind the project aim to revitalize a crime-ridden area through social investment. “It’s like another language,” says Milton of the power of art. “It’s another means of communicating with each other in a social sense. So, we might have seemingly disparate groups in our community, but they tend to come together [where community-based art is involved]”.

“Art is one element that is not static. As new people come, new experiences come, and the fusion of disciplines also comes.” – Milton Wong

In the city’s Olympics-focused era, sensitivity to the implications of a gentrification project rockets political correctness to an all-time high. The cynic might object that the Woodward’s development accommodates the growing appetite of a cultural elite in Vancouver as they move to devour the edgy cool of a historic city centre and flush out a poor community before tourists arrive for the Olympic Games. As a result, the building and the programs they become home to are promised to be sustainable, ethical, participatory, interdisciplinary, and yes, culturally sensitive. The Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre is no different. The multi-purpose performance space allows for dance, theatre, and music to be performed by students, community groups, and touring professionals due to its flexible seating arrangement with 450 moveable seats and stages that can accommodate any performance requirement.

“It should be a catalyst, on an on-going basis, to continue to cause the evolution and development of the Downtown Eastside,” says Milton of the art space. “Art is one element that is not static. As new people come, new experiences come, and the fusion of disciplines also comes.” Forgetting for a moment that the vision for the Woodward’s arts factory is at best complicated (and at worst, conflicted), the entire project is made vulnerable to a few significant economic factors. In a few short years, the budgets that the Province of British Columbia has made available to education and the arts have radically diminished, prompting schools to cut services and hike tuition fees, and reducing some arts organizations to survival mode in 2010 with less than 10 percent of the government funding they received in 2009. Even if the Woodward’s launch is successful, it’s difficult to imagine what will become of the arts and education centre in the years that follow. The circumstances around Woodward’s launch raises important questions for British Columbians. When social investment in arts and culture through public funding is reduced, where do we go from here? Who do we listen to in the war between a cash-strapped government and an irate arts community?