CENTRE A BLOG

by Jessa Alston O'Conner

As Yellow Signal exhibitions continue across Vancouver over the next several months, it is worth exploring more about the origins for this city-wide project that date back 15 years. In 1998, Jiangnan: Modern and Contemporary Art from South of the Yanzi River was a major exhibition series across Vancouver on a scale not before seen outside of China.  In his talk at Centre A in March, curator Zheng Shengtian spoke about origins of Jiangnan and how that series opened doors for Yellow Signal  today.

Zheng explains in his curator's talk that in 1997, Hank Bull (co-founder of Centre A) travelled to China where he visited Shanghai and other cities in the Yangzi River delta region, also known as Jiangnan. Returning to Vancouver with great enthusiasm, he began to generate community interest in bringing Chinese art to Vancouver with a desire to introduce these artists and their works to new audiences. Meetings were held, but no one dreamed that  it would grow to become city-wide, but also one of the biggest exhibition projects ever undertaken in the greater Vancouver area.

Jiangnan began in 1998 at the Vancouver Art Gallery with Pan Tianshou’s first exhibition ever in North America. 12 other exhibitions followed, in almost every venue in Vancouver including  non-profit centers like Western Front, Access Gallery the Contemporary Art Gallery, Artspeak, Grunt Gallery, Presentation House, and also in private galleries. It was a major series of exhibitions that brought more than 24 Chinese artists to Vancouver. Jiangnan came to a close with a symposium that included major scholars from around world.

The Chinese name for the Yangzi River is Chiang Jiang, ‘the Great River’. Jiangnan means “South of the River” and is a region that includes Hangzhou, Suzhou and Nanjing, and the metropolis of Shanghai.

This area is lush, supplying food, silk, tea and ceramics to northern China. At times, it was the location of the nation’s capitals, and during end of the Northern Song Dynasty in 1127,  it was home to many of the scholars and artists of China. With the Republican Revolution and the end of Qin Dynasty in 1911, the role of art changed with the time. Instead of serving elite and Imperial interests, the art schools that opened in Shanghai and Hangzhou were more openly accessible, and modern artists from these regions began to study not only traditional art forms, but also Western and international media and art trends, including the avant garde. Yet under General Mao, Social Realism was adopted as the only officially accepted artistic style. This curtailing of artistic self-determination ended with his death in 1976 and by the 1980s, the region once again rose as a prominent creative center in China.

China is diverse country, and Jiangnan has been a center of artistic production since at least the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279). Some artists continue in traditional practices of painting, and others breaking from it, re inventing tradition with new media. Jiangnan sought to reflect this diversity of artists and perspectives. Some of the artists selected were part of the artistic community that were exiled from China after the catastrophe at Tiananmen in 1989, and other artists were practicing within China. After the artistic style of Social Realism being the sole genre enforced  for so many decades, the artistic exploration of personal, self-expression and abstraction became a highly politicized act. The works in Jiangnan demonstrated how contemporary artists in China were not only working in the transitional period in the late 90s, but also in a time when transnational networks of economy, culture, crime and communication were interconnected.  Jiangnan was about artistic concerns that mattered globally, not just to artists in China. Some artists drew from traditional Chinese art forms and themes, while others created works that stemmed from  universal experiences devoid of Chinese signifiers, relating to global audiences.

The works exhibited as part of Jiangnan brought together a variety of the subject matter, media, and perspectives that were characteristic of Chinese contemporary art in the late 1990s. Many artists synthesized traditional art forms and subject, but did so in a contemporary way in order to bring these art forms in to the 20^th century.  Media including fibers, silk worms, video and performance were exhibited in conjunction with contemporary expressions of traditional calligraphy and landscape painting.  The works explored themes of migration, love/birth, the power of the Western art world, the construction of social control, modernist and Dadaist influences, urbanism in Shanghai and Vancouver, sexuality, and both written and spoken language. Several artists played major roles in modern and contemporary art movements in China over the past few decades: Qiu Ti and Pang Tao were important for abstract modernism in China in the 1950s, and Huang Yongping was the founder of the Xianem Dada, one of the leading grounds in avant garde art in China in the 1980s.

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Zheng recalled in his talk how the president of the Chinese Academy of Art then told him how impressed he was by Vancouver audience's reception to Chinese art. He said he had never seen a positive response on such a scale in other countries he had been to, and he felt that this series in Vancouver was one of the largest of this kind.

Sheng explained the significance of Jiangnan because of its historical relation to Yellow Signal. Even after a decade has passed the tradition continues. Last year, when Centre A  invited Sheng to curate a show of contemporary Chinese art, they soon drew the same kind of positive response from other venues who all wanted to participate,  remembering the success of Jiangnan. And so, what began with one single exhibition at Centre A has now grown to an exhibition series with 7 galleries and venues involved. Yesterday one more venue has joined the list: a film screen about Ai Wei Wei has now slated for the Vancouver Art Gallery, bringing the series to 8 shows.

Sheng expressed how pleased he has been to see such a reaction from other venues, curators, colleagues, the general public to the idea of bringing more artists to Vancouver so that we can understand a bigger picture of contemporary Chinese art and at what stage it is at now. The reason for Yellow Signal's focus on new media art is a correlation that Zheng drew: Vancouver being an art centre that emphasizes photography and video, and with a long history of high quality production artists like Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham, Ken Lum, He could see that in the past Chinese artists learned alot from these Vancouver artists, while now Chinese media work has developed rapidly at an impressive rate. Yellow Signal generates the same kind of excitement  in Vancouver that Jiangnan did 20 years ago, bringing these fresh, innovative works by contemporary Chinese artists here for our audiences once again. 

By: Rachel Ozerkevich

Kan Xuan is one of the artists featured in Centre A’s current Exhibition, Yellow Signal: New Media in China. Xuan is a contemporary female artist working in a still male-dominated field, and her participation in the exhibition provides us with an exciting insight into her unique creative process and film projects. Currently on display in the gallery space are two of her poignant and humorous video pieces: One by One (2005) and Nothing! (2002). Through Xuan’s work, we are given brief glimpses into her exploration of the nature of image making and the possible failures of artistic representation.

            Simply put, much of Xuan’s work explores the relationship between life and the world that surrounds us. Her videos are brief and simple, yet they allude to a deeper sense of spiritualism. The influence of Zen spirituality is often evident in her work. She has explored economics and politics as well: in her 2007 piece Island (2 yuan/1 Pound/1 Euro/1 Dollar), she depicted coins from various international currencies resting against objects. The piece was a reflection on the “vast economic and political changes that have affected every aspect of society” (Hou Hanru, “Paradigm Shifts”). Xuan’s seemingly simple footage and rough aesthetics forces the viewer to consider simple and often easily overlooked issues that bare significances in everyday life.

            The Guangzhou Biennale catalogue of 2010 describes Xuan’s work as an exploration of the “cognitive dissonance between the seen and the known, between representation and reality”. This “dissonance” that the viewer experiences is precisely the point. For Xuan, the nature of image making—itself inherently problematic and full of inconsistencies—is a central aspect of her work. In an environment as politically charged and full of contradictions as modern-day China, her work is remarkable for its simplicity and honesty.

            Xuan’s work plays an important role in Yellow Signal. The exhibition according to the curator and one of Centre A’s founding members Zheng Shengtian, is “a metaphor for the communal state of ambiguity in Asian countries…(it is) about limitation and possibility, choice and chance, confusion and self-confidence, feelings that many Asian artists experience, but that artists everywhere may also relate to in their creative practice”. Xuan’s work conveys these issues of ambiguity, dissonance and duality in a simple and universally relatable way.

            One by One is a single channel video filmed with a rotating camera. The video captures a group of security guards under the sun in an unidentified urban setting. The spinning of the camera varies in speed, ranging from slow and steady to almost frantic. The result of immersing oneself in the projection room is varying degrees of dizziness. The camera jerks to a stop periodically to focus on aspects of the guards’ uniforms. The guards do not speak, though the viewer gets a sense of their environment from the sounds of the city: the birds, construction, pedestrians walking, car alarms, etc. The direct sunlight on the uniforms gives the scene a feeling of warmth. In short, the setting feels recognizable, normal and everyday.

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            The guards’ uniforms seem somewhat sinister. Since the viewer never sees anything above or below the lapel of the uniforms, the guards are faceless and dehumanized. One could easily overlook the fact that the guards are human if it weren’t for faint signs of movement and breath. The guards are interchangeable and seemingly permanent aspects of their environment. Many questions are invoked by experiencing this piece: who are these guards, and how are they interacting with their immediate surroundings? Since the uniformed torsos almost span the entire screen, they seem to define the surroundings, as they are the only beings visible. Do they control the environment? They certainly police it successfully by grabbing our immediate attention and making us dizzy.

            One by One is very much indicative of Xuan’s desire to express a more direct understanding of life and illuminate commonly overlooked feelings of the everyday. The piece presents the mundane in an active and dizzying way. After mere seconds of viewing, one is overcome with the desire to see more of a recognizable urban scene. Even though we think we know what’s beyond the uniforms, we very much want to see for ourselves. The viewer is highly aware of having his or her gaze controlled and policed.

            Nothing!, Xuan’s other work on display, is also a single channel video. In her brief description of the piece, she writes: “searching for it, crazy about it, and troubled by it, but ultimately, as we often see, there’s ‘nothing’”. The viewer is presented with shaky, frantic shots of the ground, leaves, holes and cracks in concrete and stone. Here, there are bugs, garbage and other debris. The narrating voice, distorted and manipulated to sound high-pitched and vaguely foreign, is clearly looking for something in a satirical and perhaps sarcastic way. The voice exclaims things like “Oh wow! Jeez! Jesus! Aaah! Shit! Ohhh!”. These exclamations are always followed by “Nothing!”

            The result is a frenzied, hyperactive and very humorous look at the mundane, at the “nothing” that hides on the streets, in old concrete and in spaces that only insects inhabit. Really, there is always “something” in these spaces. The exclamation “nothing!” seems to belittle and discount the existence of what actually lies in these overlooked cracks. The implication is that bugs, garbage, rotting fruit and bizarre rock formations aren’t actually anything. The excited exclamations of “nothing!” suggest that this is exactly what the voice has been looking for. The mundane is made to be exciting, busy, blurred and worth commenting on. It’s everywhere! Go find it! This is what the voice seems to urge in its sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek way.

            Nothing! seeks to explore the somewhat pointless nature of life for creatures who live close to the ground and who spend their energy following scents and trails. However, it invokes much more than pointlessness. The video’s humour and simplicity seem to urge the viewer to slow down and notice the seemingly insignificant, and often silly, aspects of everyday life. Both videos currently on display articulate this theme of the everyday presented under an inquisitive new lens.

Xuan’s participation in Yellow Signal is a unique opportunity to become acquainted with an important and noteworthy artist defying genre and subject matter boundaries in a politically charged climate. Her work is humorous and thought provoking. Her seemingly simple imagery makes for engaging experience that is in reality anything but simple. One comes away from viewing a Xuan video with a renewed curiosity, and perhaps even a criticality, for life’s little details.

Part One: Introduction to 'Yellow Signal'

Part Two: History of Chinese Media Art

Videographer: Elisha Burrows

By Stacey Ho

'Yellow Signal' has many iterations. The phrase originates from a conversation with artist Dinh Q. Lê. Yellow Signal was used by the Vietnamese-American artist to describe the state of flux in which contemporary Asian artists make their work. For Lê, ‘Yellow Signal’ is a place somewhere between permission and censorship, between stop and go. Yellow Signal is also a series of exhibitions and screenings that showcase the exceptional new media art that has emerged in China over the past ten or so years. Put together in part by preeminent Asian art scholar and advocate Zheng Shengtian, Zheng traces Yellow Signal's history back to the 1998 Jiangnan Project, a groundbreaking multi-venue Vancouver exhibition series on Chinese art. Finally, Yellow Signal is the title of a massive four-part installation by Wang Jianwei, the last part of which has been brought to Vancouver as a four-channel video installation at Centre A. Exhibited in tandem with two shorts by acclaimed video artist Kan Xuan, the works of both artists convey a sense of uncertainty appropriate to the origins of the phrase, 'Yellow Signal'.

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Wang Jianwei's Yellow Signal - Position depicts four unsettling scenes, all cast in a dim blue light, precisely framed, and with no exposition. As viewers slowly piece together the elements of these silent sequences, many of their questions remain unanswered. This only adds to the underlying tension that pervades the atmosphere of the work. Each of the four scenes of Yellow Signal - Position, examines different ways of looking. We see a line of beggars picked off by firing squad from the perspective of the executioner. On another, wavering screen, our gaze becomes the mirror for the primping and preening of a woman and man as they pose for the camera. Projected over the entrance of Centre A, a group of voyeurs peek out into the world outside the gallery using a battery of telescopes and camera equipment. The longest video shows a group of anonymous-looking people sitting around a long table, with one person off to the side. Each person reveals an object (a knife, a screwdriver, a pornographic DVD), which is slowly toured around the room. The viewer becomes invested in the fetishized object rather than the faceless actors. In all four of these scenes, the actors operate by a logic unexplained to us, and this tension of unknowing pervades the whole work. Is this the ‘Yellow Signal’, the state between stop and go?

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Similarly, no easy answers are found in the video works of Kan Xuan. A roving point-of-view is featured in both One by One (2005) and Nothing! (2002), but the results of the camera's investigations are ambiguous. In One by One, we are taken on a whirling ride as the camera spins in the centre of a circle. When it suddenly stops, we focus on the breast of a security guard uniform. The image is depersonalized, with the head and arms cut out of the frame, yet tiny movements hint at the life and breath behind this faceless entity. We can barely acknowledge these small moments before the camera is sent off once again on its dizzying journey.

 Clocking in at just under two minutes, Nothing!, with its humorous existentialism, has become a hit of the exhibition. Opening with a countdown set to an elementary dance beat, the camera roams about, searching wildly through cracks and holes, looking at plants and bugs. For all this frantic effort, what does Kan find? "Aha!" a pitched-up voice gleefully proclaims, "Nothing!" Alternatively: "Hmm... Nothing! Shit, shit, shit: nothing." 

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Coming from a place where revolutionary ideology is intertwined with state policy, the ambiguous stances taken by both Kan and Wang convey a reluctance to follow the institutionalized narrative of their shared country. In a recent conversation published by Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art *, Wang delineated two different ways an artist can approach politics: "We should recognize that artists are part of society and its politics; artists do not need to fictionalize a political body and then attempt to solve its problems. That would be the greatest endorsement of ideology." While I tend to agree with Wang, I do wonder if his comments are universally applicable, given the vast historical and contextual differences between Chinese culture and that of North America. On this side of the pond, 'fictionalizing a political body' appears as a possible and necessary means of resisting the unsustainable and destructive state of our current economic and social system. Also, speaking of resistance, though artists here are interested in the states of in-between, we do not exactly vacillate in the same fearful purgatory of suppression and commodification, red and green. Despite these differences, I am left curious and hopeful as to whether non-Asian artists can also find kinship in this notion of the ‘Yellow Signal’, given the specificities from which this concept has emerged.

* "Artists in a State of Anxiety" Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art March/April 2011 Volume 10, Number 2

Images by Hua Jin

This video is an excerpt from an interview with Chinese media artist Wang Jianwei by curator Shengtian Zheng held at his studio in Beijing China, on February 18, 2012. The full interview will be published in a special issue of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art dedicated to 'Yellow Signal: New Media in China' in May 2012.

photo by Hua Jin

Wang Jianwei on Yellow Signal

 Excerpt from an interview by Shengtian Zheng

 Beijing, February 18, 2012

Yellow Signal-Position (2012) is a new adaptation of Go to the Conference Room on the 13th Floor For Free Films-Chapter Four of Wang Jianwei's groundbreaking solo exhibition, Yellow Signal (Beijing, 2011). Wang has re-concieved the original work, as a four channel video installation for Centre A.

Shengtian Zheng: Now we are going to show part of the Yellow Signal project in Vancouver. You decided to present Chapter four. You have visited Centre A and came up with an idea after looking at the space. You were interested in using this space for a specific work. Why do you feel that Chapter four would be more applicable to this space?

Wang Jianwei: I decided to make two changes to Chapter four. The first is to turn off the audio track completely. The second is how the projection is used. I visited Centre A and we examined the floor plan. Something weird and extraordinary about the relationship between the glass window and the neighborhood outside stayed in my mind. This relationship is not the same as with the original installation Go to the Conference Room on the 13th Floor for Free Films, but it is in a spirit of commonwealth. It is not about national identity or culture, but issues that we all face. Finally, I decided to move away from all previous installations of Chapter four, and let a new relationship occur just between video images and the space. 

For example, I plan to cover the huge glass window and only leave a specific area to project the video of the voyeurs. The voyeur thinks he is peeping at others. But the video shot from our side makes it so that it is the voyeur who is being watched. Can he really see outside through the glass window? Or do we want to know what is behind him while looking at him? This is very much like the “truth behind the real” as expressed by Slavoj Zizek. The ideology tried to find the truth. Zizek assumed the truth hidden behind real is in fact an ideology. That’s why I am projecting this act of the video onto the window.

Another act is six beggars on the ground. I want Centre A to build a wall to create a partition. The visitors will see six persons of life size as themselves. But the scene looks like in a theatre. The beggars will be shot one by one by bullets that come from somewhere unknown. As visitors watch this video, they are also within this space. So the threat could come from any angle in the space.  

The third act is a man and a woman standing side by side. They look at the camera as if facing a mirror.  They believe in the world you constantly face a mirror. As point of fact when we look at others we are always gazing.  As Jacques Lacan said, gaze is the object, not the subject. He said if a person notice he was being viewed, there must a gaze. When I shot the scene, I supposed there was a mirror. The mirror was the video camera. But when the visitors watch the video, they are the mirror. This projection should be hanging in the space, on a surface that is not solid but floating, like fabric. The image will not be steady and will become out of focus while visitors walk around it.

The last act has thirteen people sitting around a long meeting table. There is one person on the far side. Everyone takes an odd item. It is something not only he or she believed, but also wants others to judge as an evidence. For instance, one person takes a plate carefully, moving extremely slowly, and carries the item as if it is a treasure. With each one proceeds the same way, this 18 minute film becomes very boring.  This act will be projected the highest at Centre A, so high the viewers may not be able to see it clearly; but that doesn’t matter. The audience only needs to be aware that something is going on above them.  

Through this reconstruction of the piece, my imagination of this space and its surrounding areas was satisfied. Yet at the same time, I removed other things that attached to this chapter of theYellow Signal, so that it could be transformed. But the significance of the work doesn’t lose even some particularities were removed after moving. I have tried to reconstruct all four chapters ofYellow Signal and realized only this chapter had found its most appropriate position. Finally, I gave it a new name “Position.”

Shengtian Zheng: So you have changed the original title Go to the Conference Room on the 13th Floor for Free Films to Position?

Wang Jianwei: Yes. Go to the Conference Room on the 13th Floor for Free Films originally included furniture and four installations, shipping crates that were piled up, and thirteen staircases. It also had six photos. All of these aspects are now eliminated. I think the implications within this project do not expand or reduce just because the space has changed. I don’t want to say the significance is not as great by being transformed in another space, nor to say it is more applicable. I am still looking for something like the yellow signal—should there be a value in commonwealth despite that there is nothing in common between us? As a Chinese artist with experience living in China, surely I have my own way of thinking. But we can have a dialogue at this level. It is not a dialogue on Chinese symbols or Chinese particularities; I am willing to have a much deeper dialogue in this new context.

Centre A would like to acknowledge the following individuals:
Artist/ Interviewee: Wang Jianwei
Curator/ Interviewer: Shengtian Zheng
Videographer: Don Li Leger
Transcription: Debra Zhou
Text Editor: Keith Wallace
English Voice Over: Yi Xin Tong
Sponsor: JNBY Art Projects

By: Jessa Alston-O'Conner

The past several months have been busy with virtual interactions and path-making on the Maraya website, diverse critical discussions during the speaker series, and public engagement with the Maraya exhibition, first at Centre A and now in the Museum of Vancouver Studio. In their Centre A salon discussion, artists Henry Tsang, Glen Lowry and M. Simon Levin behind this multi-media multi-city project came together to share their perspectives on how Maraya came to be, and where it could lead us. Does Maraya serve as a mirror onto these controlled environments, these sites of false water and glass, and may it open up space to reflect and create the kinds of cities and communities we want to live in?

Since 2007 the trio have been exploring and probing the uncanny similarities and the differences between the luxury waterfront condominium developments that have so completely reshaped Vancouver and those replicated in Dubai. Tsang explained how they traced the roots of Vancouver’s False Creek developments back to Stanley Kwok and the selling of Expo 86 grounds to Concord Pacific developers through to the explosion of Dubai as a new global city over the past decade. During seven research trips to Dubai and years of documentation of Vancouver, the artists gathered sound, video, and images to create a multi media exhibition and interactive website. They also created prototypes of future public art works in the form of portable ‘portal’ screens inside silver Haliburton cases to ideally be laid out along the Seawall offering live stream to Vancouver from similar cases set along the marina in Dubai. 

Lowry brought in a theoretical approach, drawing on Michel De Certeau's 'Walking in the City" and Jane Jacobs' "the Death and Life of Great American Cities" and applying these ideas about life in larger cities like New York, Baltimore, and Chicago to our understanding of Vancouver and Dubai. Lowry pointed out that the world that de Certeau watched and wrote about does not exist anymore--since September 11th, more capital has flowed into the Middle East, and Dubai grew to "eclipse American rhetoric of excess". In fact, the tallest building in the world is in Dubai and Lowry went on to point out that most of the tallest buildings in the world since 2004 have been built outside of North America. Nevertheless, both Maraya and de Certeau’s text consider the view from above, observing the crowds below. Lowry expanded on De Certeau’s ideas about the pedestrian as someone who move through a city but is unable to read it: "neither author nor spectator, Maraya moves in this space, too". Neither the sole creators nor the detached observer of Vancouver or Dubai, Maraya invites and challenges the public to explore the kind of city we want to live in at ground level.

Lowry drew from Jacob's discussions of the role and importance of sidewalks in urban centers as demarcations of public space from private, places for people to gather, and that can attract the eyes of the community to ensure neighborhood safety. These ideas can shape our understanding of the potential of the Seawall.  How might the Haliburton activate the Seawall walkway and create social interactions and connections? What kind of experiences can be created? Does the Seawall have the potential to be more than a place to rollerblade and walk dogs?

Coming back to the idea of mirrors, Levin stressed that mirrors can be a distortion that we learn from. Instead of getting caught up in the surface similarities or differences between the diptychs of Maraya, he emphasized the importance of self awareness, to see our city in the project and considering what these differences may mean. The diptychs in the exhibition are intended to visually work together, but a look closer creates anxiety–we are not sure where we are looking at, they are not the same after all. Destabilizing our comfortable complacency is key to Maraya. This is evident in the video projections on the floor and the walls, each shot from different vantage points. Levin explained that we can feel unsettled as the floor appears to move with the video projections. In doing so we are reminded of the embodied experience of the city and see it differently than usual. We also consider the privilege and perspectives of these many views, private space that complicates public space, and the distortion within the reflections of these two cities.

During Q and A it asked what steps made sure that this project was critical enough, instead of being complacent and indulging in Concord Pacific model.

This made me pause--is Maraya critical enough? Or is it celebrating these designs?

In experiencing the work, engaging on the website, and attending the speaker series, I think Maraya is indeed critical of this kind of city building, but not in an extreme way. Instead, the work opens up more questions than it can answer, invites public contributions to the project, looks at what is uncannily similar, or very different, and asks why. Even more importantly it asks if the city can be more, and if the seawall and the controlled spaces of leisure that these designs have created can be activated to offer more meaningful community connections. I look forward to seeing more of the portal prototype, and of gaining insights into perspectives from Dubai as the Maraya project is not finished with much left to explore. It asks whose ideal city this is, who can belong or is excluded? Can these towers of luxury and the seawall become sites of meaningful social engagement? In asking these questions, the work is pointing to important community and urban issues that have been omitted from the pristine designs of False Creek and the Dubai Marina. Instead of celebrating these achievements in urban planning and architecture it is a call to us, the viewer, to bring our voices and ideas to shape the city.           

Maraya Project: The Seawalls of Vancouver and Dubai at the Museum of Vancouver.
February 29 to May 20, 2012.

Networked Urban Flows: Maraya = Reflection. M Simon Levin, Glen Lowry and Henry Tsang speaking on March 8 at 6:30 PM. Call MOV 604.736.4431 ext 0 for more information.

Past Reflections on the on-going Maraya Project

By Jessa Alston-O’Connor

At the opening reception for the Maraya exhibition at Centre A, artist M Simon Levin explained to the audience how the Maraya project asks the question "What kind of cities do we want to live in?" Glen Lowry, another member of the artist trio along with Henry Tsang likened the similarities between Vancouver and Dubai to a kind of “bleeding of one city into the other”. As a user of the Maraya website, these questions inspired me to consider just how do the thousands of Maraya images at our fingertips invite us to complicate these questions of cities and the bleeding and blending of Vancouver and Dubai?

As users we are invited to play and engage with thousands of images on the Maraya website, images taken of Vancouver and Dubai over several years from a seemingly infinite number of vantage points. In playing with the images on Maraya it is as though the photos have been scatters across the floor for us, ready to be cropped, blended and rearranged in any and every way. Keeping in mind the ideas brought up by Levin and Lowry, what kind of city do these images reflect? What meaning can be made from bleeding two distinctly different cities together?

What struck me immediately as I selected, manipulated and blended the photos on my paths was how few people were captured in these photographs. Certainly there are a number of photographs of pedestrians on the sea wall or sidewalks, but the vast majority of the photos that have come through the photo stream for my paths have been devoid of people. Among the silent glass towers, most of the people that do appear seem insignificant and miniscule. The majority of images I have seen focus on the architecture, the industrial construction equipment building the next tower, empty terrace tables and the brilliant teal blue of the waters.

If this sampling of images from these cities were to offer possible answers the question 'what kind of city do we want', then Vancouver and Dubai seem like places where achievement in architecture, urban planning and infrastructure are central. People as individuals are not the focus and the experience of these city designs on an intimate, human scale are peripheral to the shimmering urban vistas. These photographs do not reveal who lives here, or who has been exclude–it is left up to the viewer to fill in these gaps. This leads me to wonder how the tiny people scattered through a few of these images navigate such spaces as individuals, spaces that were created for thousands to live the dream for a luxurious life of urban excitement and relaxation? What is the impact on community when its citizens are anonymous and invisible? How does community form among the thousands living hidden inside identical glass towers and the public space offered is controlled, manicured, and landscaped leisure space created for the residents, instead of by them. When it came to photographing people living and moving through the spaces in these photographs, in many ways the photographs in Maraya project bring our attention to this anonymity among neighbours. These photos demonstrate how a cityscape tells the stories of the buildings, fences, cityscapes and the seaside walkways, but not of the people who live here.

In blending and overlaying image after image in my paths, I noticed how quickly my eyes stopped seeing Dubai and Vancouver as separate; what mattered more was complimentary shapes and lines to being brought together, or my use of color to form relationships between photographs.  The cities very literally bled into on another in the paths I created, becoming almost indistinguishable from one another. The similarities between so many of the photos has brought markers of place into sharper focus– 2010 Olympic signage, signs in Arabic, palm trees and mountain views visually jump out from the paths among a sea photos of identical buildings.

What makes each city unique, if on the surface it looks so similar? The interchangeable nature of some of the photos also raised questions for me about place–where is here, when here is so similar to there?  What is it about these cities that make them unique, or is uniqueness not as important in these newer models of 21^st century urban living?  Is this the city we want, or whose idea of an ideal city is this? How is community created in these urban environments, or has the definition of community changed over the past few years along with the changed city sky lines of both Vancouver and Dubai? 

As we play with the images on the Maraya Project website, we do much more than simply select and manipulate photos of water and glass–we create visual, metaphorical photo montages that complicate these questions of urban living, community, and globalization. Through the website we pose more questions than we can answer alone and so it is through our image montages, discussions and input from each other as we move along these paths that we can explore these two cities as a way to better understand the places we live in. 

by: Jessa Alston O'Conner 

What does it mean to wait? Is it a passive state, or an active place between two points in time and space? How can it be re-imagined? Waiting For is a group exhibition featuring works by Matilda Aslizadeh, Natalie Doonan, Gwenessa Lam, Natasha McHardy.  Together their works explore the ways and reasons we wait within the gallery space of Centre A where one hundred years ago the trains of the BC Electric Railway Company Terminal once converged. This building was a place of waiting and transience for thousands of travelers every day in 1912, and this history informs the exhibition through works that explore our waiting with expectation, waiting for death, for acceptance and belonging, and histories of migration, serving and waiting on others. This series of posts will highlight each of these four artists.

Each of Aslizadeh's three works in Waiting For immediately bring to mind the tradition of the still life genre in Western Art History, especially vanitas painting in Northern Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. In these paintings, flowers, food, skulls and items of luxury had rich symbolic significance. They signified prosperity while reminding the viewer that earthly wealth and beauty does not last forever, and that one must never forget their mortality and their eternal Christian soul. Still Life Study 1 and Still Life Study 2 are layered images that confuse the eye and feel a bit like seeing with double vision. Semi-transparent grey images of decaying fruit are over laid with images of their colorful, ripened selves and vice versa. Is the grey image of rot and decay an omen from the future, waiting in the shadow of the living? Or is the decomposed fruit the true nature, while its fleshy, juicy image is only a ghost from the past? There is a tension and feeling of anxiety as my eyes constantly jump back and forth between the layers of images, trying to account for and make sense of both images independently, but at the same time being aware of how reliant they are of one another.

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Still Life, a looped video installation by Aslizadeh, animates a cluttered vignette of food and plants that transform infinitely, regenerating and decaying at different times. While some flowers or foods are swallowed and eaten in violent ways, others decay and regenerate humorously. She plays with multiple temporalities, imitating commercial photography with her use of bold, saturated colors. In her artist talk, Alizadeh explained her interest in the sanitization of death in the West, and how rarely we experience the materiality of death, trying to do anything to stop aging and death. Yet some of the objects in her video are made of plastic, such as the grapes-which never rot, while the foods and flora around them are perishing. A plastic skull stands in as a mask of death that never deteriorates or change. In working with fruits and plants for this installation, she was also interested in referencing the over abundance of imports available to us in the age of globalization. Our seemingly unlimited access to all products regardless of season or geography essentially ignores and disregards natural life cycles and growing seasons for our desire to consume.

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The idea of exploring and complicating the tradition of the still live stems from Aslizadeh's interest in the typical waiting rooms, found in medical offices and hospitals. In particular, she investigates the aesthetic conventions of these spaces, which are designed solely for waiting. Thereare often frames of flat, banal, and intentionally pleasant still life and generic nature prints on the walls. She saw the waiting room as a ‘space of suspension and anticipation’, where it seems as if the boring, calm art were there to lessen, avoid, or delay the emotionality of the coming appointment, procedure, or news. Drawn to the concept of subverting conventional benign décor of still life in waiting rooms, Aslizadeth’s Still Life functions as an animated reflection of a human psyche, as one who waits for life and for death.

images by Hua Jin

By: Rachel Ozerkevich

The Centre A space, in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, has seen its fair share of history. Since the building’s construction in 1912, it has been a busy tramway terminal, an administrative office and a bank. It has been a witness to the immense and ongoing changes that continue to surround it. Now an important centre in the Canadian art scene, the gallery is currently hosting the exhibition Waiting For. Some of the show’s major themes are transience, migration and change. Now seems like an opportune time to take a look at its evolution, from transport hub to gallery and everything in between within the historical space that is now Centre A.

image by Hua Jin

Before the Skytrain, buses, and cars crowded and connected Vancouver, the city began experimenting with trams as a means of urban and suburban transportation. In 1888, tracks were laid for trams to be pulled by horses. Two years later, the city’s first streetcars began their routes in the downtown core. These first 6 cars were electric and the British Columbia Electric Railway Company (BCE Co.) took over the tramway business in the Vancouver area. In 1912, when they finished the final construction of their administrative headquarters and tram terminus at the corner of Hastings and Carrall street, the company boasted the most extensive interurban tramway system in North America.

By the end of that same year, the BCE trams were departing from the grand, beautiful terminus in the Downtown Eastside and travelling as far as New Westminster, Chilliwack and Burnaby. Two of the company’s three lines terminated at 425 Carrall Street: the Central Park-Fraser Valley Line, connecting Vancouver to New Westminster and Chilliwack, and the Burnaby Lake Line out to New Westminster.

The trams brought customers from outlying areas to Vancouver’s downtown core to enjoy the city’s bustling commercial and social heartbeat. The trams also played a pivotal role in the early years of the twentieth century, allowing families to live further and further away from their places of work. It can easily be argued that the B.C.E. railway played a large role in facilitating the suburbanization of Vancouver.

The B.C.E. Co. was the largest employer in the area in the early decades of the nineteen hundreds. The terminus station, as well as being host to a spacious public area, also provided office spaces for some 300 workers. To accommodate the huge influx of staff and passengers in the neighbourhood, the Downtown Eastside businesses expanded rapidly to provide goods and services. The area blossomed commercially and grew alongside the tram depot.

At the turn of the century, the Downtown Eastside was the commercial and economic hub of the city. The area boasted the famed Woodwards department store as well as a wide variety of independent luxury boutiques and services. It is almost difficult now to imagine these streets filled with flashing lights, imposing signs and window displays all vying for consumers’ attention. The BCE station itself, in the centre of the shopping district, was a bustling building. If one envisions the space as it is now as filled with trams, crowds, cafes and vendors, it seems almost overwhelming. It would have been a noisy, lively and colourful space, with competing salesmen and a continuous flow of arrivals and departures.

image courtesy of the Vancouver Archives

The B.C.E station was designed by the architectural firm Somervell and Putnam in Second Empire Renaissance style. Its Parisian roofline, grand arches and sheer size would have been an impressive sight in an area constantly growing and developing around it. Built with six stories, it was large by the era’s standards. Today, however, the building is dwarfed by hundreds of surrounding city structures. Yet its delicate detailing lends it a grandeur that is still arresting. The station was without a doubt a focal point of the neighbourhood. The project proved to be pivotal for its architects, not only for its ornate and striking design, but for its use of an early form of fireproof steel.

In 1945 during an extensive renovation by the architects Sharp & Thompson, an upper story was added to the station. In the 1950s, it was becoming increasingly apparent that the electric tramway system was not successfully accommodating the growing and rapidly modernizing city. Motor cars were quickly becoming more easily accessible to Vancouverites. Driving one’s own car was seen as simply more convenient than waiting for the tram amongst the masses. With the decrease in popularity and usage, the tram tracks were gradually torn up during the 1950s and the electric tram system was replaced with trackless buses.

The Bank of Montreal moved into the B.C.E. terminus station, putting an end to the building’s pivotal role in Canadian transportation history. The Vancouer International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art moved into the space in 1999.

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Centre A images

The gallery has transformed in some way, back to the echoing, spacious structure  it must have been a hundred years ago. In visiting Waiting For, Centre A’s current exhibition, we as viewers are confronted with what transience, journeys and change might mean for us in this era. Are we concerned simply with getting from point A to point B, or do we stop to consider the implications of a lifestyle so centred on moving forward, away from the past? After having explored the current exhibition, it is striking to note how similar our modern habits are to a twentieth century lifestyle: we are often in a perpetual state of waiting, despite the dramatic changes that occur around us.

By: Jessa Alston-O'Conner 

What does it mean to wait? Is it a passive state, or an active place between two points in time and space? How can it be re-imagined? Waiting For is a group exhibition featuring works by Matilda Aslizadeh, Natalie Doonan, Gwenessa Lam, Natasha McHardy.  Together their works explore the ways and reasons we wait within the gallery space of Centre A where one hundred years ago the trains of the BC Electric Railway Company Terminal once converged. This building was a place of waiting and transience for thousands of travelers every day in 1912, and this history informs the exhibition through works that explore our waiting with expectation, waiting for death, for acceptance and belonging, and histories of migration, serving and waiting on others. This series of posts will highlight each of these four artists.

Immediately stepping through the front doors of Centre A, one is met by the blurry image of Dining Car No. 1 by Gwenessa Lam. The painting is dizzyingly blurred and layered in cool grays and black. The hazy shapes of the inside of a hundred year old train car recede into the distance, but something is not natural about it, it is slightly unnerving. The image is uncannily, perhaps too visually balanced of a place to be real.

On the south wall of the gallery, Lam’s second work Switchboard is drawn directly on the wall in ink, charcoal, and graphite. Again, one is reminded of old images of switchboard operators, but this work is also eerily symmetrical and strange.

At the center of both of these works is Lam’s interest in history and play as a way to understand the past. Repeated use of mirroring and reflections with archival images is central to Lam’s exploration for Waiting For. She opted to focus on the history of the building itself, which dates back to 1912. The place was a transit hub for three lines of the BC Electric Railway trains, which entered and exited through the space that is the front windows of Centre A today. In her artist talk, Lam shared some of the official archival photographs she gathered in her research about the building and how they informed the creation of both her works in this exhibition.  She was drawn to the history of this building as a space of movement and migration, bringing people and ideas together from all regions of the city, as well as freight and food from the Fraser Valley.  Lam was especially interested in the methodical documentation of the interiors of the new ‘interurban’ train cars of the BC Railway Company and how they used certain approaches in their imagery to communicate the luxury of this new form of travel. These approaches bring connotations to modernity as well, and the seemingly endless possibilities that progress brings with it. She found that each photo represented a pristine space in one point perspective, with a glowing light at the end of the car from the doorway, perhaps metaphorical to the glowing light at the end of a tunnel to the future and a new era in modernization.

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 Lam explained in her artist talk how this one point perspective and the similarity between each train car photograph inspired her to consider folding an image in half, creating a mirror image of the space. This was a way to revisit the notion of reality through its reflection. She is interested in the idea of the mirror image as a strategy to re-examine history and archives, and to present in her work, something that is both real and fictional. By mirroring the interior of a dining car, Lam explained how the center line becomes active, and along the centre line strange and unrecognizable shapes are created. This renders the historical image as troubled and disrupts its truth. Her paintings and drawings are thus rooted in reality, but hint at other realms and possibilities; as she literally takes a side of history and complicates it, by creating two images and realities from one.  

During her research into the archival photographs of this building and the BC Electric Railway Company, Lam was also intrigued by the images of people who passed through the building every day on their way to work and those who worked in the building itself. She shared archival images she found of women who worked here and how they were often photographed in positions of standing and waiting, such as the photos of sales women in the showroom space of the building’s lobby. At the time, BC Electric also offered telecommunications services, and women often were employed to work the switchboards. Lam noticed that photographs of these switchboard operators were some of the only archival documentation in which the women were not waiting passively but were engaged and actively performing their work for the camera. Lam sought to reproduce this image of the switchboard operators in order to draw attention to the disconnection in this work, rather than the connection such photographs were intended to symbolize. As communication technology advanced and were exciting developments during that period in Vancouver’s history, Lam wondered about the ability for different societal groups to communicate and access these ideals, or the barriers that remained. In relation to Dining Car No.1, Lam also drew a mirror image of switchboard operators directly on the wall of the gallery. Switch Board renders the wires into tentacle-like arms reaching out to each woman, reflecting the image back to itself infinitely. Together, the two pieces Dining Car No. 1 and Switch Board encourage the viewer to consider the site specificity of the works and of this exhibition as a whole. Presenting a version of the past that is based on truth but is not real, and that is rooted in the archival photographic image yet takes on a new meaning, Lam points to the alternate possibilities of reality that are given in life through its reflection.     

Images by: Hua Jin