preview
VOICES OF SOUTHEAST ASIA
Runs July 1 to September 25
Glenbow Museum
Culture is often thought of as the kind of thing that is frozen in time, with the key characteristics of a people set in stone.
Yet in fact, culture is more like the weather – continually changing. Sometimes it will experience a gentle-breeze-like shift, and at other times, a powerful force that transforms everything in its path.
That’s one way to sum up Voices of Southeast Asia, the new exhibition that sprawls across the second floor of the Glenbow Museum.
Vietnam is one of the countries that underscores the tsunami-like effect of cultural patterns. A tiny nation that was thrust into the world spotlight due to war, more than 130,000 of its people fled their homeland beginning in the spring of 1975 in order to escape the communist forces that threatened to execute them because they had been aligned with the defeated South Vietnamese government.
When they left on fishing boats with only the clothes on their backs, they brought with them the one thing that could not be stripped away: a rich culture that dates back more than 2,500 years. One of these refugees was Quyen Hoang, the curator of a contemporary exhibition of art, Foreign and Familiar: Reconsidering the Everyday, which makes up one of the component parts of the Glenbow show. Born in Hanoi, she fled Vietnam as an eight-year-old along with her family and more than 1,000 other people on seven boats. After 10 days, the makeshift flotilla reached Hong Kong. Hoang and her family later immigrated to Canada – first to Vancouver and then further east to North Battleford, Saskatchewan.
"Culture is not static," says Hoang, recalling this tumultuous period of her life. The curator, who has a fine arts degree from the University of Calgary and a master’s degree in art history from Concordia University, says that when they emigrated, hers was one of only two Vietnamese families in North Battleford.
Her experience echoes that of millions of other people who have migrated from one place in the world to another, bringing with them the bits and pieces that add up to a cultural identity.
And that is what shines through the contemporary art included in Voices of Southeast Asia. Culture is a dynamic entity that is added to and subtracted from in ways many can’t articulate. Fortunately, there are visual artists who ponder these questions, resulting in work such as that of Calgary artist Linh Ly. For Foreign and Familiar, she presents a large-scale tapestry that is made out of thousands of photographs hand-sewn onto a canvas.
Visiting local Vietnamese restaurants, Ly took snapshots of the places that, for many in Calgary, have come to represent Vietnamese culture. The complex tapestry is visually fascinating, but the idea behind it is even more compelling. Vietnamese restaurants in North American cities become points of contact between West and East, moderated through noodles. The piece begs the question, "Can we begin to understand a culture by consuming it?"
It’s a question that Kim Huynh, another Calgary-based artist (born and raised in Saigon – now Ho Chi Minh City), explores in her installation, Unless. It consists of a large rack with a selection of top hats decorated in a military fatigue pattern, with briefcases placed nearby. The artist mocks the iconic British top hat and briefcase, representing the devouring wealth, power and class distinctions of the West, with the briefcases constructed of Vietnamese brown block sugar.
Sin-ying Ho is a Toronto-based artist who explores similar themes, here using her significant skills as a ceramist. In her piece, Gibberish, binary code from the computer world accents a porcelain vessel that features a Chinese poem. Language, Ho points out, is the foundation of culture, the glue that connects us – yet the glue can become quickly unstuck when its structure changes, even when at first the form we are looking at appears somehow familiar.
Foreign and Familiar is an exhibition that rests firmly upon the intellectual platform created by its curator and participating artists. It offers the viewer an opening to a deeper understanding of how cultural identities are created and how, like a sudden drop in atmospheric pressure, those cultural touchstones are often only a veneer covering a much richer place.
Voices of Southeast Asia also features exhibitions and displays exploring, in addition to Vietnam, the culture of south China, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. |
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